>>That was in VAX Cobol and VAX Basic, winter '87-88 :).
>
>Yupp, it is nice that even with todays machines there sometimes is a need to handle the data faster. I sure liked the times were the other programmers were betting some tasks could not be done better than these times were optical niceties and coding to standards is the real difficulty. Implementing a pointered virtual memory first for MS-DOS, later to EMS and still later utilizing 386 expanded memory to block load already pointered and usable chunks of disk... Are we getting old ? Naaaw...

No, we're getting younger - we're always today's edition of ourselves. Our pictures are getting older :).