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I did a fair amount of work on VAXes a few decades ago. 
One of my most vivid memories is of a project we did that controlled a steel mill with VAXes, PDP-11s, and Modicon PLCs. We used the RTU protocol to talk to the PLCs and it used a CRC alogrithm for the checksum that would bring a 780 to its knees. One day the local repair tech came in to do an upgrade. DEC had implemented a new CRC instruction that was immensely faster and the tech had to do a whole bunch of wire-wrapping on the machine's 2x2 foot CPU circuit board to install the patch. 
We sure have come a long way in the 20+ years since then. Now the contents of at least four of those VAX CPU boards can fit on a single chip of less than a half a square inch that will consume far less power, perform thousands of times better, and its microcode can be updated electronically.
That Modicon 584 PLC was something else too. It had three circuit boards that were each roughly 2x2 feet in size, it used hundreds of AMD bite-slice chips to implement its processors, and it was the size of a small under-desk refrigerator. The afore-mentioned steel mill project utilized a whole bunch of them in redundancy configurations that had three of those refrigerator-sized boxes in a massive enclosure for "one" PLC. Today most PLCs are so reliable that redundant configurations are not needed nearly as often. It was needed there because a failure could result hundreds of tons of solidified steel that would be a huge PITA to deal with.
By cracky, you young whipper snappers sure have it easy these days. 
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Yes we have come a long way. When I first came to Florida I was hired to write the control and monitoring software for a water treatment plant in Ft. Meyers. The first day I showed up for the job I met with my boss and asked him where he wanted me to start and what he wanted done. He dug around his desk littered with food and stuff I wouldn't touch and dug out a photo of a touch screen controls for another water plant and pointed to it. We had a PDP-11 with touch screens from Canada that broke every other day and we had a hell of a time getting them through customs or whatever. But I got to go there when we installed them and travel around with the techs and look at the field hardware...controllers and whatnot. It was interesting!
We had it a tad harder in the day...inprov was common and fly by the seat of your pants a lot of the time with hardware and software that was new and unreliable. You had to know a lot more about a lot more then just to get by.
I could go on but your right these days the younguns have a lot of education but little field experience.
Mike
Theres light at the end of the tunnel. Lord I hope it ain't no train!
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I was working on contract for a USA chemical company Grace. They were replacing old IBM 360s scattered round Europe with PDP-11s acting as RJE stations to two large IBM 370s in France and Germany. One of the advantages of those days is that if somethig needed to be done you had to go there to do it. I worked in a half a dozen countries. From there I developed itchy feet. Amsterdam for two years, UK, France, Germany, Thailand, Sweden, Switzerland. And latterly, 6 years in Florida and 5 in Canada. For many years my life seemed like an assembly..
:startAgain
Shift country
Register @police
Branch :startAgain
Some people have jobs, other have careers. I've just had experiences.
Oh yes, and I've worked in at least 5 countries where the people will tell you it's the best country in the world. Can you guess which?
Paul
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Paul,
Ret Orrick wrote: One of the advantages of those days is that if somethig needed to be done you had to go there to do it.
Yeh the good old days. Most of my traveling was in U.S. but I saw some incredible sights and some awesome experiences. But I lost a wife of 20 yrs in the process, I loved to travel and she didn't like me traveling. If I had to do again I'd still would of traveled!
I'm in Jacksonville, FL. where did you stay while here?
Mike
Theres light at the end of the tunnel. Lord I hope it ain't no train!
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Miami. I sort of lost my family in the process as well. Sacrified on the alter of IT and self-indulgence. Still, I'm running with a back-up now.
Paul
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It gets in your blood and you spend a lot of time at the altar but it can be a lonely road as well. I love em all but I don't understand any of em?? One of the mysteries of life eh?
Miami been there and to the keys..that was fun! You?
Now that I'm single would love to have the opp. to travel again but when I got divorced some 12 rs. ago I got out of computing as a career and am finding that getting back in after all these yrs. is a bitch. I'm trying to catch up on the tech. I've missed but its just taking time.
