I'd love some material targeted towards people like my aunt (spent the 60s and 70s programming then designing and integrating systems for hospitals, then the 80s managing cattle breeding operations with dBASE) and my father-in-law (PhD mechanical engineer who worked for the German equivalent of ANSI until his retirement in the early 2000s, very comfortable with Windows CMD) to deal with the slick, ever-changing "discoverable" interfaces the kids I babysat for are imposing on us with every app or phone update.
Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills
11–20 of 30 posts
Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills
#12OFUG (Old Folks Unix Group) perhaps?
Greybeards and Greybuns?
Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills
#13OFUG (Old Folks Unix Group) perhaps?
Dinosaurs of UNIX?
Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills
#14I got into the game "kinda late" (first PC ran DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1), and I still cherish and adore the CLI, and can't imagine it ever going away (if it does, a little piece of me will die with it). The look on the faces of a fresh crop of 20-something developers when you pull out a one-liner and/or some regex never gets old, and I still consider myself very unskilled compared to the folks who have lived and breat…
I'm guessing retirement age.
Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills
#15I got into the game "kinda late" (first PC ran DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1), and I still cherish and adore the CLI, and can't imagine it ever going away (if it does, a little piece of me will die with it). The look on the faces of a fresh crop of 20-something developers when you pull out a one-liner and/or some regex never gets old, and I still consider myself very unskilled compared to the folks who have lived and breat…
"The look on the faces of a fresh crop of 20-something developers"... My equivalent is doing a data reformat or analysis on a big dataset that someone has been struggling with in (please excuse my language) Excel. The data owner's eyes widen and they say something like "Wow! That's so fast and simple! How come I never heard of this stuff?"
Good question about "Old". In Australia there's at least one well-defined cut-off: 75 years. If you're 75 or older: - when you die your death isn't classed as "premature", and demographers don't assign you any "potential years of life lost" - you're no longer invited to have screening for bowel, breast or cervical cancer screening (invites go to 50-74 year-olds)
Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills
#16Can we younger people join the fun and learn about retro techniques properly?
(well I'm over 40 but I joined tech for only 5 years so kinda young)
Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills
#17Great idea! Also to be more inclusive and equitable there should be a parallel group: OBFUS, Old Black Folks with Unix Skills.
Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills
#18Great idea! Also to be more inclusive and equitable there should be a parallel group: OBFUS, Old Black Folks with Unix Skills.
Is this satire? Does literally everything have to be segregated by race now? What is not "inclusive" or "equitable" about Old Farts With Unix Skills?
Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills
#19Great idea! Also to be more inclusive and equitable there should be a parallel group: OBFUS, Old Black Folks with Unix Skills.
Is this satire? Does literally everything have to be segregated by race now? What is not "inclusive" or "equitable" about Old Farts With Unix Skills?
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Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills
#20How about people who remember RSTS/E or VM/CMS? (Guess we all switched to POSIX or Windows since those are the only games in town)
VM/CMS still exists in some form in the IBM world, I think, but it would be hard to find a device that still runs RSTS/E. I haven't used Windows since 2007 and don't miss it.
Yeah, IBM mainframes still use VM and run CMS and other OS inside the VM. IBM was slow to the timesharing party, their plan to make "one OS" for the 360 failed utterly, and some academics got the idea for VM that became the real OS strategy for the 370 and future machines, I saw a Youtube
video where people demo VM in 1975
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo2q7d5dJgg
personally I remember using it on an IBM 3090 at the New Hampshire Insurance company in the late 1980s when I was in the computer explorers.
Sometime I think about setting up a PDP-11 emulator and running RSTS/E in it for old times sake.
I also really enjoyed running OS/9 on a TRS-80 color computer, which was a really cheap machine with serious limitations (32 character display) but I had mine (I think a Coco 3 at that point) hooked up to a TRS-80 Model 100 and a DEC printing terminal so I had a Unix-like experience on three consoles, my impression was that OS/9 was a better OS than anything mainstream on IBM PC hardware at the time.