FCC Report & Order - GMRS License Fee Lowered to $35

[Hans]

Thanks for the update.

[Rustywp]

They approved lowering the price, but haven't as of this past month when I had to pay $70 for my license!

WRNQ805

[wayoverthere]

4 hours ago, Rustywp said:

They approved lowering the price, but haven't as of this past month when I had to pay $70 for my license!

WRNQ805

yeah, the update @AdmiralCochrane posted on the last page indicates they're holding off dropping the fee for GMRS until they can redo ALL the fees at once, GMRS, amateur, etc. (sometime next year).... Making sure they don't drop this side to $35 till they can get their $35 apiece in on the ham side, i guess.

(I took advantage and did a vanity request for the ham side while it's still free)

[AdmiralCochrane]

I think its more of a cost savings by having ITT or whoever does the programming do it all at once.  Some of this legacy crap is still runnning on mainframes 

[wayoverthere]

2 hours ago, AdmiralCochrane said:

I think its more of a cost savings by having ITT or whoever does the programming do it all at once.  Some of this legacy crap is still runnning on mainframes 

I wouldn't doubt it. Waiting for that last programmer familiar with COBOL to be available, perhaps?  

[Lscott]

26 minutes ago, wayoverthere said:

I wouldn't doubt it. Waiting for that last programmer familiar with COBOL to be available, perhaps?  

Now try learning FORTRAN and doing your assignments using a keypunch machine to type up your source deck. Oh, provided they even worked, which was about half the time. Everything was batch processed with a typical 4 to 5 hour turn around time. That was for my engineering degree.

Yuck. I remember I had to take a programming class in COBOL for my computer science degree. At least the school had a VAX cluster by then with terminals. You could even dial in from home and log into your account to do your programming projects.

 

[wayoverthere]

20 minutes ago, Lscott said:

Now try learning FORTRAN and doing your assignments using a keypunch machine to type up your source deck. Oh, provided they even worked, which was about half the time. Everything was batch processed with a typical 4 to 5 hour turn around time. That was for my engineering degree.

Yuck. I remember I had to take a programming class in COBOL for my computer science degree. At least the school had a VAX cluster by then with terminals. You could even dial in from home and log into your account to do your programming projects.

 

Trying not to, though someone turned up a pile of punch cards at work not too long ago. I hear we actually still have things running on COBOL, not that they let me near much of anything...I've ticked off too many of the helpdesk techs over the years.

[n4gix]

16 hours ago, Lscott said:

Yuck. I remember I had to take a programming class in COBOL for my computer science degree. At least the school had a VAX cluster by then with terminals. You could even dial in from home and log into your account to do your programming projects.

Back in the Dark Ages (long before even ARPANET!), I took COBOL, FORTRAN IV, and PERL during the same semester. The same professor taught all three classes. For our major project in each class he essentially gave us the same task, which basically was a simple accounting application for a golf course.

I decided to combine all three assignments into a single solution: PERL for the input/output routines, COBOL for the database, and FORTRAN IV for all maths operations. The professor was only mildly amused, but he did finally give me a 4.0 for all three classes. 

EDIT: I don't remember the exact number now, but as close as I can recall this took close to 4 thousand punch cards!

[MichaelLAX]

I bet none of you took SNOBOL like I did!

[n4gix]

Actually I took SNOBOL4 the next semester.  SNOBOL4 pattern-matching uses a backtracking algorithm similar to that used in the logic programming language Prolog, which provides pattern-like constructs via DCGs. This algorithm makes it easier to use SNOBOL as a logic programming language than is the case for most languages.

SNOBOL stores variables, strings and data structures in a single garbage-collected heap.

A simple example:

          OUTPUT = "What is your name?"
          Username = INPUT
          Username "J"                                             :S(LOVE)
          Username "K"                                             :S(HATE)
MEH       OUTPUT = "Hi, " Username                                 :(END)
LOVE      OUTPUT = "How nice to meet you, " Username               :(END)
HATE      OUTPUT = "Oh. It's you, " Username
END

[axorlov]

1 hour ago, n4gix said:

Back in the Dark Ages (long before even ARPANET!), I took COBOL, FORTRAN IV, and PERL during the same semester.

Must be PEARL, no? Before the ARPANET and in the same sentence with C... and F...-IV, let not these names be uttered after dark.

[WyoJoe]

21 hours ago, Lscott said:

Now try learning FORTRAN and doing your assignments using a keypunch machine to type up your source deck. Oh, provided they even worked, which was about half the time. Everything was batch processed with a typical 4 to 5 hour turn around time. That was for my engineering degree.

