[LINK] comparative computer knowledge and skills

[Frank O'Connor]

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 <brd at iimetro.com.au> 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: brd at iimetro.com.au
> web:   www.drbrd.com
> web:   www.problemsfirst.com
> Blog:  www.problemsfirst.com/blog
> 
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