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STAMP OUT GREEN WORDS

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Button:Creator:Product:Date:Group:Meeting:Location:
251Conrad WeisertSHARE8/65SHAREXXVChicago
At a meeting of the SHARE Systems Division, November 22, 1964, in Washington, DC, George Mealy of IBM described the new block tape format for FORTRAN. The same presentation was also made in the Spring of 1965 to the SHARE Board at a meeting in the Time-Life building in New York. The FORTRAN unformatted binary records had a Control Word and George used green chalk to describe the Control or Description Word. The reaction to the Green Chalk caused the word to be called the Green Word. No one liked the contents of the Green Word (not information, wrong location, etc.). Furthermore, no other language except FORTRAN could read these unformatted records because of the Control Word; there were no macros for Assembler and no COBOL support, and thus Stamp out Green Words was an attack, but the flavor of this attack was to extend these unformatted records (now known as RECFM=VBS) to all languages. Conrad Weisert and Channing Jackson made 100 copies of the button and brought it to Chicago two SHAREs later, August 1965, and it was the FIRST computer button.
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