19yr old DOGEbag, 1978 VISTA programming@ VA

[Bantamfancier]

13. Sitting here just quietly laughing.

Cut my teeth on CPM. Worked my way thru the intel processors. Marveled at my first hard drive, a whole 10 MB! Shoot, I never put the screws back in the cover on my machine because I knew I would be back in there upgrading and replacing components soon.

Then I got a job on the IBM AS400 platform. Had a wall of reference books, I read every one.
Taught myself RPG, CL, and SQL.
Maintained older System 36 and 38s. Taught myself enough COBOL to be able to improve the existing code on them.

The beautiful thing about the platform was the backward compatibility. The hardware got bigger and faster but it would still run 40 year old code. As long as you had the source, you could recompile the programs so operating system software upgrades were no problem.

A lot of the IBM mini frames were in the financial sector. The logic in the code is as valid now as it was when first released. No need to rewrite it just because python or C# is sexier.

Yeah, I’m retired but if need be, I could be tempted to babysit if the money’s right.