Posted on 07/29/2012 3:10:27 PM PDT by Looking4Truth
I'm not as pissed as I sound. Enjoy.
my sister claims (if i recall correctly and if not, it’s my fault not hers) that gates worked there and that she recalls seeing him at The Mill.
You sound like an old bastard who's behind the times, but I guess you might have had a little bit of fun (is that the right word--"fun"?) writing it...
It wasn’t piracy, as it was written for a plant in the same company. I was simply surprised to see it, but was more surprised that it was written for windows 3.1, and it still worked flawlessly. And that such a program (that indeed I did put alot of effort into back in the day) was preferable to modern programs...hell the program was intended for a specific type of manufacturing line, of which this plant was not one of...though apparantly it was customizable enough
You knees would be shot, though. ;)
I moved from engineering to the restaurant and loved it. Specs were clear, once you locked the kitchen door for the night, you were DONE, and no-one would call at 2am and say the accounting server is down.
Can't stand on concrete for hours anymore like the young men can, though.
/johnny
It was written when I was just a punk-a** co-op, so it was pretty specific to the task at hand for that one plant 100 miles from the nearest highway in Nevada, on a Compaq 386.
I get you. I've seen that type of thing occur in my days as a consultant and I've also seen the blatant ripping off of hundreds of thousands of dollars (and lines of code) of COBOL programs from one established company to a startup. The geniuses didn't even rip out the comment lines that stated who wrote the programs and when and for whom.
I know you still 'get me' though. L8R.
Ha ha, when I first did computing, it was with a Teletype ASR-33 and a 110 baud modem! My first computer, I wire wrapped!
Also, when I was a kid, I had to walk back and forth to school four miles a day*. And it was uphill both ways. The snow was three feet deep. And then came the winter...
* This part is actually true.
Everything I know I learned from Fortran77.
On punch cards.
I remember for one final exam we had to get the addresses to sort in alphabetical order.
The basics are still valuable today - we used to call them subroutines and database keywords, but you see them today under different guises.
A few times over the years I had seriously entertained other careers such as working in a dog kennel or oil change monkey.
Stretching my memory a bit; back in the 80’s I worked on the precision approach radar system used by the Marines (still??).
The processor was an USH-20 - programmed via the keyboard (no punch-cards - we were high tech).
The thing that sticks in my memory was the accuracy of the system. In fully automatic mode, the system would literally fly the planes in “hands-off”.
The story goes that the system was bringing the planes in to touch-down so close to the same spot every time that the runway was starting to crumble at that point.
BTW, I have never bought anything advertised on a web site or a TV, on a banner, etc. etc.. Wonder how many people are the same. Seems like a huge waste of money.
But companies pay for the number of eyeballs that see their adverts thinking that many will buy their product.
Apparently, the less desirable elements of humanity have made the Internet what it is today... eg. Porn.
The geniuses didn’t even rip out the comment lines that stated who wrote the programs and when and for whom.
That’s funny. We won a huge lawsuit against a (french) competitor. Their programs had our comments, and their electrical and mechanical drawings had our company name on them.
* This part is actually true.
This thread is getting weird. I actually did walk uphill both ways in the snow. I lived on a lake as a kid and the bus came only to the end of the lake at the dam. The road leading to the dam went up and down hills along the shoreline, hence I really did have to do that. Small world.
I 100% agree about technology just getting so overwhelming and diverse and people being able to keep up with it. Running into “technical” people who couldn’t think or reason is happening to me more and more.
One of my mass deployments for a gov’t agency sometime back had a fairly simple script to follow. Do a few and there wasn’t much to think about after.
The standard barring network or other anamolies was 14 units per day. That is old backup/breakdown of old with backup made and restored to new and all hardware fully assembled and some admin.
I usually made goal and one other guy was usually there or close. One other fellow seemed permanently baffled. If he had 4 done correctly in a day, it was something.
Half of the ones he did would require the old one to be pulled from the truck and backed up again. I don’t know why. Their backup routine consisted of two icons. One for the old and one for the new.
If there was any kind of problem, the policy was to have an agency IT person to manually move or handle the problem. They were quite strict on that.
Very well said!
Young kids seem to have a knack for it though. Get em a computer early and let them go and include protections because the Internet can be a cold nasty place.
Date: Winter ‘63.
Computer: IBM 1620.
Peripherals: 28K extended core, 1407 card reader/punch, 402 accounting machine.
Translator: Forgo (simplified 2-pass Fortran, all cards)
Program: “Hello world!”
Don’t pay that well, though. Low end jobs tend to treat their employees like dumb slaves.
You’d make several times more as a bit twiddler.
I guess that this goes without saying...
You F**king rock!
I remember learning the 'WHOAMI' command in Unix and LMAO.
)
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