I encourage everyone to collect their memories and make them available for computer historians. We’re getting computer history museums and keeping things is important.
I put up my memories of the Ada DoD-I contest.
The competition for Ada eventually pared down to the Red, Blue, Green and Yellow languages. Then to Red and Green. We were the Red team at Intermetrics, and this was our second language design. Unlike Green (which won), we threw out our language completely from the 4 language contest and came up with this design just at the deadline for the 2 language contest. Unfortunately, everyone spent that part of the design phase assuming Green would win and preparing the textbooks and college classes. At the vote, which was required to be unanimous, the AF sent someone with no knowledge of the contest who was instructed to vote for Green and not to change their vote. The member from Defense Communications was physically shaking because he, and many others who read our book when it came out, were for Red.
http://www.iment.com/maida/computer/redref/index.htm
This was our reference manual.
http://www.iment.com/maida/computer/redref/toc.htm
And this was our rationale document
http://www.iment.com/maida/computer/redrat/toc.htm
And these were the requirements we worked to:
http://www.iment.com/maida/computer/requirements/strawman.htm
Now get your own historical memories out so they won’t be lost!!!!!
I unfortunately entered the field unschooled and without any sheepskins in a from the frying pan to the fire conditions at a place where I worked. With no education, training or experience I became 1st a coordinator, then a manager and eventually a director of a small IT staff of mostly programmers and beginning with almost all consultant-programmers to eventually a staff split pretty even between employees and programmers.
It was a small staff with a huge job with a boss, my boss, the CEO a believer that no one outside of our organization had invented or ever would invent the software and applications we needed, so everything was built in-house. But some consultants early on really screwed up,kept messing up, and we needed some things fixed quickly.
I have the ability to learn just about anything new to me, quickly. When the fires - problems, stalled projects, mainframe down, network down, major system changes, wholesale new systems - I had to step up where ever I was short, and became a better programmer in all our programming languages than just about everyone that worked for me - to get the job done.
In some ways, being in management, I lost my calling, but it through me into more programming areas than I could afford any of my staff to get into, in order to keep them on the timelines of what I needed them for. Everyone I hired later told me they were kind of afraid to work for me - I knew too much, they couldn’t screw up, I’d know it even if no one else did. One of my best consultants was offered to go work for an outfit working on an artificial intelligence project. He told me what it was and what they offered. I told him he’d be crazy not to take the offer. He decided he’d rather work with me. I never felt more blessed on the job.
So I never built any programming language, but I learned a lot of them, from Fortran and Assembler to Cobol and CICS, to C, to all the languages grown up around the Internet and PC-Network based client-server computing. (Taught myself HTML in one week)
But the whole field of people that created the field I worked in, at the applied level, has always made me feel I worked on the shoulders of giants. I would have liked to have been among them, but never was.