I've been involved with software development for over 35 years, beginning by writing manufacturing software on an HP computer and adding to it experience with mainframes, PCs, Macs, and tablets. I watched with interest the discussions between the big 3 Bs - Brad, Bertrand, and Bjorn as Object Oriented programming for the masses was born. Been there when the NeXT was introduced, wrote my masters dissertation using a Mac II and did my doctoral work on a PC. I was one of the last classes at Drexel that had to be able to use a slide rule and watched with fascination as students entering Drexel two years after I graduated had to buy a Mac. I work with Big Data using statistical machine learning methods and look forward to mining past experience to enrich the lives of the children of the world.
Last year, a single statement, hidden deep in a science commentary, marked the changing of the work of High Performance Computing. The author mentioned that with the availability of multi-core CPUs and low cost GPUs, it was possible to have hardware sitting idle because programs could not take advantage of the massive parallelism of affordable hardware. For me, this marks the beginning of an era where true software engineering will be needed to harness all this power in new and innovative algorithms - and its a place that has to potential to take all kinds of knowledge advancement to new heights.
Here are a few questions to see if we've come through some of the same experiences ...
You might be a classics programmer if:
You know why core is called core ...
You know Chicago as a band and The Godfather as a movie ...
You used to carry around the bootstrap codes for a Honeywell 316 in
your wallet.
Your first high level program, written in BASIC, is stored on a paper
tape (and you use that tape for tree trimming).
You're over 24 Moore's Years of age.
You were around before 'Classic Coke' cleaned up the worse marketing fiasco ever.
You and your team could empty a well stocked Coke machine of said Coke in 48 hours.
You were flamed for advertising a for-profit business on usenet.
You think VMS might have been one of the best OS's ever invented.
You know why the ++,-- operators work the way they do in 'C'
