My screed against 'script kiddies' and what passes for 'IT pros' these days.

My (trying to control my angry) mind. | today | Me, myself and I

[Looking4Truth]

I'm not as pissed as I sound. Enjoy.

[Looking4Truth]

all cards)

All cards. Yes.

That's what I had to learn on. One syntax error and you had to resubmit the damn cards all over again to the ops people. We 'as students' when I first was learning this stuff were under deadlines, so having to resubmit your deck was almost fatal as far as passing the course (USAF '85). It sucked.

[Yardstick]

Lunar Lander was a great game. Simple and fun. Omega Race for the VIC 20 was another good one.

[Erasmus]

I've heard a much different story regarding "Digital," but it wasn't where MS-DOS originated, but how IBM became involved with Microsoft.

As you go on to explain, Digital Research (another small company like Microsoft) put off IBM, so they went down the street, figuratively, to Gates. Now I had to look this up, but it appears that Bill saw the opportunity and grabbed at it with both hands. He went out and quickly bought a little system called QDOS from another software house called Seattle Computer Products and used this as a basis for MS-DOS, whose Rev 1.0 he was able to deliver pretty quickly.

And not if it's running Linux, in which case quite a bit was was influenced by Andrew Tannenbaum.

Torvalds gives explicit credit to Tannenbaum's Minix project. However, ultimate credit is due to Kernighan and Ritchie of Bell Labs, with their Unix.

One of the chief architects of Windows NT, Dave Cutter, was was hired away from DEC, who was behind the VAX11/780 and VMS.

One of my former colleagues was fond of pointing out what happens when you step the letters of the acronym VMS one letter forward in the alphabet.

[freekitty]

You sound like my cousin. I remember those big old things. My beef is not with useless ads on internet; but on tv too. Every two seconds you are interrupted by those pos.

[Vietnam Vet From New Mexico]

I started on a Honeywell 200 in the 6
0’s

[wally_bert]

I had both and played the daylights out of Omega Race.

[Talisker]

Back in my day, we coded in 0’s and 1’s, and sometimes we didn’t even have the 1’s.....and that’s the way it was and we liked it.

You had binary code?

Luxury.

We lived on a planet with a hazy sky, with no sunrise or sunset, no day or night, and we had to hum continuously to prevent any break between sound and no sound.

Try programming in THAT environment.

[steve86]

I kept wanting to turn on AdBlock during the Olympics Opening Ceremony the other night (never watch tv otherwise). Finally decided the off button would work just as well. Note to OP: You need Firefox Noscript addon also to lasso and choke those malevolent scripts.

[the invisib1e hand]

Back in my day, we coded in 0’s and 1’s, and sometimes we didn’t even have the 1’s.....and that’s the way it was and we liked it.

I couldn't think of a response to this. It's too hardcore.

Also, my remarks about msft...it's funny, I wonder what I'd be doing if it weren't for Bill Gates. I'd probably have gone into the family business...

[Former War Criminal]

We lived on a planet with a hazy sky, with no sunrise or sunset, no day or night, and we had to hum continuously to prevent any break between sound and no sound.

I retired from the Ground Observer Corps in 1957.

[the invisib1e hand]

wow. you have a golden anniversary coming up!

[the invisib1e hand]

that’s beautiful.

[Yardstick]

It was addictive, especially with game paddles. I think the VIC 20 version was even better than the arcade version.

Now I’m thinking of those early computer magazines that would publish screen shots so readers could prove they had gotten a high score on a game. Just think of that — you would take a picture, take it somewhere to have it developed, pick it up a few days later, snail mail it in, then maybe you’d see it a few weeks later published in a pulp paper magazine. Talk about old school.

[Erasmus]

Th 7094 computer at one of my undergrad schools was like that. You had a 'routing room' with a service window where you would submit your deck.

Several hours later (depending on your class schedule, often the next day), you'd get the deck back with a printout of your results wrapped around it with a rubberband. The printout would usually be a dump of your program's core when it aborted, and sometimes would be a vague but error-riddled version of the output you intended from the program itself.

