Funny

[Bill Briggs]

At 2:40 PM -0800 3/30/06, Jim Light wrote:
>I too remember typing in my college programming jobs on an 029 Key Punch
>and submitting them over the counter at the computer center.

 Been there, done that, but sadly, the T-shirt has not survived the years.


> A "high-Level" language was FORTRAN.

 It's still correct to classify FORTRAN as a "high-level" language. C gets lower, and Assember is about as low as it gets these days. Nobody inputs the Hex equivalents of the opcodes any more, though in the first digital course I took in EE we did.


> DOS 1.0 was an operating system it was possible to know everything about. Now it's too complicated to know everything about an OpSys unless you do that for a living.

 I think it's at the stage now where it's not possible to know everything about a modern OS, even if you do it for a living. Depends on how you interpret "know everything", but it's a lot to know. The guys I know at Apple who do it for a living would never pretend to know the whole OS. From a high level they know the structure, but the workings are too many and too complex to know it all.


>I think the notion that us old timers know more about how
>things work underneath has merit.

 Perhaps. Depends on what the old timers were schooled in. We've had a chance to grow with computers, so it has come to us in a steady flow. People starting out now wade into the ocean. One of the things I have noted with my students (and it has taken me a few years to absorb this lesson) is that even though they have grown up with, are comfortable with, and use the technology very "naturally", the majority don't know much about it. Even seniors in EE don't know the things I expect they should.


>I took a print shop course in High School and learned stuff about
>typefaces and setting type (manually) that helps me even today.

 I'm sure. Far too many think because they have the tool that they know how to set type.


>FrameMaker, for all it's odd little quirks, is still pretty damn good.

 I concur. Things I'd like to see fixed, a few additions, but for the most part, it's very good. The OS X version will be even better. ;-)

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