Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2017 3:37 am
Continuing with the Checking Account program, it allowed you to sort the records but the sort was terrible, it would take about two minutes per record.
I check out the program, and its sort is horrible, it basically compares the first record to every other and the lowest one gets moved to the top, then repeat. So I'm not even that good and I do a bubble sort and cut the sort time in half. A sort of about 100 records drops to 20 minutes. Yeah, it was still slow but it was a big improvement.
----
After a year or so of using the Apple II to balance her books Mrs. Rice decides to buy an IBM PC Clone. I, of course, being a regular visitor to the University I had a copy of practically every piece of software I could pirate, so I had Lotus 1-2-3 version 2.
Whereas the memory on the Apple II was so small we could only do one month at a time the IBM could handle a whole year all at once. In fact, she originally bought only 256K of memory but I was getting so much done I maxed it out within a week after she bought it and so she bought more memory to boost it to 640K
I discovered how much faster it was when I did a sort in Lotus 1-2-3. I had written a program to convert the data and we used a serial connection to transfer data from the Apple II to the PC since they can't read each others floppies.
So I load up a month's worth of data, which takes 20 minutes to sort on the Apple, and ask Lotus 1-2-3 to sort it. Hit the last key, and about a second later it just comes back, not having done anything. Do it again, same thing. So I do a descending search, and Boom!
I go back into her office. "You know how it takes about 20-25 minutes to sort a month's checks on the Apple?"
"Yeah."
"I just ran a sort on the PC with a month's records loaded into 1-2-3. You know how long it took?"
"No."
"About two seconds."
------------------------------------------
Later on I have to tell this story, in which I spent $20 to find 1c, my boss knew in advance I was going to have to spend $20 or more to find it, and to top it off, we didn't even care about the 1c.
I check out the program, and its sort is horrible, it basically compares the first record to every other and the lowest one gets moved to the top, then repeat. So I'm not even that good and I do a bubble sort and cut the sort time in half. A sort of about 100 records drops to 20 minutes. Yeah, it was still slow but it was a big improvement.
----
After a year or so of using the Apple II to balance her books Mrs. Rice decides to buy an IBM PC Clone. I, of course, being a regular visitor to the University I had a copy of practically every piece of software I could pirate, so I had Lotus 1-2-3 version 2.
Whereas the memory on the Apple II was so small we could only do one month at a time the IBM could handle a whole year all at once. In fact, she originally bought only 256K of memory but I was getting so much done I maxed it out within a week after she bought it and so she bought more memory to boost it to 640K
I discovered how much faster it was when I did a sort in Lotus 1-2-3. I had written a program to convert the data and we used a serial connection to transfer data from the Apple II to the PC since they can't read each others floppies.
So I load up a month's worth of data, which takes 20 minutes to sort on the Apple, and ask Lotus 1-2-3 to sort it. Hit the last key, and about a second later it just comes back, not having done anything. Do it again, same thing. So I do a descending search, and Boom!
I go back into her office. "You know how it takes about 20-25 minutes to sort a month's checks on the Apple?"
"Yeah."
"I just ran a sort on the PC with a month's records loaded into 1-2-3. You know how long it took?"
"No."
"About two seconds."
------------------------------------------
Later on I have to tell this story, in which I spent $20 to find 1c, my boss knew in advance I was going to have to spend $20 or more to find it, and to top it off, we didn't even care about the 1c.