David BissetMe as a programmer.
4mc@davidbisset At least they don't have to wait for 3-days for compilation time during the night shift... oh the good ole days
herchenroder@4mc @davidbisset I used to work at JPMC and I had to EMAIL file edits to a different department and they would replace the file and I could test it out the next day. Completely absurd.
@herchenroder @davidbisset I wasn't joking, I learned to program in 1975 as I was the evening shift and overnight operator at Attwood Statistics in the UK. The programmers compiles would sit in 80-column card trays outside the computer room. We could run the compiles when the machine wasn't doing anything. The programmers used to leave home phone numbers if the compile ended > 0
@4mc @davidbisset That's fascinating. Amazing how far we've come in such a relatively short amount of time.
@herchenroder @davidbisset Yes... except it's not really a short amount of time. Next year will mark 50-years. 50-years before I learned to program we didn't have wired telephones :-)
In 1984 I wrote some PC Assembler code which became the basis for a mainframe programmers workbench. We used Micro Focus Cobol on PC's the programmers would submit compiles on the mainframe in batch, they were auto downloaded and syntax checked on the PC before being compiled on the mainframe.
@herchenroder @davidbisset I was working at Chemical Bank in NYC - I helped design the server side of the worlds first home banking system, PRONTO. Hank Kees was a VP at the bank and we used to do all sorts of mad stuff. Thom Henderson who designed the ARC file format was a contractor, we did the port to the IBM mainframe described in this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_(file_format)
It's a tale of programming in the 1980's - ARC became the ZIP file format. Some much time has passed, so many technologies.
@4mc @davidbisset That is so cool. I'm grateful for folks like yourself who paved the way for the rest of us!
@herchenroder @davidbisset I had the pleasure, and it was a pleasure, of working with Hank Kees who won a PC Tech Journal award the first year with some guy called Bill Gates and a guy called Phillipe Kahn who had written a Pascal compiler for MS-DOS.
"Standing on the shoulders of giants!"
@4mc @davidbisset that is so cool!