Guru: I’m A Number, You’re A Number, Everybody’s A Number

September 9, 2019 Ted Holt

Do you, like Bob Seger, sometimes feel that you are nothing more than a number? Me too. That’s because to many people, that’s exactly what we are. And if there’s one thing that computers are good at, it’s assigning numbers — to orders, to accounts, to invoices, to transactions, and of course, to people. Since we have to make the computer assign numbers, we may as well learn the modern way to do it.

In my earliest days of programming, I would store the last assigned of a series of numbers in a data file. (The S/34 and S/36 …