October 17, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Took a while before I got up enough courage to post to this forum but here goes.
Started in '50s - college degree in Mechanical Engineering - when engineering was the rage. Engineers ran companies were CEOs, Members of the Board of Directors.
Watch life change with the gradual switch over to the Bean Counters (Accounts) taking over the CEO and Board positions.
Luckily I worked for a company that was generous in supporting an employees education. Worked for and received a Masters Degree in Business Management.
In the 1960's Watched as computers began to be felt in industry - now this is back in the heady days of the IBM big iron, (IBM 709, the last vacuum tube computer that IBM made) took the opportunity to learn how to program in the archaic Fortran 1 language. Programmed using it to develop rocket engines.
Gradually switched over to what was then known as a minicomputer, a Hewlett-Packard Series 1000 and became acquainted with hierarchal databases and used those databases to develop a complete General Ledger accounting system.
From there moved onto desktop computers with first using DOS and the C language but rapidly moving to Microsoft Windows 3.0 operating system, relational database and Microsoft's SQL Server.
Now attempting to grasp dot net concepts, and more and more of T-SQL. It has given me a varying life, but a life full of challenges, and best of all a life full of satisfaction.
To me not to learn is but to intellectually die.
To all I would say continue to learn, for not to learn will in 10 or 20 years having you look back and say "I wish I did", and for those of you in this position it is not too late to catch up!
Please excuse me for being so long winded and verbose, hey humor an old man, please.
October 17, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Hey bit. Glad you got the courage to post. 709? Good greif. Here I thought that my 1403 and 7079 days made me the old man. Very glad you are hanging in there. Some of our hand-held Mobile computers beat the socks off of 360-40's for raw power but lack the on-line storage.
Keep up the good work. We need folks just like you and me to remind these youngsters just how good they have got it.
ATBCharles Kincaid
October 18, 2009 at 10:00 am
Nice post.
I heard someone speaking last week about iPhone development. Said the iPhone has the capabilities, though not the storage (yet) of the old G3s, which aren't that old!
October 18, 2009 at 11:25 am
Charles Kincaid - let me take you further back onto memory lane, we replaced the 709 with a 1401... Remember when coding was not accomplished with a word processor, or SSMS? Let us go back to the days of punched cards and card punch machines where a single spelling mistake, one wrong character and the entire card had to be re-punched, or if it was a truly a simple mistake using a bit of scotch tape to cover the punched hole. Working with card readers, card sorters and tabulating machines and wiring their boards. Dropping your program card deck and sitting there putting them back into the correct order ............ ah those were the days of long hours and not much productivity.
Afraid much of the references here, read like a foreign language to the young whipper snappers who program now.
October 18, 2009 at 6:50 pm
bitbucket-25253 (10/18/2009)
Charles Kincaid - let me take you further back onto memory lane, we replaced the 709 with a 1401... Remember when coding was not accomplished with a word processor, or SSMS? Let us go back to the days of punched cards and card punch machines where a single spelling mistake, one wrong character and the entire card had to be re-punched, or if it was a truly a simple mistake using a bit of scotch tape to cover the punched hole. Working with card readers, card sorters and tabulating machines and wiring their boards. Dropping your program card deck and sitting there putting them back into the correct order ............ ah those were the days of long hours and not much productivity.Afraid much of the references here, read like a foreign language to the young whipper snappers who program now.
My first program was on a wire board when they were still used regularly but, yeah... I'm a whipper snapper. By the time I started with that, BitBucket was already 3 days older than dirt. 😉 We had one of those new fangled key punch machines where you could add a program card that you'd punched. It also came with a plastic "Unit 0" instead of a metal one. Of course, real paper tape was much more fun... CHAR(127) was one of my favorites especially since the tape would always rip right on that character. And 110 baud was greased lightning.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
October 19, 2009 at 10:48 am
Ah the old days.
I had a special plaid jacket that I wore in the office only. Two outside pokects on each side and two pockets on each side inside. I kept routines wrapped in rubber bands in all the pokects. It was my walking routine library.
I've wired the boards too.
Then there is the old card joke: "How do they bury main-frame programmers? Face down, nine edge first."
ATBCharles Kincaid
October 19, 2009 at 10:52 am
Guess that means some of us will be buried in the cloud...
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How best to post your question[/url]
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"stewsterl 80804 (10/16/2009)I guess when you stop and try to understand the solution provided you not only learn, but save yourself some headaches when you need to make any slight changes."
December 2, 2009 at 10:38 am
I agree with a previous post by blandry, today's technology moves so fast... it can be kind of frustrating. However, this means that if you don't actively try to learn more, you will fall behind.
Someone else pointed out, if your happy with your current job you don't need to focus on the training as much, I agree with this for the most part, but you'll probably be more likely to be layed off.
Something that seems to have changed in business world (around the 1980's) it seems like its easier to move up the ladder by switching companies. Many companies openly state that they do not expect someone to work there for longer than 5 years, so why should they invest in the employee?
Where I work my boss values me quite abit, and if I put in a serious request to go to some sort of training, he'll consider it. I think he see's it as a way to keep me around, generally I'm happy with some good books and a few hrs company time to learn them, which is far cheaper than many of the options I've seen.
Me personally, I love to learn, the biggest problem I have is time, so our arrangement works pretty well.
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