Posts by Vometia Munro 171 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Mar 2016
The name "Alsatian" still makes me shudder slightly: separate breed inasmuch as many of those seemingly ubiquitous dogs in the area where I grew up were encouraged to be aggressive and were notoriously temperamental as a result. AFAIK it's nothing innate about the German Shepherd, just that... well, a lot of people got them as hard-man status symbols and the rest got them to protect their homes from the former group.
I was born a few years earlier and for me, "baby boom" has a strong association with 1950s America's glory days; though I'm afraid I can't recall specific examples of why I still have that lasting impression.
I remember playing in bomb sites in the north east as late as ~1980ish: the large crater next to my cousins' house is where their neighbours used to be. Looking on Google Maps' satellite view it's still possible to see where the bombs dropped because of the different-coloured roofs of the new-builds that have popped up in what had been left as empty spaces for decades amongst the neat rows of Victorian and Edwardian terraces.
Yeah; I've seen historians remark how the technical changes in WW1 were more profound than WW2. It surprised me at the time because I was thinking "but WW2 saw the beginnings of computers, radar, nuclear weapons, jets, rockets..." but the progression from what started in 1914 as basically Napoleonic-era warfare to modern, mechanised warfare over the course of just four years was a much bigger eye-opener.
I'm really sad about Philips. It was my first proper job when I started out 30 years ago and I was just seeing the tail end of its "golden age" when it was a really innovative company and a nice employer too. But this was now the '90s, the age of VARs and "I expect everyone to be a salesman" as our new CEO announced. The demise of Philips Telecommunications and Data Systems (or Business Systems, or Information Systems, or whatever-it-was-called-this-week by that point) was very rapid but it seems that the new approach to big fat profits i.e. flogging anything that made money and rationalising expenses by firing staff at random was just the way of things from now on.
Ugh, that was a strange era in... well, whatever tf it was.
I remember hearing some of that stuff. It started out kinda sorta like there might be something: it didn't require too much suspension of disbelief to hear "turn me on, dead man" in The Beatles' Revolution № 9, which tbf probably made more sense being played backwards than it did forwards anyway.
But as it went on, it progressed through "actually, the disbelief is now tired of levitating" to the contrived, the downright silly and the actually so-bizarre-it's-slightly-disturbing, as in worse than the thing they were supposedly complaining about.
I don't even recall the particular song that caused my wtf moment, something pretty innocuous by the Eagles or ELO or someone, but this increasingly insane ranting US preacher type played some except from it that went kinda:
"mmmphmmgrpMM mmnnanngmFFM"
as they do. And our ranty Archevangelist of the Batshit Insane said, "didja hear that? He said he wants to put Our Lawwwd Jeebus... inna paaht!" and I'm just left thinking, seriously daddio, the only pot around here is what you should be smoking to calm down a bit.
He had a lot of fans, though. I don't know if they were True Believers™ or just there for the entertainment value. Sadly we'd parted company by the time I'd been introduced to Beastie. That would've had lots of potential to be quite interesting.
Well, there was the M88K, which, er... wasn't the same thing at all really, was it? It was a nice speed upgrade on the VME-based systems I was using at the time, but I liked the CISCy elegance of the M68K. I guess I felt the same about the Vax vs. Alpha/AXP/whatever-it-was-called-that-week: there's no denying the Alpha was a good chip (well, other than DEC's marketing, who may as well have just said "this is rubbish, don't buy it" for all the good they did) but I would've preferred something more, well, Vaxy.
At various places I've worked the cleaners often got the blame, which was terribly sad because a more honest and conscientious bunch you wouldn't find. If valuables were left lying around they were tidied up and discreetly put out of obvious sight of potentially less-honest passers-by; the time I found one of them had been regularly using my desk phone out of hours I checked with the telecomms guy who went through the logs and said, well, yes, she has been making international calls but using some sort of pre-pay call-and-forward card so the cost to the company was zero.
