On this day, several years ago (2014?), it became a very memorable day for Savage///Circuits. I decided to play an April Fools prank on my website members. In my website host control panel I redirected savagecircuits.com to the iconic YouTube video below.
Well, it worked...many visitors were pranked by going to the website only to find themselves Rick-Rolled (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling)!
The problem is, not everyone realized it was a prank by us (Wendy was still alive at that time), and the calls, text messages and emails started flooding in, with members saying our website had been hacked! We were laughing our butts off and in stitches, but some took it seriously. I don't do that anymore. But I got a laugh thinking about that incident from 10 or so years ago. ;D
Speaking of April Fools Day, here's Sparkfun's April Fools Post (https://www.instagram.com/p/DH6fU2Rvijq/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link) on Instagram.
I remember that. Lol That was good.
Quote from: Chris Savage on Apr 01, 2024, 10:36 AM...Well, it worked...many visitors were pranked by going to the website only to find themselves Rick-Rolled (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling)!
The problem is, not everyone realized it was a prank by us (Wendy was still alive at that time), and the calls, text messages and emails started flooding in, with members saying our website had been hacked! We were laughing our butts off and in stitches, but some took it seriously. I don't do that anymore. But I got a laugh thinking about that incident from 10 or so years ago. ;D
Yep, that included me - I could even hear Wendy laughing in the background when I called you. Good times.
Many years ago, there was a magazine (Embedded Systems Programming magazine - now embedded.com) that I used to get, that had an advertisement in their April issue: it was for a COBOL compiler for microcontrollers. This was back when microcontrollers had micro specs - as in the 8051 had 4 KB of ROM, and only 128 bytes of RAM.
(https://www.embedded.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/contenteetimes-images-design-embedded-2015-11-jg301.jpg)
The humor was that COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL) is an extremely verbose language, and often took huge (for that time) amounts of memory. It was normally provided for mainframe computers, but took some effort to shrink it down for mini-computers. The extremely limited ROM, and RAM, of microcontrollers would make it nearly impossible to implement - although with modern microcontrollers there may be a version of COBOL available. :o
Jack Ganssle, one of my Embedded Systems heros, wrote an article about languages, which started with comments about that ad (https://www.embedded.com/on-languages/) Now that I look at this again, I feel a tugging on my heart to download GNU-COBOL (https://gnucobol.sourceforge.io/), to play with the language again (been a LONG time.) :P
Here is why you may want to look into COBOL: https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/04/20/brush-up-your-cobol-why-is-a-60-year-old-language-suddenly-in-demand/ ;D
Quote from: granz on Apr 02, 2025, 12:18 PMYep, that included me - I could even hear Wendy laughing in the background when I called you. Good times.
So much fun back then. I often miss old days...
Quote from: granz on Apr 02, 2025, 12:18 PMThe extremely limited ROM, and RAM, of microcontrollers would make it nearly impossible to implement - although with modern microcontrollers there may be a version of COBOL available.
There is COBOL for the Propeller 2 (https://forums.parallax.com/discussion/172153/gnu-cobol-for-p2). Otherwise, I haven't really thought much about it, except what is in the news about DOGE claiming dead people are claiming Social Security benefits, because COBOL was used in the SSA systems and something about the way it stores dates. So apparently these "kids" working for DOGE aren't familiar with COBOL any more than I am. LOL
Quote from: Chris Savage on Apr 02, 2025, 01:03 PMThere is COBOL for the Propeller 2 (https://forums.parallax.com/discussion/172153/gnu-cobol-for-p2).
I seem to remember seeing that a while back. Funny. :)
Quote from: Chris Savage on Apr 02, 2025, 01:03 PMOtherwise, I haven't really thought much about it, except what is in the news about DOGE claiming dead people are claiming Social Security benefits, because COBOL was used in the SSA systems and something about the way it stores dates. So apparently these "kids" working for DOGE aren't familiar with COBOL any more than I am. LOL
Yep, not too many schools offer COBOL classes any more. ;D