6 ms·

Nice article. Reminded me my own experience of creating bank software system for a State Bank of one of republics that was in the middle of separating from for

by c-smile 10y ago

Nice article. Reminded me my own experience of creating bank software system for a State Bank of one of republics that was in the middle of separating from former USSR. "Perestroika" they named that process. No mainframes, where we would get those at that time? Only i386 as a server and PC XTs as terminals. Connected by ropes essentially, but NetBIOS was working over them. Plus 1200 bod or so modems to connect with other banks in the republic. But we (team of two developers) did it in 9 months. Excellent Zortech C++ by Walter Bright (creator of D language). Editor - MultiEdit the Great. What we would do without it - I don't know. Database - dbVista (later known as dbRaima). Everything was working on PTDOS (Russian MSDOS alike thing) Yet multitasking C library providing cooperative multitasking (same execution model Node.js is using). And everything in 640k of RAM that "should be enough for anybody". We were young and nobody hadn't even a chance to tell us that this is "too serious", "impossible" and the like. A lot of manual input by operators, so usability requirements were surprisingly high: http://www.terrainformatica.com/2016/02/ui-usability-solution-i-am-especially-proud-of/ http://www.terrainformatica.com/2016/02/ui-usability-solutio... :)

jhallenworld 10y ago
Nice. In that era we had an even cheaper solution for a multi-user accounting system, the VNA by Advanced Micro Research / the "UnTerminal": https://books.google.com/books?id=AlnQ5OJS6XgC&pg=PT167&lpg=PT167&dq=vna+unterminal&source=bl&ots=fcS46ZxES4&sig=a7M14fRPWpXf8wZ2e6hAi2wQO7E&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwigtduGofTNAhWGmR4KHQCyCJkQ6AEIJjAD#v=onepage&q=vna%20unterminal&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=AlnQ5OJS6XgC&pg=PT167&lpg=... So basically no networking, just multiple video cards and keyboard interfaces in a single 386 PC (it used RS-422 to move the video signals to the screens). In SCO Xenix this worked extremely well. No networking needed.
shitgoose 10y ago
musical verification - very nice! a completely unexplored area of UI design. very powerful can be.
- c-smile 10y ago
  Oh, yeah. Girls were especially happy when we've added an option to choose octave :) I still hear sometimes in my night dreams sound of bank's operation hall orchestra :) Twenty workstations or so at closing of operational day ... It was actually not that bad. The only problem was with 10 digits and 12-tone chromatic scale. Added '.' and '-' to that.
  - shitgoose 10y ago
    that is very interesting what you are saying. acoustic perception has almost unlimited bandwidth compared to visual. you don't even have to look, just listen for the noise in the background. if girls learned to distinguish 10 tones by the end of their first day, imagine what can be done with more sophisticated approach. this acoustic monitoring can be complimentary to standard mode of operation, a sort of UDP protocol - if you missed a note, fuck it, sky won't fall, but because of incredible capacity of our brain to distinguish the patterns in background noise, this can be very useful in detecting unusual situations that otherwise would go unnoticed.
    - c-smile 10y ago
      That area of UI/UX is very interesting indeed. Common misconception is that UI is only about visual side of it. User Interaction may include all other senses/informational channels. Another common misconception is to think that UI principles are the same on any device that has CPU. Far from it. As an example: I've participated in initial designs of EverNote[.com] application. From the very beginning it was very clear for us that desktop and mobile versions are very different entities. On mobiles you essentially have no other way to input your data other than using camera or voice. Size of your finger's touch area on phone screen is comparable with area of average paragraph of text. WYSIWYG text editing in such circumstances is barely feasible. So only buttons of 1 inch size, that's the only reliable options in GUI. GUI and UI in general are very interesting things indeed.
  - vanderZwan 10y ago
    Why not two octaves in the Pentatonic scale? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentatonic_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentatonic_scale
duncan_bayne 10y ago
I would _love_ to read a writeup of that project.
- kilroy123 10y ago
  Same!
- c-smile 10y ago
  Hard to recall actually, many waters had flown away since that time. Just one fact: the system survived monetary reform in USSR of 1991 when in three days the whole country suddenly changed all banknotes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_reform_in_the_Soviet_Union,_1991 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_reform_in_the_Soviet_... ). History of USSR is just one big social experiment of things like this. Number of transactions in these three days was astonishing as you can imagine. We've spent all three days in the bank worrying mostly about hardware. 12 keyboards and 3 workstations from twenty-something were lost in the battle :) But the most crazy thing that I saw was on the next day after the reform. It was January 26th, and it was snowy all three days. Plaza in front of bank's building was covered by snow and banknotes on top of it, surreal. People who were late or exceeded exchange quota were just throwing money away. But our system did handle it surprisingly well. My pardon for hijacking the COBOL topic. C++ rulez forever!
  - duncan_bayne 10y ago
    Thank you for the details :)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
sedachv 10y ago
> No mainframes, where we would get those at that time? Госбанк started using mainframes in 1972: http://www.computer-museum.ru/histsoft/bank1.htm http://www.computer-museum.ru/histsoft/bank1.htm
- c-smile 10y ago
  Gosbank USSR had died with the USSR itself. And those IBM clones they were using ... Where did you get them at that time? And software? No one wanted even to think to start something new with them. UPDATE: In fact we were extremely lucky to haven't even seen this mainframe beauty upfront. Pure number of day transactions were enough for us to estimate payload and architecture. It was just 3 or so years later when I was invited to see that glassy mainframe's kingdom at Central Bank of USSR.