The various times stuff has gone missing has turned out to be either a particular kleptomaniac employee who'd nick anything that wasn't bolted down (the "I'll take this to the bank at lunchtime" US currency I'd left on my desk I can understand, the turntable out of the tea-room microwave left me scratching my head) or some chancer who'd walked in off the street and evaded the security guards. But whether it was the Saturday job at Sainsbury's in my teens or the high-tech place with lots of pocketable goodies, there's never been a spate of employees just nicking stuff because they can. Which isn't to say it doesn't happen, just (probably) not on such a scale to justify all this daft TSA-style arsing about. Especially not when the cost of alienating their staff is probably much greater.
The same thought occurred to me, but I can see Apple would just blithely respond that they're free to leave at any time, just omitting the bit that they're also choosing to walk out of their job. Duress is also a thing, but whether or not any jurisdiction thinks it should care is another matter.
Interesting that there was more to it than I realised! I shouldn't be too surprised at the 10's involvement as they lent themselves to so much interesting and innovative stuff at the time. A slightly expanded version of "whatever it was I vaguely remember I heard" is that he wanted either a 10 (of his own, presumably) or a System/370, but the latter made me doubt my memory and/or source as I'm not sure the timeline is right, and it seems to be a bit of a radical departure from what I presume to be quite a non-IBMish background (though tbf CP has a not dissimilar ethos to Unix).
I didn't quite "get" the sense of community behind early Unix development until fairly recently: I mean I did in a sense having experienced an element of it when in college and read plenty about it, but it was seeing a documentary-type video from about 1980 of the numerous people both developing and using it for their day-to-day work that really made the whole "bigness" of it stand out to me. Suddenly the PDP-11 wasn't just a 16-bit machine, an older, littler version of the Vax (my college's herd of them was my first experience of "proper" computing) but something that fostered exciting, innovative projects and the same sort of people who variously created and used them.
tbf to the 11, it booted the 10, kept an eye on its health and did the trivial I/O that the 10 was too important to bother with!
I recall hearing the (probably apocryphal) story of Ken Thompson et al wanting a 10 to develop Unix on and being turned down because it was too expensive so he'd have to make do with the spare 11 they had lying around. Probably nonsense, but makes for an interesting "what if?"
"largely driven by the net effect of a change in realized and unrealized gains (losses) on derivative instruments... an increase in losses on debt modification and extinguishment... lower depreciation and amortization... a decrease in foreign currency transaction losses... higher related-party fees and allocations."
I have absolutely no idea what that's supposed to mean in English; something to do with tax, maybe?
Keys are awesome things. Our minis didn't have reset buttons, you needed the key to do that. Which was always left dangling from the lock, right where some daft bumbling halfwit with a hangover could get it to full turn before realising that it's the wrong machine. In fact it's doubly the wrong machine because it's the one the CEO's PA is using. Was. Was using.
Still, not as bad as the time I left the comedy error routine lurking in the root profile to wind up one of our ops, promptly forgot about it, went home and left it to be triggered by the night shift who escalated it at about 2am to... well, it was bad. Worse than the reset incident because at least one of them wasn't deliberately being a halfwit, just the type that comes naturally.
I suspect a similar premise is why many years ago I found myself being used as a courier for tapes of sensitive, er, "things". I couldn't understand why they wanted to waste money on some programmer who hated driving to ferry this stuff around instead of a professional courier but I guess as I was somehow classed as trustworthy, some halfwit with a hangover in her "this really needs a wash" low-end company car was less conspicuous or something. It probably was indeed in a Tesco bag, which I managed to not lose, much to my surprise. Yay.
My experience is that the guys tend to tough it out longer, but it doesn't mean they like it. I'm no psychologist so at best I can speculate about the reasons, only my observation that, sooner or later, given the choice, people tend to move away from that sort of environment.
I dare say that there are still plenty of good places to work but IT does have something of an image problem with bad management and burn-out which hasn't exactly been enhanced by the offshoring frenzy of recent years. People who want a stable and supportive environment in which they can flourish will tend to look elsewhere.
