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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

#231

Post by photosinensis »

bigger_cheese wrote: post #170

My work is pretty bad. We have a box running windows 3.1 hooked up to an instrument on our plant. The answer I got when I asked about it was it has a proprietary ISA DAQ card in it with 'flaky' drivers' that prevents us upgrading it. It's a non critical instrument but is providing 'useful' data I think its some type of microwave radar measurement instrument - very specialised hardware. It's been working well since th…

I worked with RS232 earlier this year, and I hope to return to it in some capacity. Sometimes, the old stuff isn't even all that bad.

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

#232

Post by sedachv »

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.

Don't do it! Shady recruiters ask this so they can edit your resume without telling you. Only send PDFs to recruiters, the shady ones won't bother with those.

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

#233

Post by Neil_in_Chicago »

Ten or fifteen years ago, I spent a few years maintaining a "system" in FoxPro for unix on bastard hardware . . . I once had to maintain a system using "Westi" 1.1, Westighouse's knockoff of CICS . . . The day I completed my first serious project and linked it, I crashed the company because the operating system was named "test", so I'd just overwritten it. About the time I was fired, I figured out that the entire system was bootleg.

IF NO ONE WILL ADMIT EVEN KNOWING WHO BOUGHT THE IDIOTIC PILE OF MISMATCHED PARTS, WALK OUT IMMEDIATELY.

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

#234

Post by cm2187 »

mekael wrote: post #55

Ah legacy enterprise software/hardware, it keeps me employed and insane. Where i currently work we have a system which was originally designed in '69(coding started in 75) running on an ibm iSeries. It's old old tech and most of the system is cludged together so poorly that instead of being able to write patches we just write wrappers around the applications(micro services really) that modify the program as its runni…

I can tell you that trillon dollars banks are also ran on spreadsheets and access database.

What I don't get is that a software designed in the 60s to run on machines of the 70s surely can't be that complex. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just re-implement it? Might not even need to change the logic, just convert to a modern syntax.

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

#235

Post by DonHopkins »

hga wrote: post #220
DonHopkins wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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\35…

OOP ACK! It was a shot in the dark, but I am SO GLAD I asked!!! Thank you Harold!

It looks just like I remember. ;)

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

#236

Post by collyw »

xj9 wrote: post #140
russnewcomer wrote: post #7

I think the most interesting lessons of this story have to do with the following expectations. First, the expectation of support timelines. It seems in tech that support is promised for products far beyond when the vendor should reasonably be expected to support them. Companies make large investments in technology that ultimately aren't long-term enough. Lesson: Any company doing a major project where there is signif…

I agree with you, but most software engineers seem hell-bent on ignoring the discipline that every other kind of engineer is required to learn in order to exercise their craft. I don't mean to say that software engineers are not engineers, but I do think we should put more emphasis on shipping correct programs rather than merely functional ones.

Management is never interested in that.

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

#237

Post by jweather »

q4814 wrote: post #62
russell wrote: post #37

As soon as I saw the title, I thought of the furor when Gingrich and Clinton discovered that the FAA was using vacuum tube computers and radar in the air traffic control system. http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/clinton.htm The foreign (sole) vacuum tube supplier that Clinton mentioned was Russia. Oh, the embarrassment! I knew that there were some delays in rolling out the the replacement system, so I did so…

It's possible that the computers didn't run on tubes but rather the radar systems. The two may have been conflated. I believe I've read that tubes are still quite common in high-power radio transmitters because they're more effective than solid-state components. Still a bad situation, but maybe not as sensational as it appears on the surface.

Radar and satellite systems still use traveling-wave tubes in the RF signal chain. The reference to tubes could also be the radar displays, which were traditionally vector CRTs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling-wave_tube

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

#238

Post by jweather »

twic wrote: post #118
TrevorJj wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in the control tower of an international airport as recently as 4 years ago, and can confirm that at least some of the systems were still built on 1960's technology - the radar scopes were basically pre-CRT technology. On the other hand, for something as fault-intolerant as air traffic control there's a huge amount of value in reliable, well understood systems.

Pre-CRT? You mean like John Logie-Baird type stuff? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_television

Vector tube displays, most likely.

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

#239

Post by xj9 »

collyw wrote: post #236
xj9 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but most software engineers seem hell-bent on ignoring the discipline that every other kind of engineer is required to learn in order to exercise their craft. I don't mean to say that software engineers are not engineers, but I do think we should put more emphasis on shipping correct programs rather than merely functional ones.

Management is never interested in that.

Sad but true

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

#240

Post by StillBored »

cecilpl wrote: post #139
rwallace wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Five characters! Luxury. I learned to program on a system where we only had two. (Not joking: on the Commodore eight bit machines, only the first two characters of variable names were significant.)

Applesoft BASIC (for the Apple ][e) was like this too.

Yes, because both apple and commodore license microsoft basic as the core of their basic implementations.
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