Mmmm,
As a baby boomer (and there are a few of us here) I remember coding to tape in
COBOL for a stats unit I was doing at the University of Tasmania, I remember
the first Z80 CPM unit I owned, and a heap of arcane text based application
software. I marvelled at VisiCalc when it first appeared ("Wow! How come nobody
ever thought of doing that sort of array handling on a mainframe?"), cut my
teeth on BASIC (because all the software you got in the good old days had to be
transcribed from magazines) saved to cassette tape and delved into the
mysteries of 8 bit ASSEMBLER and Z80 and 6502 chip architecture with gay
abandon. ('Not that there's anything wrong with that' - Seinfeld)
I remember my first disk based OS, my first Trash 80, my first Apple 2 and my
first Macintosh ... bought on my birthday in 1984 which also happened to be the
same day it was released for sale. I can remember buying and installing the
first IBM PC, and little numbers from KayPro and Amstrad that they said were
portables ... but which were only portables if you were about six axe handles
across the shoulders, lived on a diet of steroids on toast, and didn't mind
devoting a sizeable amount of your free and work time to packing and unpacking
the puppies.
I remember creating various LAN's at work and at my place ... based on various
arcane and proprietary protocols from the likes of HP, Novell, Apple and IBM.
As network operating systems ... with the possible exception of Novell ... each
of them sucked.
I remember 'discovering' TCP/IP and the Internet in the early 1980's and
connecting through AARNET. At first it was simply a batched UUCP (NNTP) feed
from AARNET via ZikZak to supplement the Fidonet BBS I was running, but
eventually it graduated to real time and I became a bona-fide ISP. I remember
paying Telstra extortionate rates for 64K ISDN channels to feed my Internet
connection, a room full of modems and switches, learning LINUX for servers to
handle all the batch stuff, and distributing rich TeleFinder and First Class
client software to my clientele to cut down on bandwidth requirements but
enrich the experience (when I first saw Mosaic in the late 80's it paled in
comparison to the client software our users were using ... which emulated the
Macintosh desktop.)
I remember Gopher, and Veronica and Telnet and dedicated FTP, and .... well,
anyone who was around in the 80's will know what I'm talking about. It's all
folded into the Web browser now. I remember USENET (still use it in fact) the
text based precursor of little numbers like Twitter, Facebook and the like ...
it was more noise than useful information, but it was lively.
I remember DBase (in all its incarnations), FoxBase, RBase, Omnis and all those
esoteric database products. I remember Visicalc, Lotus 1,2,3, Multiplan, Jazz,
Quattro and all those early spreadsheets. And the word processors I used over
the years ... their names are Legion.
I cut my teeth on various IDE's ... with each new one looking for the Holy
Grail of development which I never found. Eventually I found the whole IDE
thing self defeating and went back to high level languages for most development.
I developed networked applications with thousands of users ... on my own.
Nowadays this is done by teams ... but in those days a single moron was
assigned to the job.
I belonged to a number of user groups (very popular in the 1980's), wrote
monthly columns and reviews for a couple of magazines in the 90's and early
Noughties, and did a far bit of tech based research professionally. (Some of my
stuff on e-commerce, e-government, the Internet and the like was quoted in
journals and magazines with descriptors like 'seminal' ... and I could never
work out whether that was meant in a good or bad sense.)
I was at one stage or another a member of the US based Internet Society, a
founding member of the Australian Internet Society, an associate in the IETF
and a government rep to a couple of committees to do with XML and Business in
Australia.
That said, things change. There is no way I could do, or would want to do,
ASSEMBLER nowadays ... the bottom line is that 32 and 64 bit processor
architecture is way too complex to even consider it. Better to code in a high
level language and let the compiler do the work for you. FORTH was a really
cool language to know in the 1980's ... code efficient, CPU efficient,
adaptable to many uses and functions, albeit the choice of developer anarchists
... but singularly useless in terms of todays processors which are much to big
and complex to write an effective FORTH for. PASCAL was Nicholas Wirth's
sadistic joke on student programmers ... especially the first couple of
versions ... that one shot compiler caused more grief than Napoleon's march on
Moscow.
New versions of common Net protocols (IPv6, HTTP 2, HTML 5, etc etc), new
IDE's, new languages and API's, new CPU's, GPU's, routing protocols, routers,
switches and gateways are simply things I'm not much interested in keeping up
with anymore.
Each and very month I stayed away from development, from network
administration, from product reviews, from whatever I fell further and further
behind. I ended up becoming a project bunny and a 'resource' rather than the
technician I had been.
Until nowadays, in the words of the inestimable Sargeant Schulz "I know
Nothing. Nothing."
And in the final analysis, that's what it all comes down to. The world changes
... usually for the better. Technology develops. Complexity grows. What's new
is old, and what's old retires.
So that's what I did and I haven't looked back.
Well, until now ... :)
---
On 21 Nov 2013, at 5:15 pm, Bernard Robertson-Dunn <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 21/11/2013 5:01 PM, Andrew Thornton wrote:
>>
>> Is there any way of knowing how someone
>> compares in terms of computer knowledge and skills? Do other people know
>> more than me/less/the same.
>
> I think you need to be a bit more specific than "computer knowledge and
> skills"
>
> At the hardware level, do you include microprocessors, real time control
> systems, embedded systems, mainframes, SAN/Data Storage systems etc?
>
> In the software world, do you include the design of compilers/linkers,
> RDBMSs, OLTP systems, graphics processors, networking systems, web
> servers, application processors?
>
> There's far more to computers than just your common or garden PC/tablet
> and web site development.
>
> --
>
> Regards
> brd
>
> Bernard Robertson-Dunn
> Sydney Australia
> email: [email protected]
> web: www.drbrd.com
> web: www.problemsfirst.com
> Blog: www.problemsfirst.com/blog
>
> _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
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