Maybe they would be better served asking that question. IM(admittedly somewhat limited)E the thing with trying to enforce more women in IT woefully misses the point. Always. The reason more women aren't working there is because it's shit: it's just a horrible place to be. During my career I saw the workplace become more and more toxic and the male:female ratio went from almost parity at my first IT gig to practically none by the time I eventually threw in the towel many years later. How about focussing on making the computing department a less fundamentally shitty place to be by not making every day crunch day and not having sociopathic management? It might just be what encourages more women back into the workplace. I just remember the whole experience as "I love my work but I hate my job": it shouldn't be like that, and as a counterpoint, the best, most productive time I had in my career is when our boss flounced off and it took them six months to replace him (they offered me the job; I told them to get lost and soon paid for that mistake when they hired The PHB From Hell).
Surely they must realise that if they're having to try too hard that they need to have a closer look at the fundamental problem. Though "they" is pretty much the entire industry so it's going to be a tough one to change.
Well done to me for both missing out perhaps the most important word (what I jumped off, i.e. the bus; admittedly it may be inferred, but nobody wants to do that much thinking to figure out what some fat halfwit is on about) and then wandering off to do something random during the perplexing 10 minute editing limit. It made sense in my head, anyway, and it may not have even managed that if not for the friendly yellow bin which was otherwise unused thanks to that "the entire world is your dustbin" ethos, but I digress.
I never wondered why there was a nice bouncy yellow plastic bin mounted at about 5' on a convenient lamp-post next to the local bus stop until I impatiently tried to jump off the still-moving and bounced off it. At which point I suddenly appreciated its cheerful yellow bounciness even if I did feel rather shame-faced in front of the seemingly unimpressed (though more likely "yeah, seem it all before") queue and driver.
tbf, the standard "support" offered by various data flingers is to go through a checklist that involves blaming your PC, blaming your AV software, blaming you, blaming your router and when all else fails, blaming your ISP. Even though it's nearly always them. Thinking of certain games publishers and their "must surely be a Spectrum with a wobbly RamPak" approach to servers, but certainly not exclusive to them.
Over 30 years later I still remember it as The Best Keyboard I've Ever Used™, it really was wonderful even if the layout seemed somewhat perplexing (though more or less the same as the original PC) and it wasn't exactly, erm, silent.
But they weren't joking about the weight. I'm not sure how they made them so heavy. The very thick and not-very-bendy cables (a pair of twinax, as the terminals were daisychained, and a just-as-fat keyboard cable) just added to the fun if the thing ever needed to be moved.
Going back to a previous comment, I think the thing with the swivelly screen was most likely a 3178. From memory it looks identical. I was surprised as it isn't twinax but it seems that the computing contraption in question (and I'm definitely not sure what it was: *probably* a System/38) could deal with both types, so the 3174 terminals were those in its more immediate vicinity and the twinax terminals were located in the further reaches. I'd hazard a guess from the appearance and vintage that the 3174's keyboard was a Model F as it isn't enormous enough to be a beam-spring.
I remember having to do something with some code from a well-known vendor that was written in a similar style. It seemed to mostly consist of functions whose purpose was to call other functions. It was very leggy and tedious to follow, and probably hard to debug as it was so difficult to get an at-a-glance sense of what any part of it was doing.
I've learnt not to automatically blame the programmer, though, as this was the same time I started to get some absurd design impositions from above. Some were perhaps poorly explained, others were just fundamentally bad ideas and I quickly stopped cursing the poor chap whose project I had to take over. That's not to suggest I made no gaffes of my own as I have plenty of real horrors to my name but it seems that at least some of the more pervasive examples of unpleasantness are courtesy of a manager who didn't understand coding and/or project management.
I always wondered why 36 bits was so popular back in the day... until I looked it up and the explanation was pretty straightforward: because that's how many bits you need to store 10 decimal digits, which was decreed in order for them to compete with mechanical adding machines.
