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Interesting link! > After an initial failure, he succeeded with CA-SORT, a program enabling computers to sort through data quickly and economically. Wang's SOR
by shoo 8y ago
Interesting link!
> After an initial failure, he succeeded with CA-SORT, a program enabling computers to sort through data quickly and economically. Wang's SORT offered competition to a similar IBM program, and Wang convinced many businesses with IBM hardware to change over to CA's product. Mainframe software was licensed rather than sold, and the recurring revenue from the licenses of the SORT software was a great boost to Computer Associates.
- le-mark 8y agoInteresting to note that legacy mainframe sorting isn't just moving values around in memory like all the algorithms we mostly study today. Mainframes back then had vanishingly small amounts of RAM (compared to what we have today) and had to use tape and later disk (dasd) for any real storage. So this type of sort is known as disk or tape sort. One "nicety" was that most records on tape (and subsequently disk) were "fixed" length, so could count on advancing x number of bytes reliably for next/prev record etc. It was a different era for sure.