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The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

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Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#211

Post by cptnbob »

cnvogel wrote: post #202
cptnbob wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of our clients still has a DOS box connected to a 14.4k modem that we have to drag EDI interchanges off. You wouldn't believe how much it cost to get a modem and POTS line installed in our DC so we could talk to it. There's a windows service written in .net that talks to it via a serial port and POSTs it to a REST endpoint.

Of course you could put a small internet connected embedded box to your clients place... (maybe even a commercial terminal server, if you trust the security of it) and directly emulate the whole modem+POTS line.

They paid for our modem setup so meh ;-)

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#212

Post by pavel_lishin »

artmageddon wrote: post #113
logfromblammo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add "Crystal Reports" and "MUMPS" to the "do not put on resume" list. I never even actually worked with Crystal Reports. A long time ago, I made a bunch of similar resumes that each included one thing extra on them, because I was curious about what I could be learning to get better response rates. The Crystal Reports variant produced a deluge of the worst-sounding jobs touted by the most clueless recruiters. And that…

It seems like everyone wants resumes in Word format. The one time I tried to send a PDF the recruiter nearly treated it like it was some unknown format and asked me to resend as Word.

I assume it's so they can modify it and re-send it out to other companies.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#213

Post by wthigo »

lsc wrote: post #171
notacoward wrote: post #52

How ancient this all seems . . . until you realize people are doing the exact same thing by shipping "golden" VM/container images around instead of doing proper package and configuration management.

Yes. The DevOps people seem to be saying that the sysadmin job will go away, to be replaced only by programmers, but they miss what a sysadmin is - The sysadmin job has always been about keeping the systems that actually make money up and running after the developers got bored and moved on to newer and cooler technology. (Ugh. I'm actually pretty insulted by the incompleteness of the tools they write in an attempt to…

Sounds like you're mixing up DevOps and NoOps. DevOps is what happens when dev and ops (sysadmins) work more closely together. NoOps is the (probably misguided) notion that sysadmins aren't needed at all

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#214

Post by kragen »

Laforet wrote: post #183
kragen wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think, but often things fail in unexpected ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_pest is destroying thousands of die-cast zinc-alloy toys from the 1930s to 1950s. Zinc alloys are pretty corrosion-resistant, so this was a surprise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate_film#Decay_a... is destroying a lot of historically important documents in libraries that were laminated in acetate during the 1…

Zinc and zinc alloys are also known to produce whiskers slowly (or rapidly if subjected to temperature/stress cycles) which can short circuits over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_%28metallurgy%29 This is especially a problem in RoHS compliant appliances as the common additives, i.e. lead, used to supress whisker formation in solder cannot be used.

Yes, although it's tin whiskers rather than the zinc whiskers that come from solder. It might be the same mechanism, but the mechanism isn't well understood yet. Which is kind of funny, given that we've been smelting tin since the beginning of the Bronze Age; you'd think we'd understand it by now.

I thought about bringing up tin whiskers in my earlier comment, but I decided I was already going over my non-architectural surprising-failure-mode word budget. :)

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#215

Post by SeanLuke »

csixty4 wrote: post #179
SeanLuke wrote: post #69

Mine. Pick Basic, with only an ed-like line editor, in all caps, on Pick OS running inside an emulator called VMark UniVerse on HP/UX. I lasted a year.

Glad you got out of it so quickly. I spent five years in Pick at the turn of the century and it set my career back quite a bit. Just out of curiosity, how did you get out and what are you working on these days?

> Just out of curiosity, how did you get out and what are you working on these days?

I quit and went to grad school. I'm now a computer science professor.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#216

Post by kragen »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #180
kragen wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think, but often things fail in unexpected ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_pest is destroying thousands of die-cast zinc-alloy toys from the 1930s to 1950s. Zinc alloys are pretty corrosion-resistant, so this was a surprise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate_film#Decay_a... is destroying a lot of historically important documents in libraries that were laminated in acetate during the 1…

You should look to the Roman Pantheon building https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome

Yes, the Pantheon is a good example of what I was talking about — except that it's built with Roman concrete, which is substantially more weather-resistant than modern concrete, for reasons that are still not well understood. It's probably a matter of using slightly different pozzolans, but the Roman concrete manufacturing process was lost with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. So if you were to try to build a Pantheon today, you'd have a good chance it would fall down in only a century or two.