Apparently, anyway. There may be other explanations and I couldn't say which would be the most likely! Just that I have a soft spot for 36 bit machines which seem quite interesting and exotic compared to today's near uniformity.
I recall reading some study that had been done into this perhaps 30 years ago that concluded the most comfortable colour combination was actually yellow on blue
I wonder if that study was around the same time as the Amstrad CPC? The description of yellow-on-blue immediately reminded me of the presentation of Locomotive Basic using the CPC's chunky font and that colour scheme. Looked pretty space-age compared to my Dragon's rather Brutalist ALLCAPS font in washed-out greeny-black on washed-out green.
I'm pretty sure this was the beam-spring variety as it was very tactile, but ISTR there were a couple (or more) different types in the vicinity, so they may have varied. The one I'm thinking of looked a bit like a VT100 with a VIC-20 for a keyboard but both on steroids and made of cast iron. The other type I thought looked more space-age with a swivelly screen on a plinth and a less stocky keyboard: that might've been the non-beam-spring one, but I honestly don't remember.
What I certainly remember was the weight. D: I was asked to move one. Even over a short distance with someone else carrying the other end it nearly killed me. As much as I was a scrawny teenager I wasn't *that* weedy but those things were seriously very, very heavy indeed.
I think amber became popular with terminals for the same reason the green lighting on car dashboards was replaced with amber in that it was less tiring to look at. Or something like that, anyway.
I have a VT320 in the garage and without checking I *think* it's green on black, but amber seemed to be the more common option, with B&W coming a distant third, albeit just based on my own experiences. Most of the VT220 clones were green, though.
My personal choice for coding (and email and... etc) is still green-on-black. I find I'm more fussy about the way the font looks than the exact colour scheme, though. But evidently not fussy enough to remember offhand what's my current preference.
The beam-spring keyboards on the IBM terminals (my experience was some sort of twinax thing... 5250 rings a bell) had a clunker that did a nice emulation of the golfball. I think it was just a solenoid, but enough to make the desk vibrate with every keypress.
I suppose I tend to view Pascal as the Latin of programming languages in that it generates a certain amount of debate vis-a-vis its usefulness IRL (I mean as specified rather than as implemented) vs. its usefulness in teaching appropriate methodologies and habits.
I never got into it nor Modula 2, both of which were taught when I was at college in the '80s, but I did find myself gravitating towards Ada and quite liked it. Unfortunately, that was undermined by requiring a Vax running the enormous MAPSE subsystem, as well as me being the wayward creature that I was, I decided that C looked like something that was much more likely to do my head in and was therefore The Language For Me™. And so it was. It worked out in the end but I wonder how things might've panned out had I (and everyone else) stuck with Ada.
Some of the O-level marking was surprising. My English lit paper was returned ungraded, which I thought only ever happened if you spelt your own name wrong or didn't turn up or something. Don't get me wrong, I was crap at English lit, but I did (and still do) remember the stuff we had to study reasonably well.
What was perhaps more surprising was getting a grade B for English language. I certainly wouldn't have awarded myself that.
I grew up with MS Basic, which made me a bit of a laughing stock amongst people with better computers: considering BBC Basic and Locomotive Basic were approximate contemporaries.
Then I went to college and saw DEC Basic: although it's not something I used (I was trying to learn C at the time, and as much as it's just what I use now, it was traumatic) it seemed instantly and oddly familiar, more than just being another Basic dialect. I have no idea if there was any connection, though I notice that the released source archive has TOPS-10 style 6.3 filename conventions.
I did very little assembly programming; in fact just some M68K on some programmable controller box thingy at college and that was it. Prior to that I was jealous of BBC Basic and its fancy-pants inline assembly and after that I was vaguely curious about Vax Macro and the System/3x0 assembler that the old beards at work used, but that's about it.
