Programmer1971

Revision as of 20:14, 31 January 2014

Revision as of 16:14, 1 March 2017

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As the user name indicates, I started computer programming in 1971, and have worked with computing most of the time since. Before that I started in building electronics projects and kits in 1963 and stayed interested in electronics from then onward. I have to admit to being a jack of all trades, master of none, however after all these years I am fairly familiar with certain groups of work and knowledge. My programming of mainframes in COBOL, FORTRAN and RPG while of little use later did help me to understand programming techniques and structures - and I migrated into the cBasic in the 1980 and some pascal. Later I was happy with older [[dBase]] for DOS and various splits of that - especially [[Clipper_(programming_language)|Clipper]]. While the OOP way of doing things did not seem quite so easy when we migrated to Windows, I did try to stay somewhat familiar with Turbo Pascal for Windows and Delphi, while migrating most of the dbase work to Microsoft Access. I still remember a fun tech support call to Microsoft in the early days of Access 1.1 - when I have converted very complex oil and gas form for the State government to a relational database app in Access. The tech on the phone asked - how many fields do you have on the page? It ashad quite a few and when we told Microsoft, the answer basically was nothey onewere hadnot aware of anyone donedoing that - and if we figured out how to get it working fully to let them know.

Over the years - I have stayed busy with either the hardware side of electronics and computing - or the software side - and often both. My favorite thing to point out is that if you find someone who seems to think they know it all - run! My viewpoint is that it changes far to fast for anyone to know all of even one particular niche of the job focus very long - and those who think they know it all oftenmost likely don't. Murphy's law and the complexity of the work we have make it difficult enough and if you stay at it nearlyover 50 years you will see it can change pretty often in ways we don't expect. I often tell people to think about the [[Star Trek: The Original Series|STAR TREK]] communicators used on the TV show in the mid 1960s and how futuristic they were (had they been real). Think then of the frequency shifting, pocket computers we have for cell phones today - the radio portion of them is far beyond anything we dreamed of in the sixties, and the computer light years past that time too. Camera, video, scanner, banking, maps, satellite pics, GPS - etc all so far beyond gadgets even James Bond had back then, and we get them for free with a 2 year contract, and most folks will toss them when they get a new one and think little about how much technology they have in their hands.

Technology really is a hoot to me - still. ItsIt's the one field of work I can never be bored with and get new fascinations frequently. If a man from 2013today had appeared near to me even in the 1970s and could get a longitude and latitude down to a few feet by looking at something smaller than a pack of cigarettes, then pulled up a Google Maps picture of the area we were in from the air - that would have been amazing. Now if it went for street view and could show me a virtual drive down the street of most streets in america from this same tiny tv set in his hand - that would have been overkill. My smallest TV then weighed maybe 9 pounds and was a bit bigger than a lunchbox.

The Free Encyclopedia that is WIKIPEDIA - that is such a good example of progress and information sharing. That we depend on it frequently is pretty well known. That we can add to it, help it be more complete and to grow is a real gift we should grasp and use. Every one of us has something to help WIKI - whether its being a long winded old-timer talking about these things, adding some corrections or links to help an item be more complete, or just correcting readability and grammar - we all can help this living mass of data become bigger and better.