Shop OBEX P1 Docs P2 Docs Learn Events
Data Entry Efficiency — Parallax Forums

Data Entry Efficiency

Comments

  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,066
    evanh wrote: »
    But they do work well. And googling for answers makes a big diff to getting up to speed.

    EDIT: Cluso, I'd argue for 30 years ago for the Mac and Amiga and Archimedes. But that is another era. The PC kind of destroyed it.
    Agreed. The Amiga was ahead of its time, not that i had one. Don’t know anything of the Archimedes. And Bill copied the mac ;)

    Back in the 90s i helped a friend convert his Qbasic accounting package to windoze with VB3. One customer refused to go the windoze path because it couldn’t keep up with her data entry. She was totally correct tho. And now everything is connected to the cloud, data entry is frightfully slow compared to the 70s and 80s. Thats progress.. its intuitive but horridly slow.
  • Cluso99 wrote: »
    Agreed. The Amiga was ahead of its time, not that i had one. Don’t know anything of the Archimedes. And Bill copied the mac ;)

    Back in the 90s i helped a friend convert his Qbasic accounting package to windoze with VB3. One customer refused to go the windoze path because it couldn’t keep up with her data entry. She was totally correct tho. And now everything is connected to the cloud, data entry is frightfully slow compared to the 70s and 80s. Thats progress.. its intuitive but horridly slow.

    Agreed, the Amiga was a lot ahead, I had two A2000 (I still have them).

    Regarding data entry I imagine you are referring to the slowness of moving focus between fields with mouse and then typing again the data. But VB3 already had the tab_index property and events like gotfocus and lostfocus that, together with object's naming property and support for arrays of objects, were capable of building nice GUIs with good automation so that a given form didn't require any mouse interaction and data entry was possible only through keyboard (even using function keys and shortcuts).
    I didn't feel any increased slowness compared to a dos program or even an AS/36 AS400 mainframe of that time with their green on black terminals.
  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,066
    dMajo wrote: »
    Cluso99 wrote: »
    Agreed. The Amiga was ahead of its time, not that i had one. Don’t know anything of the Archimedes. And Bill copied the mac ;)

    Back in the 90s i helped a friend convert his Qbasic accounting package to windoze with VB3. One customer refused to go the windoze path because it couldn’t keep up with her data entry. She was totally correct tho. And now everything is connected to the cloud, data entry is frightfully slow compared to the 70s and 80s. Thats progress.. its intuitive but horridly slow.

    Agreed, the Amiga was a lot ahead, I had two A2000 (I still have them).

    Regarding data entry I imagine you are referring to the slowness of moving focus between fields with mouse and then typing again the data. But VB3 already had the tab_index property and events like gotfocus and lostfocus that, together with object's naming property and support for arrays of objects, were capable of building nice GUIs with good automation so that a given form didn't require any mouse interaction and data entry was possible only through keyboard (even using function keys and shortcuts).
    I didn't feel any increased slowness compared to a dos program or even an AS/36 AS400 mainframe of that time with their green on black terminals.
    Comparing Qbasic under windows but chacter entry vs VB3 (properly written to not use the mouse and automatically move the focus to the next field) running on the same pc with the same server and btrieve database, we had no alternative but to agree, an efficient operator just flooded the pc! She had to slow to such a snails pace so the the visual components could keep up. The pc was the fastest that money could buy. Even when we went to compiled VB (VB5?) it was still frightful.
    Younger operators never knew the speed of the old text based programs so they just think the slowness is normal.

    By comparison, in the late 70s, the mini I worked on (taught both hardware maintenance and programming courses for Singer/ICL) which had a memory cycle time of 2.2us and many clocks per instruction (but high level instructions) supported 35 video terminals doing live online data order entry.
  • dMajodMajo Posts: 855
    edited 2019-08-22 17:17
    Cluso99 wrote: »
    dMajo wrote: »
    Cluso99 wrote: »
    Agreed. The Amiga was ahead of its time, not that i had one. Don’t know anything of the Archimedes. And Bill copied the mac ;)

    Back in the 90s i helped a friend convert his Qbasic accounting package to windoze with VB3. One customer refused to go the windoze path because it couldn’t keep up with her data entry. She was totally correct tho. And now everything is connected to the cloud, data entry is frightfully slow compared to the 70s and 80s. Thats progress.. its intuitive but horridly slow.

