40 years ago today: Computer Weekly January 24 1974
Like the bureau service on Slide 7, Programmer Notes had interesting correspondence with reader, C. P. Middleton, of Perth. Commenting on documentation in Cobol code he wrote: "I would disagree that paragraph labelling should be sufficiently self-explanatory so as to make a program self-documenting. It is a virtually impossible task to make labels describe adequately the logic within the paragraph, and reliance upon them may be misleading and dangerous."
I guess the problem we face today is that some of the Cobol code written 40 years ago is embedded into core business processes. Lack of documentation has made it extremely expensive and almost impossible to replace.
The National Museum of Computing has a full copy of every print edition of Computer Weekly since our first in September 1966, and is now digitising the archive.
In the next slide, we present at an article from the January 24 1974 edition, which shows that in-car telemetry is nothing new.
More articles from the Computer Weekly archive
- What was happening in the IT world in July 1969 when Apollo 11 achieved its goal of putting a man on the moon?
- The first edition of Computer Weekly: September 22 1966