Mike
Theres light at the end of the tunnel. Lord I hope it ain't no train!
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Mike, my heart goes out to you. There was a time when I thought I had the world by the balls. Loved designing, loved coding, loved debugging, loved beta installations and the travel involved. Made a serious error and accidently made a whole bunch of money one year and decided to come off the road and try my hand at my other love, restaurants. All was fine, money tight but life was good, then some idiots ran some planes into some very nice buildings and my restaurant business dropped to zero. Now trying to get back into the wonderful world of programming is worse then starting from scratch. Several thousands of dollars of equipment, software and books later I'm still uncomfortable applying for an "experience required" position. I'm more than willing to go in at an "entry level" but there are none to be found in my area. *sigh* Greener grass is sometimes that way because of all the BS strewn about the field I reckon. ... Good luck in your quest! Paul.
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Paul,
Life is a series of decisions the ones we take determine where we go but sometimes its hard or impossible to backtrack if we make a wrong one. I'm finding my age (57) is one of the biggest obsticles but am determined. Its not like we can't do the job. I went for am interview a couple of months ago. Get an order, arrange controls on a form to customers needs and hand it back. They didn't think I could do it...duh a frickin monkey could've done it.
Don't give up and good luck to you also.
Mike
Theres light at the end of the tunnel. Lord I hope it ain't no train!
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Mike, thanks for the good wishes. I really didn't mean to hijack the thread to become a "why old programmers are in pain" topic LOL. I do miss the good old days though. When I started programming we were a group of 4 brash young men who thought they could teach IBM a few things about our industry. Lo and behold we apparently did, IBM licensed our first system for the, then state of the art, System/32. We used some magic assembly routines to make that old beast do things IBM didn't even know it could do. I can't claim any of the credit for the assembler routines but I got pretty damn magical with RPG II (speaking of dead horses). Went on to persue the market with System/34, System/36 and finally the AS/400 before switching gears and moving to the PC and 'C' world. But I digress, in those days we did a little of everything on a project, no particular speciality. If we needed a 'black-box' we wrote a black box, it may have been screen handling (pre-windows), or it may have been data-access, we built the system from scratch. Now I've managed to upgrade my skill set somewhat, at least I understand C# and much of the .NET world, but I'm damned if I can resolve myself to not having active participation in all phases of a project and that's what it seems like the world has come to expect. You're either an Architect, a coder, a UI guy or some such, I've always been involved in developing systems where everybody did a little of all things. Now there is just too damn much to learn to stick with that mind-set! Yeah sometimes I do miss the 10meg drive and 8K of memory and the ability to do magic with them. Nope, I haven't given up, I'm still plugging away and at the ripe old age of 53 by God I will be able to bring something to the table. Thanks again for your wishes, Paul
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Paul,
Yeh I reckon we hogged this thread, and what you said is exactly true.
I find it hard to absorb all I need to know to do what I used to do. You said it right we used to know enough of everything to fix anything...now I know just enough to be dangerous. LOL
I think if we both keep plugging and whine enough womeone will eventually get tired of listening and actually give us a chance.
By the way what type of cooking did you specialize in?
Best of luck
Mike
If you want my email is mikeh32217@yahoo.com gimme a shout
Theres light at the end of the tunnel. Lord I hope it ain't no train!
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Dang! Those same idiots nearly killed my computer business! I had the misfortune of having a large number of aircraft and airline related clients. I lost ALL of them, most to bankruptcy, one to getting all but out of the airline catering business and sticking with fairgrounds, weddings and other such. Of course they no longer needed an interstate computer network for that!
Good luck to you.
beachsidepaul wrote: All was fine, money tight but life was good, then some idiots ran some planes into some very nice buildings and my restaurant business dropped to zero. Now trying to get back into the wonderful world of programming is worse then starting from scratch. Several thousands of dollars of equipment, software and books later I'm still uncomfortable applying for an "experience required" position. I'm more than willing to go in at an "entry level" but there are none to be found in my area. *sigh* Greener grass is sometimes that way because of all the BS strewn about the field I reckon. ... Good luck in your quest! Paul.
