Good tools for creating tables, including CSS setup, recommendations?

[Joep L. Blom]

Chris G wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 08:39:38PM +0100, Joep L. Blom wrote:
>>> :-)  I think there was actually a B. However in the 1970s I started
>>> programming in Fortran and Basic but moved on to assembler on the
>>> PDP-12 (a sort of bastardised PDP-8 derivative with extra bits). Then
>>> at the end of the 70s I started writing in assembler for the 8080.
>>>
>> Chris,
>> I have to protest. The PDP-12 was not "a bastardized PDP-8" but a 
>> specially for laboratory work developed successor to the LINC.
>> I was at that time - working as a neuroscientist - jealous of people 
>> using a PDP-12 as they had much better A/D converters and more memory 
>> than my (simple!) PDP-8 (4K 12-bit memory, Dectape and papertape as 
>> external media). I bought my first PDP-8 in 1969 (SN 1999!) and 
>> programmed exclusively in Fortran. Basic was a commodire language, we 
>> used FOCAL, for quick and dirty programs.
> 
> Yes, OK, the PDP-12 was a fun machine actually but it was the quickest
> way to explain what it was!  :-)
> 
> I really enjoyed my years programming the PDP-12 from around 1971
> through until 1977.  It had some parts that were well in advance of
> its time like an interactive VDU for editing.
> 
> I joined a company (G D Searle) who took over the tail end of the
> PDP-12 from DEC, it was used specifically as a hospital pathology
> laboratory machine gathering data from automated blood and urine analysis.
> 
> I had a really big PDP-12 at the end where I worked in Saudi Arabia,
> 16k of memory (four whole banks of 4k!) and a 256k disk drive.
> 
> Oh yes, FOCAL, I remember that too, no basic of any consequence on
> the PDPs then.
> 
>> (Yes, I am not the youngest on this list but certainly not the oldest!!).
>> Joep
>>
> Me too!  :-)
> 
HOO! You had a awfully big disk!!
We even couldn't afford a DF32. I had a lucky colleague in another lab 
who had one, that was fast!!. But 7 years later ('75) we got a PDP-11, 
which was rather difficult as it was hexadecimal instead of octal (I 
still calculate faster in octal than in hexadecimal!).
But we programmed a FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) in this 4 K (12-bit) 
environment, using so-called rotating buffers of 256 words. And it was 
reasonably fast on a 1 MHz processor. Current programs waste memory and 
cycles in the millions and lean programs cannot be found. That 's the 
price of progress and sloppy programmers (my opinion!).
But your problem didn't exist then. HTTP came into existence in 1992!
Joep