Drag’n'Dump
Posted by TFG on May 11th, 2005
I take that back. What’s so absolutely perfect about this product is that it allows you to generate executable code that you can drop into obscure directories on your customer’s servers. Only you know what they do and only you can fix them. That’s evil genius.
I know a former mainframe systems programmer who worked like that…he’s in sales now, though.
Love this line: idiot proof visual drag and drop fecal-torium
Man, sometimes I really do miss coding…bare-metal assembler was my milieu, back when 16MB of core was a daily reality, and the dream gig was whipping the OS into shape for multiple partitions. I just stop sometimes and dream of what I could have done with a gigabyte of memory. I would have had tape drives dancing the jitterbug…
May 11th, 2005 at 5:05 pm
Bare metal? You call that bare metal? Try a three-way parallel bit-slice processor with 4K of 48-bit wide program memory and 4K of 16-bit wide data memory that it can only access 64 words at a time — with a hardware stack only five levels deep! I had to make it speak three incompatible versions of MIL-STD-1553, concurrently with one another, while interfacing to a modified Unibus in a VAX 11/785!
Back then, the men were men and the sheep were nervous!
May 11th, 2005 at 5:42 pm
OK, OK — you’ve successfully out-old-farted me, Fran. That’s pretty cool, though.
In my defense, I was doing this at 21, self-taught, with no formal training, sneaking in time on the old 370/148 in the basement. I had to bribe one of the SPs for a TSO userid (I was an operator then; tape ape) — a case of Bud was what it took.
We did have PDP-11 that we used for transferring tapes to remote sites. I think at 1200kbps. heh heh