by c-smile 10y ago

jhallenworld 10y ago

Nice. In that era we had an even cheaper solution for a multi-user accounting system, the VNA by Advanced Micro Research / the "UnTerminal": https://books.google.com/books?id=AlnQ5OJS6XgC&pg=PT167&lpg=PT167&dq=vna+unterminal&source=bl&ots=fcS46ZxES4&sig=a7M14fRPWpXf8wZ2e6hAi2wQO7E&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwigtduGofTNAhWGmR4KHQCyCJkQ6AEIJjAD#v=onepage&q=vna%20unterminal&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=AlnQ5OJS6XgC&pg=PT167&lpg=... So basically no networking, just multiple video cards and keyboard interfaces in a single 386 PC (it used RS-422 to move the video signals to the screens). In SCO Xenix this worked extremely well. No networking needed.

shitgoose 10y ago

musical verification - very nice! a completely unexplored area of UI design. very powerful can be.

c-smile 10y ago
Oh, yeah. Girls were especially happy when we've added an option to choose octave :) I still hear sometimes in my night dreams sound of bank's operation hall orchestra :) Twenty workstations or so at closing of operational day ... It was actually not that bad. The only problem was with 10 digits and 12-tone chromatic scale. Added '.' and '-' to that.
- shitgoose 10y ago
  that is very interesting what you are saying. acoustic perception has almost unlimited bandwidth compared to visual. you don't even have to look, just listen for the noise in the background. if girls learned to distinguish 10 tones by the end of their first day, imagine what can be done with more sophisticated approach. this acoustic monitoring can be complimentary to standard mode of operation, a sort of UDP protocol - if you missed a note, fuck it, sky won't fall, but because of incredible capacity of our brain to distinguish the patterns in background noise, this can be very useful in detecting unusual situations that otherwise would go unnoticed.
  - c-smile 10y ago
    That area of UI/UX is very interesting indeed. Common misconception is that UI is only about visual side of it. User Interaction may include all other senses/informational channels. Another common misconception is to think that UI principles are the same on any device that has CPU. Far from it. As an example: I've participated in initial designs of EverNote[.com] application. From the very beginning it was very clear for us that desktop and mobile versions are very different entities. On mobiles you essentially have no other way to input your data other than using camera or voice. Size of your finger's touch area on phone screen is comparable with area of average paragraph of text. WYSIWYG text editing in such circumstances is barely feasible. So only buttons of 1 inch size, that's the only reliable options in GUI. GUI and UI in general are very interesting things indeed.
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  Why not two octaves in the Pentatonic scale? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentatonic_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentatonic_scale

duncan_bayne 10y ago

I would _love_ to read a writeup of that project.

kilroy123 10y ago
Same!
c-smile 10y ago
Hard to recall actually, many waters had flown away since that time. Just one fact: the system survived monetary reform in USSR of 1991 when in three days the whole country suddenly changed all banknotes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_reform_in_the_Soviet_Union,_1991 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_reform_in_the_Soviet_... ). History of USSR is just one big social experiment of things like this. Number of transactions in these three days was astonishing as you can imagine. We've spent all three days in the bank worrying mostly about hardware. 12 keyboards and 3 workstations from twenty-something were lost in the battle :) But the most crazy thing that I saw was on the next day after the reform. It was January 26th, and it was snowy all three days. Plaza in front of bank's building was covered by snow and banknotes on top of it, surreal. People who were late or exceeded exchange quota were just throwing money away. But our system did handle it surprisingly well. My pardon for hijacking the COBOL topic. C++ rulez forever!
- duncan_bayne 10y ago
  Thank you for the details :)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

sedachv 10y ago

> No mainframes, where we would get those at that time? Госбанк started using mainframes in 1972: http://www.computer-museum.ru/histsoft/bank1.htm http://www.computer-museum.ru/histsoft/bank1.htm

c-smile 10y ago
Gosbank USSR had died with the USSR itself. And those IBM clones they were using ... Where did you get them at that time? And software? No one wanted even to think to start something new with them. UPDATE: In fact we were extremely lucky to haven't even seen this mainframe beauty upfront. Pure number of day transactions were enough for us to estimate payload and architecture. It was just 3 or so years later when I was invited to see that glassy mainframe's kingdom at Central Bank of USSR.