Weldon B. Adair, Jr.
Adair Software Corporation
weldon@adairsoftware.com
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I did a lot of assembly back on the 6502, but we never had the luxury of variables in the early assemblers. We had to remember the addresses of various Kernel routines and same for variables, and there was absolutely no moving around of things to different locations. It was screwey because on an Apple II, FFD2 was the same kernel routine as FFDE on the Commodore, so nothing translated. When I got my first C compiler I was in heaven - and it sucked big time by todays standards.
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What you needed was a macro pre-processor. I wrote one in Basic, and it just replaced keywords with absolute addresses. This was mainly for s100 bus stuff. Did not do much on the 6502, mainly Z80 and 8080/6. Then I discovered the 68000 series. It had a far better architecture than the 8086 / 80286. What a pity Intel won that race, via the IBM PC.
I promise this is coincidence. I wrote the following http://www.codeproject.com/Feature/HallOfShame.asp?select=1985951&forumid=392254&fr=46&df=100#xx1985951xx[^] before visiting smoothjazzy. You've already helped to answer the final question 
Paul
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What question? I'm not sure that link is correct... it just takes me back to this same thread?
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My question was....
Oh yes, and I've worked in at least 5 countries where the people will tell you it's the best country in the world. Can you guess which?
When I went to your site it said the USA was the best country in the world. So you've got the first of the the five that sprang to mind.
Best wishes from an ex systems engineer
Paul
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I can actually rank the places I'd like to live, tell me how close I am to your list...
1. USA
2. Canada
3. England
4. Japan
5. Germany
(I speak the languages in those places)
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I was ranking the places in terms of the people who live there. In order..
1) The French love France
2) The Americans love the USA
3) The Swiss love Switzerland
4) The Canadians love Canada
5) Various Brits like parts of Britland
6) Jointly, Anzacers, Scandanavians and some other Euros love their bits
My personal list is somewhat different. I've been to about 60 countries, but only worked in 12 or so. You have to live and work somewhere to get a 'feel' for it.
However, in terms of enjoyment it was hard to beat London as a student and Amsterdam in your twenties. And that was the last time I was coding seriously in IBM assembler. (Vaguely steering the message towards the title)
Paul
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 @ Britland
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I still have fond memories of SAP table and field names I used in ABAP/4. Table 'names' were normally 4 letters, and field names 5, but the table 'names' were formed according to heuristic, which we quickly learnt. Unless you are going to spell out all names, then the shorter, standard way of shortening them makes. Example, MARA was the highest level material master table in Inventory, then MARB was the next level down, followed by MARC etc. Field names were fun, mixtures of English and German names shortened to normally 5 letters, so a document number in inventory would be MARC-BELNR.
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I remember a Cobol program that had an interesting set of variable names. It wasn't until I read the following line that it all came together...
Perform sex thru night varying position from top to bottom until tired out
There are so few computer languages these days that allow us to combine literature and IT.
Paul
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Whenever I have trouble sleeping at night I start reading a COBOL text book. Usually does the trick in about 5 sentences. Would that be a "feature" of the language or the textbook?
Phil
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superb!
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COBOL was my first pro language, and I used to take great joy in writing code in "English" (the 88 lines were the thing; they were more-or-less equivalent to enumerations, but they msde it possible to write code in linguistically-parseable sentences).
And it's not a dead language; my COBOL '99 and ME are as popular as ever.
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Recently in a CodeReview I found that a developer was using two variables in Web.Config like ConnectNetwork1, ConnectNetwork. In the code he was using one variable to Chat and Other variable to transfer files, which was giving a bug.
When I pointed out, now he has copy pasted the same value in both the keys, while the expected result was to maintain a single key and correct code accordingly.
See how some people think differently.
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Did you say 'think' ?
Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++
Metal Musings - Rex and my new metal blog
"I am working on a project that will convert a FORTRAN code to corresponding C++ code.I am not aware of FORTRAN syntax" ( spotted in the C++/CLI forum )
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