    Agreed, the Amiga was a lot ahead, I had two A2000 (I still have them).

    Regarding data entry I imagine you are referring to the slowness of moving focus between fields with mouse and then typing again the data. But VB3 already had the tab_index property and events like gotfocus and lostfocus that, together with object's naming property and support for arrays of objects, were capable of building nice GUIs with good automation so that a given form didn't require any mouse interaction and data entry was possible only through keyboard (even using function keys and shortcuts).
    I didn't feel any increased slowness compared to a dos program or even an S36 AS400 mainframe of that time with their green on black terminals.
    Comparing Qbasic under windows but chacter entry vs VB3 (properly written to not use the mouse and automatically move the focus to the next field) running on the same pc with the same server and btrieve database, we had no alternative but to agree, an efficient operator just flooded the pc! She had to slow to such a snails pace so the the visual components could keep up. The pc was the fastest that money could buy. Even when we went to compiled VB (VB5?) it was still frightful.
    Younger operators never knew the speed of the old text based programs so they just think the slowness is normal.

    By comparison, in the late 70s, the mini I worked on (taught both hardware maintenance and programming courses for Singer/ICL) which had a memory cycle time of 2.2us and many clocks per instruction (but high level instructions) supported 35 video terminals doing live online data order entry.

    With text based VB forms and its controls I never had problems. But I also faced the slowness of graphical parts and when I wrote the HMI for the our vacuum metalization machinery (evaporation, sputering ...) at the time I do everything in VB3 and for the graphics drawing I put an empty picture control on the form, pass its window handler to the dll library where I wrote all the graphic tracing functions that was then called from VB3 in C++ (with VC2.0)

    As per compilation, IIRC, VB5 added classes to basic while compilation belongs to VB6 (after this release the VisualStudio saga started). Its nice to see how many people of different ages visits this forum, I am always fashinated, as in the 70s(2) I was born :smile: thus at first after mini I tought you forget the word "market" .... then I understood that it must be a computer of some kind :smiley::smiley::smiley:
  • New thread was generated.
  • kwinnkwinn Posts: 8,697
    In the late 70's a single Z80 S100 data entry system with a hard disk could handle character input from 8 terminals as fast as the data entry operators could type. No surprise that the first Windows 3.1 PC's could not do the same. GUI's have to execute a lot more code per keystroke as well as having to update a screen that requires a lot more data than a simple character display.
  • nothing beats COBOL for text based screen entries and large batch processing.

    That is why it won't die.

    Mike
  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,066
    edited 2019-08-24 23:52
    Mike,
    I’ve been referring to online, not batch.

    COBOL was great for batch, and wouldn’t have been bad for online on the Singer/ICL mini... cobol translated to about 2.2:1 assembler instructions, but we were hamstrung with memory limitations (and its cost).

    That mini was built from 1970-1993 and maintained until end of 1999 (and beyond in some places), with only one substantial update redesign) in 1981. M&S (Marks & Spence)had them in all stores in the UK, and in BBC (now Bunnings) - hardware stores - in Oz and NZ.

    IN Oz, CSR had one hooked to over 120 remote terminals live at a time via 9600 baud leased lines and Scitec stat mixes. I designed and built the boards that plugged into the mini’s bus to support the remote terminals.

    pics 4 posts below :)
  • Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi) Posts: 23,514
    edited 2019-08-24 21:10
    In legal circles, WordPerfect was the go-to for briefs and pleading papers, even well after MS Word became de rigueur. I'm not sure what the attraction was though. WP still offers a specialized version for legal work.

    -Phil
  • The irony in all this is that the early PC vendors proclaimed that you would be free from the chains imposed by time-share and mainframe services. You would have total control over the apps and data on your own desk. Adherents to the cloud are now proselytizing just the opposite mantra. Personally, I do not trust cloud services with my apps or data. And I've not upgraded Word or any other app to a subscription model. I can handle my own backups, thank you very much.

