Random Thoughts of Change, at 55
Welp. Here it is. Fifty five years on this great ball of mud floating through space. Fifty five circuits of the sun. Over 20,000 days. I never thought I would live this long. As I look back on the life I have led up to now, I notice that there is one constant throught: Change.
When I first started on my journey in technology, buying time on a shared system was normal. We had these giant, room-sized computers you could access via a terminal. Only rich people had standalone computers. The rest of us had go to a library or have a computer-related class at school. I remember when our school got a batch of ten bi-synch terminals, which allowed us to have multiple sessions open on a single terminal. We sysops thought we were the lords of all creation. And what happens when you give a group of young nerds a method of being more productive? They want more, of course.
Our school ran McGill University System for Interactive Computing, or MUSIC, as the OS on our IBM 370/138 mainframe. I found out quite by accident about a bug in the login process that allowed for easy escalation of privilege for any account. Basically, spam the new session process while spamming the break key, and it would dump you out of the login process to a system prompt, with no limits. All actions would be carried out with the $System account. Was I the first to discover this? Most likely not. And no, I didn't use it for nefarious purposes, and even notified the instructor of the problem. It was more about the joy of discovery, and finding "workarounds" for problems.
In programming class, in order to get your work graded you had to print out your listing on actual paper, then hand that in to the teacher for grading and credit. In those days, I was learning COBOL and Fortran. If you're not familiar with either of these, they are two high level computer languages geared for very different purposes.
COBOL stands for COmmon Business Oriented Language, and is very wordy. To add two numbers, you'd simply type:
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. AAA.
ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
DATA DIVISION.
WORKING STORAGE SECTION.
01 WS-VAR.
05 WS-A PIC 9(03) VALUE 20.
05 WS-B PIC 9(03) VALUE 60.
05 WS-C PIC 9(03).
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
ADD WS_A TO WS-B GIVING WS-C.
DISPLAY "WS-C: " WS-C.
My memory is a bit foggy, having not touched COBOL for about 35 years, but that should be pretty close. Notice the periods at the end of each line. Woe be to the person who misses a period somewhere in their code. One missed punctuation mark in code that may contain thousands of lines makes debugging somewhat, err, frustrating.
Fortran is bit more straightforward and much less verbose. Fortran (Formula Translation) was built for math and science, so it'll get straight to the point.
integer i,j,k
write(*,*)'Enter first Number : '
read(*,*)i
write(*,*)'Enter second number : '
read(*,*)j
k=i+j
write(*,*)'Sum = ',k
stop
end
See, easy-peasy, even with leveraging user input for the values. Notice the read and write commands, with the (*,*) parameters, This is usually where you'd specify the device and format you want to input from or output to. In the above example, the asterisk (*) just specifies stdin and stdout, both of which are usually the console.
BASIC is even simpler, being geared toward new developers or hobbyists. I'm not trying to diminish the language; some incredibly complex and useful software has been created with various flavors of BASIC. Adding two numbers in, say, GW-BASIC would be as simple as this:
10 X=10
20 Y=20
30 Z=X+Y
40 Print "X + Y = "; Z
In PowerShell, a thoroughly modern scripting solution, the same operation is surprisingly similar:
$Value1 = 5
$Value2 = 10
$Result = $Value1 + $Value2
Write-Output $Result
But I didn't start this post to give you lessons on ancient languages. This is just meant to be a reflection on decades of change.
Basically, in the beginning, we all did our work on someone elses computer, or some shared system. A mainframe or minicomputer. Personal computers were the domain of geeks who tinkered with strange boxes with lots of blinking lights and switches, with which they could make the computer count in binary by flashing the lights in sequence. Cool, huh? It might not seem like much, but this persisted for a number of years, and was the beginning of the PC "revolution". Without those early pioneers, we wouldn't be where we are today.
And that pendulum had been swinging back and forth for a long time. For awhile, we'll use someone elses computers, then move back to our own computers. Maybe at work, we'll have our "own" computer, with mapped network drives for storage, kind of a hybrid where half your stuff is local, and half is on someone elses computer. Now, we're in the age of cloud computing, where a ton of services run from cloud provider datacenters, and where your data is stored. All on someone elses computer.
It's my opinion that the pendulum is starting to swing the other way, back to on-prem for businesses, as they find out their particular workloads aren't well suited for cloud use, and costs more than an on-prem solution to keep running. Basically, there are people out there who have an app that runs on a server, and they simply set up a VM in the cloud and install the app there. So, it's not really a cloud-ready app, and that is where there cost problems come from. So the pendulum is coming back, with data stored on our own computers. But I digress; I could ramble about this stuff all day.
I guess the point of the diatribe of nothing is just to look back in to myself, and where I've been. Maybe share a bit of insight.
Back in my high school days (mid 80s), I unknowingly got started down the path of a career in IT by becoming a computer operator of the aforementioned IBM 370/138 mainframe. Up until this point, I had only experienced various microcomputers such as the Commodore Brothers (VIC20 and C64), Apple ][, ][e, and //c, and some other random units. Back in those days, I spent many a Sunday afternoon banging in a listing from Compute! or some other publication, just to play Hangman or move some sprites around the screen. Of course, I saved my work on my handy tape drive, or later on a floppy disk. I didn't see my first IBM PC until 1987. Today, I carry around 512 GB in my phone, and a 1 terabyte flash drive.
As I come closer to the sunset of my career in technology, I find myself searching for opportunities to pass on my experience and knowledge to those that are fairly new to the field. It is my belief that we cannot progress to the future without a solid understanding of the past. That's one of the reasons that you will find a lot of "old junk" on this site; it helps those who come later understand what happened earlier. Also, some of this knowledge might actually be useful for someone struggling with a problem, or maybe spark someones imagination to create something even better. You know, find that thing that everyone needs, but don't know they need.
Anyhow, stay solid and embrace the change. There is not much you can do to stop it.
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