Posted on 07/29/2012 3:10:27 PM PDT by Looking4Truth
I'm not as pissed as I sound. Enjoy.
Did you have to walk uphill in the snow both ways to get them 1s? Back when I was learning FORTRAN we were glad to have 0s, 1s were gravy ;)
I remember when 8" floppy drives were the shiznipples and 1200 baud was a screaming connection.
Punch cards you lucky! We had paper tape.
“I assure you that no business geets done through facebook, nor through Linkedin.”
Ain’t that the truth. I keep having all these folks tell me how I need to join Linkedin and that will get me more business. I always ask them if it helped them get any new business. They always say “Well no, but you should join anyway!” So, there you have it. I joined and I got no new business. But hey, it was free!
At least on facebook I get the satisfaction of bugging everyone with the best of the factual conservative (and outrageous liberal) stories I find at Free Republic! Not to mention I do get several positive comments about my posts there. Oh, and do I read anything anyone else posts on facebook? Are you kidding me? The level of discourse there is “My dog pooped on the front lawn this morning! Yea!” (I’m not making that up, either. True story. And sadly enough, you realize, this was a relative that posted that.)
“A few times over the years I had seriously entertained other careers such as working in a dog kennel or oil change monkey.”
I still entertain ideas of becoming a car mechanic.
Would you happen to have a 30cm piece of wire?
The hand is referring to VMS, the system DEC developed to run the VAX series. Gates hired Dave Cutler, who led the development of VMS, to lead the development of Windows NT, from which all modern versions of Windows descend. Windows has an inner core, hidden behind the Win32 API, that bears a resemblance to VMS.
Gates beat out Digital Research much earlier. DR, which had developed the CP/M OS for 8080-based systems, was IBM's first choice to develop the first PC's OS. But they were slow in responding, so IBM went with Microsoft instead. MS didn't actually have what they sold to IBM, but they went across town and bought a nice CP/M work-alike, 86-DOS, aka QDOS, for $50K from Seattle Computer Products and turned it into PC/DOS, the original IBM PC operating system. Naturally, MS forgot to tell SCP the real reason they wanted the system.
“Half the time I get an error about a ‘wayward’ SCRIPT that forces me to restart the browser “
The NoScript plugin for Firefox is excellent at keeping heavy Javascript scripts from slowing down pages. If you want to restore functionality to a page you can select what you want with an easy-to-use button menu.
Twenty years?
Newbie!!
Jus kiddin (sorta) I started programming in ‘72.
But I agree. Javascript is the most damnable heresy that ever came to computing. And all the things they promised it would not do, like infect or corrupt your computer, it manages to do perfectly well, every day!
“I had a word processor that ran on a PRE - PC S100 based computer - in a DOS like environment it was astounding in what it could do ... Today’s BLOATED WORD still cannot do what this little Word Processor could do ... “
Was it Emacs, Vi or Vim?
Emacs was released in 1976.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs
Vi was released in 1976.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi
Vim was released in 1991, based off of Vi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_%28text_editor%29
Most Vi users now use Vim, and beginners often use an easy-to-get-started version called Cream for Vim:
http://cream.sourceforge.net/
Emacs and Vim are the two most powerful editors on the planet. No modern editor can come close to what they can do. They can run either in a modern GUI or in a terminal, just like the old DOS days.
I use Emacs and LOVE it. It takes getting used to and the default keystrokes are a little weird, but the power of Emacs is that *everything* can be customized. All settings are held in a file named “.emacs”. You can tweak everything — colors, sidebars, add abilities, shortcuts, have it auto-load often used files at the touch of a key... anything.
I’ve been using Emacs for several months and I’ve got it so customized it fits like a glove. It’s amazing.