    -Phil
  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,066
    The irony in all this is that the early PC vendors proclaimed that you would be free from the chains imposed by time-share and mainframe services. You would have total control over the apps and data on your own desk.
    So very true!
    Adherents to the cloud are now proselytizing just the opposite mantra. Personally, I do not trust cloud services with my apps or data. And I've not upgraded Word or any other app to a subscription model. I can handle my own backups, thank you very much.
    -Phil
    Oh I wish. I've been forced into Office365 for work. Office98SE worked fine for me too, but it doesn't fill MS coffers!

    And no, I don't trust the cloud either! Wait till they start really jacking the prices up and hold you whole operation to ransom.

  • WindowsWorld seems to be oblivious to the fact that free and open office software is to be had and only a click away. But that is why they are oblivious since no sales people in their right mind would alert them to that fact. I use LibreOffice day-in/day-out, and I even used it to create the P2 Datasheet. I especially like LibreOffice Draw for designing labels but I found too that LibreOffice recognizes so many formats, even my early Macintosh documents and MacDraw drawings from the mid-80s were recognized. Of course all the Microsoft formats and versions are handled and can even be set as the default for saving.

    As for data entry efficiency I can only say that when I did POS terminals that they had to supported very fast keyboard scanning and n-key rollover since operators could be extremely fast, especially before scanning really took off. One of my keyboard tests was to run my finger down a section of the keyboard as fast as I could but I could never beat it. This was originally all on a humble 2MHz 6502 based system running Forth and handling printing and scanning etc under interrupts while maintaining tasks for communications etc.
  • evanhevanh Posts: 15,126
    Greed has no bounds.

    Yep, LibreOffice is a no-brainer but I've still not managed to convince many to use it.

  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,066
    (see my post 4 post back)
    First pic is my NL90 board that plugged into the ICL System 25 minicomputer's bus (IIRC up to 12 of these pcbs could be added).
    The pcb has a Xilinx XC2018-70 FPGA, a pair of Z86C9112's, up to 8 Z8530's and up to 16 RS232 serial ports each with an RJ45 connector.
    I hand routed the FPGA to achieve the circuit I required, including delays. Still have the layout printout somewhere. You cannot so that any more!

    The second pic is an S25 with the front cover removed. Those RJ45 flat cables (on the right side) each connect to a remote terminal via Scitek Statistical Multiplexers.

    The third pic is a [pair of S25's, with a HDD (65MB removable over a 130MB fixed) in the middle. Remember the 'washing machine' sized HDD's anyone ;)
    612 x 816 - 212K
    612 x 816 - 138K
    816 x 612 - 131K
  • davejamesdavejames Posts: 4,045
    edited 2019-08-25 00:39
    Cluso99 wrote: »
    Remember the 'washing machine' sized HDD's anyone ;)

    Yup! Worked on 300MB, 11-platter Ampex drives in the mid-80s.

  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,066
    In the early 70's the 6 platters were 10MB.

    Then came the 11 platters with 40MB. When doing maintenance on the heads a locking pin was used to prevent retraction in the event of a power fail. Otherwise, look no fingers :(
  • evanhevanh Posts: 15,126
    edited 2019-08-25 14:04
    Weren't those removable cartridges of platters? Wouldn't the head maintenance be done with the cartridge out and power off?
  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,066
    edited 2019-08-25 21:21
    No they were before the cartridges.
    The heads were aligned using a custom CE disc pack worth around $25K. This was specially written data tracks which was an oscillating as in wavy. Ie if you think of a track as being a straight line then this track(s) would be like a repeating sine wave. With the CRO setup displaying lisagous figures, you would adjust the heads, one by one, to get a proper cats eye display - both sides equal. Cats eye being like an infinity sign. Maintenance was required every 3 months to ensure the heads did not move too much, otherwise you’d never be able to read the old data.
    There was other adjustments made also, such as adjusting the head delatching mechanism for power fail. If this wasn’t adjusted properly then a power fail would result in a head crash! Goodbye data and lots of $$$.
    I used to teach this stuff. Nothing like getting a brand new (customers) drive and break it down into pieces for the class to put back together :) The drive course took a week for 4-5 field engineers. The whole course took 3 months.

    Postedit
    IIRC cartridges started appearing around 75-76 and were around 5MB. Thing were moving quite rapidly then and a lot of new companies were coming onto the scene with small minis.
Sign In or Register to comment.