Readit NewsI teach in a tech/trade vocational program where 1/2 the students are your generation. All kinds of reasons they are there. (Didn't do well in High School, College, University, Grad School, Gaming in their parents basement since they were 10)
When one of the skills click (some try 2 or 3 of the ones we teach) and they start working the says that life is happening for them. The failures, in retrospect, become steps the had to take to get where they are. Perseverance is probably good personality trait to develop.
I chose my handle to have the word prosaic in it because I did many thing in tech (and other fields), none at extraordinary levels, but all done by learning by trying things out. You don't have to be wildly successful in life, prosaic can be good enough.
I think that is what he is saying, though I can't remember the TP command set well enough.
Turbo Pascal wasn't written on a 286; it was written for CP/M, where I think it required 48KiB of RAM. A "fairly early version of Turbo Pascal for DOS" might have required 64KiB?
You can't really stream things onto a floppy disk (remember that early home computers and the IBM PC didn't have hard disks; they didn't become standard equipment until the late 80s). You have to write a whole sector at a time, which can take a second or two to seek the disk to the appropriate track; rotating the disk to the right sector takes a significant fraction of a second. Journaling your edits to a journal file was a feature that EDT on VAX/VMS had around that time, but there wasn't really a practical way to do that on a home computer.
Early 80's VMS had a Keep/Purge system for history of files. Everytime you edited a file a version number was bumped up by 1. There was a command, "purge", I think that set the Keep count which was default to 3.
This would have been within the contemporary Dos and disk capabilities and size of 160-360kBytes, although slow (5-15 seconds).
When Dave Cutler moved from DEC to MS I expected the Dos console under windows to get that same feature. Disappointed. A gajillion lost hours could have be saved.
prosaic-hacker commented on PiDP-1, or the rebirth of an old machine hackaday.io/project/20254... · Posted by u/ozymandiax
This looks fascinating! is there a link that would be a better intro to the project?
There was this link on the page
https://hackaday.io/project/202541-replica-of-the-pdp-1-pidp...
TL;DR Don't sweat the future, it will mess up eventually.
Just Do something now that is productive for a while and don't be afraid to change you mind or your job.
Doing the same thing I have been doing since I was your age. Learning some that interest me now that could be useful.
Started out as a math and science geek: Organic Chemistry was the target. Two chance encounters: one with two real working chemists that warned me to get a PHD to get a real job. I was to impatient to do that much school so the second chance encounter was with a obsolete computer that was plotting graphs and space games on paper. Three years os CS later I was working on Flight Simulation. The 1st PC era happened and 5 years later I switched to install 1st gen PC networks. Then Unix got big and I did Sysdmin on that for a while. Then Perl programing which morph into webdev for handful of years.
Then I was "old" at least to the HR 15 guy, years my junior, who would not hire me, so I became a manager. Then there were to many managers I went back to school and got an accounting degree. Did that for a bunch of years and started teaching System Administration. Now looking for my next obsession.
prosaic-hacker commented on Unexpected Benefits of Building Your Own Tools tiniuc.com/make-more-tool... · Posted by u/tiniuclx
I have seen the effect of tools building in several contexts. The most successful were teams that respected the process in that they each, could and would build tools themselves and would adopt other's tools.
Without the symmetry then the creators has to make sure to keep up the pace on the global progress or be label as distracted by the tool creation.
Worst case the tool creators get separated from the main production and have to maintain the core groups utilities (which will become any code they don't want to maintain).
Tools have to be short to build, widely useful, and placed in a repository that is collectively maintained.
Remember the context that created the need for the tool may move on and the existing tools will have to be upgraded. The group should have a plan how to handle that.
prosaic-hacker commented on Why I Never Buy Cutting-Edge Smartphones or PCs howtogeek.com/why-i-never... · Posted by u/bentocorp
I may be a little more "temporally ludditish" than the author. I have bought the cheapest unlocked cellphone that Best Buy, Staples, or Costco had to offer. Most times on Black Friday.
I typically paid 150 to 250 Canadian. They last 2 to 3 years and meet my needs right up to the next purchase. I am due this year for a switch.
As for PCs and Laptops. All are old BF buys or rescued "garbage". I am setting up a Dell Latitude E5420 (2013) for a current need. (Official disposed by my employer and intercepted before sent to electronic recycling.) Other resurrected acquisitions that are operational are from 2013 and 2015. I can do this because "what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career".
I like keeping this systems out of the garbage for a few more years.
prosaic-hacker commented on Retiring from the idea of retirement candost.blog/retiring-fro... · Posted by u/mooreds
How do you see our profession evolving until and past your retirement age? Are you not worried that, besides the LLM revolution (and whatever comes next), ageism will cause you to be out of a job at say 60 at the latest?
Ageism is not death. Just a bump in the road.
I am well past 60. For the first 30 odd years I was an individual contributor in both programming and system administration and manager of the same.
When one of the financial crises and ageism ended my management career, I went back to school and switched fields. After a few years I got the chance to teach new computer support professionals in vocational program. I have been doing that for 15 years.
As a side note for ageism "victims" our school is growing and is struggling to find enough competent teachers (Window/Linux Admin, Database, Scripting, Networking, VMs, Cloud, Mobile devices...).
Check out your local vocational programs. You can find permanent or bridge work teaching at this level. Usually industry experience is more important for these jobs than a teaching degree.
prosaic-hacker commented on A new Windows CE x86 compiler in 2024 building.enlyze.com/posts... · Posted by u/ladyanita22
I have been following ReactOS development for years.
I have loaded and run it for various hobby projects.
I am glad that the skills developed in working on ROS are transferable to another area.
I agree with this and would add that the HN crowd is very HTTP browser and API centric. There are hundreds of thousands of applications that will be using TCP and not be updated until the internet is shut off. This is especially true for B2B applications. Just getting them to update cipher protocols is like pulling teeth, each time. There are an amazing number of "business critical" applications that are running ancient libraries, protocols, etc...
TCP and UDP will never go away but browsers and some API libraries may stop using TCP. More likely additional Layer 7 protocols may get added to TCP and UDP and people will use what works best for their application needs.
Do you know of any examples of these "walking wounded" applications? Can we bring some attention to reduce their foot print.