OddThinking

The Rational 1000 debugger had an optional feature – the ability to step-forward or backward through the code.

During a training course on Ada and the Rational 1000, we wrote an absurdly simple email client.

When it was my turn to demonstrate my software, it wasn’t very well received.

About an hour after I started the check-in process, a horrid thought occurred to me…

I remember the days of using a terminal over a modem on a DOS machine.

It wasn’t that long after these dark ages that I started to use a Rational 1000.

The Rational 1000 didn’t have a Save command. Well, it did, but it wasn’t called Save, and I didn’t really need it, and it didn’t really Save. Well I did need it once, but… well let me start at the beginning.

One of the more interesting concepts on a Rational 1000 was the way it pushed your code through stages on the way to compilation.

The Rational 1000 supplied a level of control over the clipboard, cursor position and windows layout that I still miss today.

The most astonishing part of the GUI greeted you before you had even logged on: the keyboard template attached to the keyboard.

Like an adept Tekken player, I could kick buggy code’s arse with kung fu debug combos that the code was never expecting.

Using a Rational 1000 was like immersive learning for Ada!

Julian tries not to get teary-eyed, as he gets nostalgic about a development environment?!