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What is "soft" about software?

Hydrogen Cyanide said:
Some of us used to carry around our software programs in boxes because they consisted of cards with punched holes.
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My comment was actually a joke, but back in high school I wrote programs using both punch cards and punch tape.

That's the point when I decided that writing code was not for me. :)
 
Apollyon said:
My comment was actually a joke, but back in high school I wrote programs using both punch cards and punch tape.

That's the point when I decided that writing code was not for me. :)
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I had a similar experience playing around with 60 and 61, add upper register and add lower register, or something like that. But then not too many years later after compilers were invented, I got back in the game for a few years: Fortran, COBOL, PL-1, APL, GPSS...
 
FWIW, my first coding was done using a punch tool for inserting wires into patch frames. Punch cards were a pleasantly modern innovation. We also forged our own ones and zeroes from living bronze. In those days, data and myth were both stored in the same memory.
 
Meffy said:
FWIW, my first coding was done using a punch tool for inserting wires into patch frames. Punch cards were a pleasantly modern innovation. We also forged our own ones and zeroes from living bronze. In those days, data and myth were both stored in the same memory.
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You guys had it good; we had to carve our bits from massive hunks of stone. A single "hello world" program weighed over 9 tons.
 
Well, no wonder, if you used Visual Basic! In my days as a priest of Delphi we'd just take the rock and toss it at whoever needed the world to say hello to them.

[edit] @Taffer: I've never played Katamari, but it looks like fun. =^_^=
 
you had it easy. In my day we had to eat a box of gravel and excrete our ones and zeros and when we got home, our mother and father would kill us and dance on our graves singing Halleluja.
 
That was well after my time. Your stone age came after my homeland, Atlantis, sank beneath the waves. We used to program in pure harmonic crystal vibrations, none of this clunky COBOL and BAL and ALGOL.

In fact, the textbook my teacher wrote survives to this day, though it has been badly mistranslated. Still, mangled as it is, people like Kurious Kathy still think it makes sense.
 
When I first started programing 0's weren't invented yet. We had to make do with just 1's.
 
In the beginning we had nothing but zeroes. That includes me and the other programmers too, we were all a buncha zeroes. Still are.

Shame we couldn't have got together with y'all and developed base two earlier. Our base zero numeration wasn't getting the results the Grand Archon would've preferred to see.
 
I suppose you could make an interpreter that just counted the number of zeros in something...
 
It's True! My base-zero accumulator was the first in a long line of distinguished, ingenious, yet failed inventions. *sigh*
 
In the old World Book Encyclopedia's article on Roman numerals, there was a photo series showing a couple of marionette Romans working out a multiplication problem on the wall. They ended out of chalk and completely exasperated. Dunno whether they ever did get their product because I didn't try to read the wall and follow along.

True, I taught myself to do division Egyptian-style two years before they taught short division the usual way in school, but I wasn't eccentric enough to try my paw at that particular nightmare.
 
I can't remember the name of the group but there was a canadian comedy group that did a sketch about romans converting from roman numerals to arabic numbers. It was freaking hiliarious.

Same group did the Boot to the Head song that played on Dr. Demento all the time.
 
Ah, Demento... I own a bunch of transcription LPs that someone threw into the dumpster at a mini-storage place. They were sent from the syndicator to radio stations, who broadcast from 'em, then sent them back (or possibly to the next radio station on a list). The manager nabbed them and was going to throw them out again but asked online (this was in the early BBS days) if anyone wanted them.

=(@.@)=

Um, YES please?

Complete with corrugated mailing cartons, cue sheets (most of them), and some kind postal return card. Also got some concerts that way. All of them have national adverts embedded, just as when broadcast. The Demento LPs have locked grooves not just at the end but after each segment -- that is, the needle doesn't move by itself from the first segment to the second, you have to cue up, lift, and move to the lead-in groove for the next segment.

Doctor Demento is Squishyware. *nodnod*
 
I don't think that there can be a range of softness for software. It is simply a term, not a graduated scale. It would be like asking: what is the fence-postiest of fence posts?

Hardware is the physical layer
Firmware is the layer just above that that makes the hardware work, this is normally immuatable or difficult to change.
Software is normally mutable and consists of 0's and 1's

Of course, technically, firmware fits under the heading of software so there are really only 2 types.
 
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