My early co-op career comes back again

Today, a pull-request I had made to an upstream software, the maintainer asked me to improve the test coverage, showing the (gcov) coverage report. OK, so as I start working on this, deja-vu comes over me (again). I’ve seen this type of report before. And then it hit me. Many years ago (~1991) I was a student @ HP here in Waterloo. One of the first things I worked on was adding ‘basic block analysis’ (coverage analysis) as a feature to HP Softbench for our X-Terminals. Now the X-Terminals were compiled (Intel i960) using an early gcc, and softbench was based on something for the PA, but I got it working, updated some of the Motif client, and was on my way in my testing career.

That early softbench and BBA coverage is immortalised here HPJ-1990-06 (June 1990 HP Journal). UI’s used to be so sexy all 3D like.
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

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2018-06-29

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One response to “My early co-op career comes back again”

John Hawksley
2019-10-16
When I was an intern at HP (95-96) we had Softbench installed on our 400-series HPUX workstations. And I did play with it jealously for a while; but I was a minicomputer COBOL programmer and in those days we were using Robelle QEDIT on the 4000 itself. It was a screen editor so you could do pageup/pagedown, then edit, then commit the page back to the mini. If you forgot the commit, you lost all your changes. It was a very steep learning curve but you learned it fast. I was allowed toward the end to work out how to cross-link COBOL and C objects and start replacing (modernizing) some of the copylibs. Great days!
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My early co-op career comes back again

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