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[princec]

I'll be retiring just past 2038... just long enough to milk a few quid out of it, like all those old COBOL programmers that made a mint last time it happened in 2000

Cas

[princec]

It should probably be strongly reaffirmed at this point that the reason there wasn't a catastrophic system failure on the eve of 2000 was precisely because we all worked our arses off fixing everything before it broke.

Cas

[Specter]

you are full of it CAS.

 bill gates said it was just fine as it is and you don't need more than 640k of memory.  he's the expert right?  just ask him he'll tell you whatever you need to know!!  FIGJAM

Aaron

[princec]

Disclaimer: I've spent the last 35 years or so making sure stuff works.

Cas

[Specter]

the word cobol came up.   that's a fright from the past.
i never did get into that.  i knew basic like the back of my hand, and hexadecimal direct coding, octal, and the mil used binary coded decimal, and i did fortran too.  then apple had it's own weird basic, with commands like peek, poke, pop, and call functions.
then there's the industial plc stuff..   ladder logics, slick 500,  siemens, and symphony, and ge's mark v,vi and other languages.  at the end of the day, if you don't have a headache, you weren't working !!

believe it or not, i have an old ass, i think it's an mfm hard drive off one of the apollo missions i think, it has a gastly interface and huge ribbon cable on it but it's not flat, it's more like a phone bundle, all saddle hitched etc etc.  i remember the exitement when i got it to spin up and read off it,.... to see programming code... eww 

Aaron

[Richard230]

The only computer course I took was in college. The course tried to teach us how to use Fortran. I had to program the IBM main-frame, which took up a good portion of the lecture hall, using punch cards. My problem was that I could never punch the cards for the program that I was running without making at least one mistake, which caused the program to fail to do whatever it was supposed to do.  By the end of the course, I got tired of punching cards and lost interest in being a computer programmer. 

[Specter]

punch cards, and their half breed cousins, the ones you circle in with a number 2 pencil.
that was how you'd get even with someone, walk by and knock their stack of cards over so they got out of order 

I was lucky i guess you could say that i got in at the ass end of that era and we had tty terminals and teletype type inputs on accordian paper.  there were the phosphor screens too for the high end side but yah everyone had to start out with the punch cards.  we had an old digital pdp 11 system that was tempermental as hell, and even a breeze blowing on it and it'd have fits and you'd hear relays just clashing and clanging all over in it and then have to shut down and reboot, and whatever work you had open... buh bye !!!    you learned real fast to back up often.

aaron

[Curt]

Really? I would put the odds at "almost certainty" within the next 100 years. I'm not sure that people have quite grasped just how catastrophic the environmental disaster is that is currently unfolding around us. I'm almost considering buying huge sacks of dried beans and tins of tomatoes, except that I think there's maybe about 20 years to go before things start to go really shit-shaped and I'll be an old bastard by then and probably ready to die.

<Rolls eyes> There are not going to be any humans left, long before any of these perpetual theoretical environmental disasters happen.

More likely, the human condition and lifespan will continue to improve, as they always have, right up until the Singularity. Western population, mental health and dominance have peaked and will continue to decline, but it won't really matter.