Lime cement, though, we do still know how to make, and it has the advantage of having a lower TCE, which will reduce thermal-cycling stresses on your wall when combined with other low-TCE materials like granite.

Both lime cement and Portland cement can suffer pretty badly from acid rain, a problem that was only discovered in 1853 (just yesterday, in the lifespan of the aqueducts or the Pantheon), and which I think we're well on our way to solving. It might come back, though, and it's harsher on lime cement than on Portland cement.

This should reinforce my point above about surprising failure modes in things that you think you've "overengineered" to last for the ages.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#217

Post by pavel_lishin »

Joeri wrote: post #143
userbinator wrote: post #78

Aside from the bureaucracy, that actually sounds like a fun job to me, solving obscure problems and working with things almost no one has heard of, instead of churning out and maintaining boring "cookie-cutter" applications. Then again, I do like retrocomputing, reverse-engineering, and the demoscene... I imagined myself in a job interview in 2010, trying to explain how useful my extensive knowledge of Xenix, PL/M bu…

I expect the job of programmer archaeologist will become a proper category sometime in the next 50 years.

Hopefully we'll have the beginnings of a Qeng Ho fleet exploring space and setting up an interstellar network by then.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#218

Post by rietta »

rietta wrote: post #39
ddoscampaign wrote: post #25

Reminds me of a contract gig I passed on to support Microsoft's creaky inheritance of Danger's Hiptop/Sidekick stuck in cheapest maintenance mode. Everyone associated were trying to rotate out and it seemed like morale was less than zero. Also never work for slave-driving shops like Taos (aka Tause Mountain) unless you really need the money because it will crush your soul. (eg master cool techs and be awesomely perso…

That transition was a real mess. We had some games in the T-Mobile Sidekick store and getting paid the royalties by Microsoft was way more difficult than it should have been after the transition. It took months to get added as a vendor and I had to even send them a "final invoice" using the numbers that they had provided. The next collection step was going to be at least small claims court. The Danger team did built…

On a happier note, I still wear my Danger Developer Day t-shirt from 2007. That was my first visit to the Bay Area.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#219

Post by DonHopkins »

hga wrote: post #209
DonHopkins wrote: post #200

Would the author mind sharing that tape dump from an old ITS system please?

See if you can get Devon, plus the people worried about privacy etc., to get their act together.

I remember running across a Turing machine emulator implemented in TECO in Minsky's home directory that I'd REALLY love to get ahold of.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#220

Post by hga »

DonHopkins wrote: post #219
hga wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See if you can get Devon, plus the people worried about privacy etc., to get their act together.

I remember running across a Turing machine emulator implemented in TECO in Minsky's home directory that I'd REALLY love to get ahold of.

Ask and yea shall receive:

  MSG: APL    1     
  DISTRIB:  *BBOARD
  EXPIRES: 03/17/81 23:08:54
  MINSKY@MIT-MC 03/11/81 23:08:54 Re: too-short programs
  APL is compact, I suppose.  So is TECO.  When I wrote the following
  Universal Turing Machine, which works, I actually understood it.
[ I've interpolated the non-printing characters as displayed by (Gnu) EMACS, escape is ^], ^^ is one character, as is \356: ]

  i1Aul qq+^^0:iqm^[29iiq\356y0L1 00L1 11L2 A1L1
  y0L1 0yR2 1AR2 AyR6 yyL3 00L0 1AL3 A1L4 yyL4 0yR5 11L7 A1L4
  yyR5 0yL3 1AR5 A1R5 yyR6 0AL3 1AR6 A1R6 y0R7 0yR6 11R7 A0R2
  ^[j
  jjxblx1lx2lx3lx4lx5lx6lx7hk
  iyyAyyAyy^[32ji110101110000010011011^[ 1uq

  I do not advise attempting to understand this code, which is
  almost as bad as that for the Universal Turing machine.
ADDED: or http://ancell-ent.com/share/minsky-TECO-turing-machine.txt

Please ack receipt of this and/or send me email (in my HN info); for others, note this is ITS TECO, which I was told was by far the most powerful version of it (fortunately, by the time I showed up learning it was no longer really necessary).

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