When I was learning FORTRAN, the turnaround time for me was around two weeks. I was in grade school, and we had to put our routines (punch cards, wrapped in a rubber band) in the school mail bag so they could be sent downtown to the mainframe (DEC PDP-11), where they would be run, the output printed out, then sent back to our school. I think the mail went out weekly, so when we got them back, we made our corrections (if needed), then re-submitted them (hopefully) before the next mail run. We didn't have many opportunities to make corrections before the school year ended!

[MichaelLAX]

8 minutes ago, WyoJoe said:

... so they could be sent downtown to the mainframe (DEC PDP-11)...

The PDP-11... a mainframe?!? 

[Lscott]

56 minutes ago, WyoJoe said:

When I was learning FORTRAN, the turnaround time for me was around two weeks. I was in grade school, and we had to put our routines (punch cards, wrapped in a rubber band) in the school mail bag so they could be sent downtown to the mainframe (DEC PDP-11), where they would be run, the output printed out, then sent back to our school. I think the mail went out weekly, so when we got them back, we made our corrections (if needed), then re-submitted them (hopefully) before the next mail run. We didn't have many opportunities to make corrections before the school year ended!

I remember when some student used the wrong device code for the output in his FORTRAN assignment. Instead of going to the line printer his data was send to the card reader/punch.  Yup, you guessed it. Every source deck after that one was punched full of holes destroying them. Fortunately my job ran before that one. They had a female student retyping all the source decks like a demon on the computer center's key punch machine. That's provide you could read the code printed on the top edge, most of the ribbons were worn out and almost impossible to read.

[Lscott]

6 hours ago, n4gix said:

EDIT: I don't remember the exact number now, but as close as I can recall this took close to 4 thousand punch cards!

Yikes!!! I never learned to type, and really still can't. I get by using the two-finger method. I don't want to guess how long it took to type that many cards.

[BoxCar]

7 hours ago, MichaelLAX said:

The PDP-11... a mainframe?!? 

The PDP-11 was referred to as a mini. Mini computers were often rack mounted and performed many of the same tasks as mainframes. These were displaced by the PC coming on the scene. Minis were quite prevalent beginning in the early 70's thru the 80's. They were almost all gone by the early 90's. Digital Equpment or DEC was one of the biggest manufacturers of those systems. Some of their models were the PDP-7, PDP-8 and PDP-10 along with their flagship PDP-11. The different models had various capabilities with the -7 being the least powerful. These systems often acted as front ends or pre=processors for many mainframes from companies like IBM. Univac, Control Data, Burroughs and others including Xerox. I spent 10 years with a mini manufacturer, Four Phase Systems. Our systems replaced a great many IBM terminal systems preprocessing key punch data and acting as print spoolers routing printer output to various printers scattered around different locations. 

[MichaelLAX]

3 hours ago, BoxCar said:

The PDP-11 was referred to as a mini...

They WERE a minicomputer!

They were the first serious threat to the IBM mainframe duopoly and foreshadowed that there was a market for the introduction of the Personal Computer a generation later!

Of course, only business and government could afford even the minicomputer, whereas the Personal Computer made possible the home market.

I still remember where I was the day that I first saw the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics:

[n4gix]

23 hours ago, axorlov said:

Must be PEARL, no? Before the ARPANET and in the same sentence with C... and F...-IV, let not these names be uttered after dark.

No, Perl is not to be confused with PEARL.

Quote

Though Perl is not officially an acronym,^[11] there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language".^[12] Perl was developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier.^[

Ref: Perl - Wikipedia

[MichaelLAX]

[WyoJoe]

18 hours ago, BoxCar said:

The PDP-11 was referred to as a mini. Mini computers were often rack mounted and performed many of the same tasks as mainframes.

Thank you for the clarification. Because of how it was being used, I assumed it was a mainframe, but, considering the era (around 1978-1979), it certainly makes sense that it was a mini.

[WyoJoe]

18 hours ago, BoxCar said:

Our systems replaced a great many IBM terminal systems preprocessing key punch data and acting as print spoolers routing printer output to various printers scattered around different locations. 

To think you can do that and a lot more with just a Raspberry Pi these days!

[H8SPVMT]

Thanks for the information on the fees.  Don't know what the rest has to do with it.

[WyoJoe]

27 minutes ago, H8SPVMT said:

Thanks for the information on the fees.  Don't know what the rest has to do with it.

I had to go back through this thread to see how we veered so far off the original topic. It was a theory about the FCC needing to make the changes in their antiquated computer system... in order to effect the price changes.

[WisLockman]

I just got my GMRS yesterday and the cost is still $70.00 for 10 years.

WROD361

[n4gix]

Yes, as has been reported here several times, the FCC has said that it won't change until sometime in 2022.