I sent this privately to the OP at first, who liked it and suggested I re-send it to the entire group as the thread is already OT and others might like the story also.
My father, 86 now, became fascinated with computers in the late 50's early 60's during his first career as a surveyor and map maker when maps were still hand drawn (cartographer I believe was his official title). Back in those days in Australia they were still mapping the continent, and part of the work consisted of going out in teams of 3 guys who would drive a topless (often doorless also) landrover to the peak of a local hill, and camp up there for a few days while they assembled the trigonometry station out of pipe steel and self made concrete on the spot. Hard work, tough men, and lots of beer was consumed I'm told. Dad wanted more and started studying a bachelors in computer science, one of the first offered in Australia at the time, with the Canberra College of Advanced Education (like an apprenticeship but for more technical trades) in about 1967, completing it (part time as evening classes mostly) in 1972. Apparently for his final assessment on the course, they had to write a compiler (don't know what language was to be compiled) for the PDP-11 the college had. This was only an undergraduate course - these guys were super smart and worked extremely hard - I've worked with IT graduates of today, and most of them could not have done what these guys were doing back in the 70's. The writer of the Xerox article reminds me a lot of my dad. These were thoughtful, considered and hard working people who had come through the worst of what the world could throw at them growing up between two world wars and eagerly accepted the opportunities presented to them by this new world of technology. After graduation Dad then went on to spend the rest of his working life with the Australian Bureau of Statistics, where they ended up writing mostly PL/1 on the Fujitsu mainframe that replaced their IBM kit (a choice that almost got the department in big trouble with their government overseers, as IBM executives played golf with the relevant parliamentary ministers). Almost 20 years later I cut my teeth in PL/1 on the same Fujitsu environment, upgraded many times since of course. Strangely though, my next shop was an Amdahl machine, and the shop after that a Hitachi even into the late 90's. I had been working with 'IBM mainframes' for more than ten years before I ever saw one actually from IBM! :-) Cheers - Mike ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