The core dump was ordinarily much larger, so the moment the routing monkey brought your results to the window, you could get that sinking feeling right away.

The routing room was in one building and the computer was in another. They had a small computer (a 1401) in the routing room which did nothing but read the submitted card decks onto tape, which would be carried over to the computer building a few times througout the day and night. Then during the next trip, the results tape would be carried back to the routing room and the outputs of the various programs run out to a high-speed printer (a 1403) on the spot. Late-night submissions were handled therefore under sort of a FedEx business model, except that the trip was only across Springfield Avenue, and not to Memphis.

Over in the computer building was another computer with its routing room nearby. This computer was a first-generation solid state machine designed and built at the University--kind of a 1962 supercomputer. In its routing room were three lightbulbs set near the ceiling in a row. They were red, yellow, and green. They were labeled "DOWN," "?," and "UP."

[Erasmus]

There is a program on Unix called “make.” (Windoze systems have versions of it now too.)

Make is designed to automate the invocation of the translator system (e.g., C compiler and linker) of a project consisting of numerous source code modules. Once you write a control script for it for a specific project, make keeps track of what files need to be retranslated in order to do a build of the project, and then invokes the translators accordingly.

It is common to invoke make with a command line parameter consisting of the name of one of the files you want to specifically retranslate. If you specify a file that is not listed in the control script, make will terminate with an error message to you.

In older versions of make (but sadly not newer ones), it was fun to type the following command:

make love

and the program would respond with

Don’t know how to make love. Stop.

[Ol' Sox]

You old coot! Keep those kids of your lawn!

When I see threads like this, I'm tempted to join in - I've got the bonafides - started in '77 coding a COBOL Accounts Receivable system for Management Science America. Went on to work with some of the folks at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center, as a tech rep pushing a new-fangled relational database management system and 4GL called Nomad. It was based on the relational model developed by Date and Codd. I was once told that Chris Date actually looked at some of the work I had done when he was visiting the Watson Center and nodded. Helped some friendly folks at the Dept. of the Navy learn another rdbms named Focus. Visited Bell Labs in Princeton in the early 80's where they showed me how they could access and process and print information with an RF network! Magic! Installed an IBM PC LAN in a Fortune 500 company - one of the first ones IBM sold commercially. Met Ozzie when he was at Iris. Met Kapor. Saw Lotus Notes pre-release 1.0 and installed Notes 1.1 at the company I worked for. I've specialized in the Collaborative Software stack ever since and these days work in product development IT for a really really big enterprise software company that eats other companies for breakfast. I'm one of the geeks' geeks. I frackin' love it. Tried management for a few years in the middle of my career, but I'm an engineer - need to keep my hands in it. Half the guys I work with have PhD's and the other half, like me, are ADhDs who just love to tweak things and break things and fix them up, ultimately resulting in production systems that give almost 5 x 9's reliability.

When script kiddies come on my lawn, I use facial recognition, tag them, then post fotos of them to their own FB pages. Damn kids. Heh.

[Alas Babylon!]

My fisrt mainframe: The Philco Ford 1000~~~

NORAD, Cheyenne Mountain Complex, Colorado, circa 1976.

AS a young Airman Basic, I learned to run this all by myself. The tape drives used one inch reel tapes, none of that new-fangled 1/2 inch 9 track! Note the card punch on the lower left.

We called that computer room "Offline", because we loaded jobs via punch card to tape, and the tapes were carried by tape librarians or "tape apes" to the "Online" system.

Online looked like this:

This was used for both Space Track and Missile Warning missions.

All of these were replaced by Honeywell 6080's in 1979 (but the chick did not come with it).

Sigh... The good ole days!

[ArmstedFragg]

We had to walk three miles in the snow to get our ones, then it was a bitch to get them home because they kept falling through the holes in our pockets.

[PAR35]

Run Ghostery and NoScript on Firefox, and you’ll have a start on getting control again.

[Vide]

Digital Research != Digital Equipment Corporation.