Here’s a few sites to get you started:
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
http://www.emacswiki.org/
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsNewbie
If you’re into personal organization, look into the well-loved Org-Mode module. I don’t use it — I have my own system set up —but many Emacsers rave over it.
http://orgmode.org/
PS. If you find you like a text editor over Word but find you have to go back to Word when you want a document formatted with bold headers, etc., you don’t have to. Look into using LaTeX. LaTeX is FAR more capable than Word and produces letters and documents that look more professional. Many books have been published using LaTeX.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX
You can use LaTeX right in Emacs or Vim, both have LaTeX plugins available.
If you try either Emacs or Vim you’ll never go back to Word. Enjoy!
Okay, I started with paper tape. So there.
But I learned to use whatever technology was "right" for the job. These days it's C# on Windows, PHP on Linux for websites, Objective C for OSX and iOS software, whatever, etc. and etc.
Or anything else the client (or the Boss) insists on...
C would be my language of choice, but companies willing to pay for the extra hours it takes are few and far between. Flexibility gets you clients who come back. VB is okay for some; I never liked it much, but would take on a VB extension or maintenance project in a heartbeat, to put beans on the table. The idea is to get it done.
A shovel is better for detail work, but a Bobcat gets it done faster if the job's big (and they all are, these days), and if it's really big, you use a D9 Caterpillar. Development of software is a lot like developing construction projects.
Look. We could all flop them out on the table and use a yardstick -- or we could just get the job done with what works. We make more money with the latter strategy. I use Emacs for Ruby and Python and PHP and Bash scripts, Vim for quick and dirty edits, VS for C#/VB/ASP.net, and even Text Wrangler for a lot of stuff, but come on, none of that makes me a bigger or smaller or better or worse person. I use a Macbook Pro (yeah, with Parallels) these days, but I won't knock your Windows or Linux box. We're all just making the client happy or stroking the boss for a good review.
But hey -- "script kiddies"? Gimme a break. Do you (OP) really know what that is?
Oh yeah, I played the snot out of Omega Race too. Went so far as to wire up a 555 circuit with potentiometer inline with the controller for automatic missile firing.
Still only got 4 shots on the screen at any time, but there were ALWAYS 4 shots on the screen with that circuit! The pot allowed me to vary the rate at which the auto fire occurred for either tight grouping or a more spaced out pattern of the missiles.
I disagree. I was involved personally in business transactions and hiring decisions where linkedin played a part.
No - it was not Emacs. But it would not surprise me that it was based on Emacs. It was a proprietary word processor that ran on a Jacquard 500 (a very different device for that era - of late 1970’s) The Jacquard could run in straight Word Processor mode - or is a computer mode where you could run programs in Basic - very sophisticated ones. It had a type of programming environment - Very Advanced for the time ... but it died out in the early 1980’s...
I disagree. I was involved personally in business transactions and hiring decisions where linkedin played a part
___________________
I would be interested in the industries. I am on lists for all sorts of insustries and they are all dead. Anyone else have luck using Linkedin in business?
Y’know, if you use Firefox, (might want to avoid the current version, though...), you can get plugins to screen out a lot of that stuff.
Love VMS! In fact, when I was at BBN in the early 1990’s, I wrote a full screen editor for DCL using DCL. Very cool language.
I started before high school with DEC’s RSTS-11 BASIC-PLUS, before picking up Data General COBOL for a summer job in high school. In college, learned FORTRAN and 8080 Assembler.
After college it was VAX VMS COBOL, then APL, and C. By the time OO coding came around, I was doing enterprise app implementations (e.g. Oracle Applications), but 95% of the work was PL/SQL and ODBC for querying databases.
Haven’t done much coding, save the occasional VB Script or Excel macro, in the last 10 years or so. It used to be fun; now PM and org change are more interesting...
specifically for datawarehousing and business intelligence.
I only touched VMS, JCL, Cobol etc. when I was filling in time doing some simple mainframe work. It’s a whole different world from my BI/DWH world — and now I’m figuring out SAP B/W — THAT is another world with it’s own terminology!
I should have been more specific; while I did a little JCL and COBOL for an IBM 360 back in the 70’s, the VMS to which I was referring was VAX-11 VMS which later morphed into Open VMS...
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