I only discovered the x86's weirdness (nomenclature because it was the 80286 by this time) as I was press-ganged into writing an email retrieval client for our salesentities' luggables. It was awful. I mean my code was awful: I've made many indiscretions in my time but I'd never programmed a PC before and the remit was vague, so I should've refused and said I'd rather eat my own shoes than get involved with it, but I was young and not sufficiently well-versed in being stroppy when it mattered. So yeah, someone else's remit was "we've been told we need to do this, all we need to do is find someone naïve or daft enough to blame. Preferably both." And there I was. In hindsight, though there's not a shortage of challengers, I'm fairly confident it's the worst code I've ever written.
Obviously going back to having only 64K to play with was a bit of a culture shock: I mean I grew up in the 8-bit world but that was then and I never had to do anything especially challenging with it. I know I could've designed it to use some sort of HDD-based indexing malarky but when you have a "by the end of the week, how hard can it be?" requirement etc.
So I looked into how to work around it. I was also very interested in operating systems design at the time and absorbed all sorts of stuff about virtual memory systems and so on, inasmuch as a laysloth's knowledge can suddenly be expanded, anyway.
With that as my context, I read about the 80286's memory addressing.
Argh.
Ugh, now I have memories of the 6847. Those memories may be nearly 40 years old but remembering the slightly muddier green or orange in place of black and all that aliasing still gives me a headache. And white that was definitely not the "bluey whiteness" that Bold advertised but some sort of mush they had to describe as "buff".
And also the regional spellings. If the BBC Micro could find room for both COLOUR and COLOR... but all things considered, I think that's the least of our problems.
The part of me that was occasionally required to wrestle with MVS (yeah I know, I have no grounds for complaint due to being the then new girl who knew Unix and was therefore highly suspect) thinks other people should share the joy and maybe CSS would be much more functional if it shared JCL's syntax. I suppose JCL was at least its own sort of consistent.
And then there was the random nerd who was blinded by an interest in computing so ended up with a Dragon and spent her subsequently disaffected youth bemoaning the lack of decent sound of graphics, and that none of those interesting computing things could be done using cassette tape anyway.
Admittedly it's a really subjective issue so me saying I'm a fan of neither MX Blues nor Browns isn't at all relevant, but speaking as someone who's been a long-time fangirl of the clattery Model M (the clatter in question being the reason for looking for alternatives... not so much for the sake of cow-orkers but waking up my other half during my random hours gaming sessions) I was surprised to find myself quite at home with an MX Red based keyboard. It's a Vortex, so on the plus side it's small and very solidly made; on the minus, the keycaps are a notoriously tight fit and I managed to yank the stem out with one of them. Fortunately brute force saved the day but I'd recommend a bit more care and attention than I managed!
"IMHO; a "hero" developer is not the "lone wolf" or "rockstar" type."
Absolutely. I'm glad to have not worked with many "rockstar" programmers (by which I mean the attitude: I've worked with a lot of really awesome IT people) but those I did encounter potentially did more harm than good. Memories of the "I'm too important to talk to you" quickly followed by "why did you do that without checking with me?!" Er, because I needed to do my job some time this week and you were too busy being a rockstar.
"When one of them came to me with a question I analysed the information needed to answer it and if they had that information. If so I would try and guide them into joining those together to arrive at the answer themselves."
I really wish I'd had more tutors like this. Far too many took the approach "I've already explained how it works, just do it" even though I would be trying to explain to them that I lacked sufficient understanding of how and why "it" is supposed to work and was therefore unable to proceed. I don't know if they just impatiently assumed I was trying to get the answer out of them or if they themselves didn't understand the hows and whys.
Fortunately for me, I encountered some wonderful people who were very patient and clearly found genuine enjoyment in passing on their knowledge.
I think a lot of the problem lies not with the programmer (though I'm not denying there's a lot of chancers out there... some knowingly, some not) but with the environment. I mean that particular landscape that features a lot of silhouetted pointy hair.
Casting my mind back to the early '90s, there was a serious problem where training courses were used by managers who wanted to keep their headcount up without having the amount of work to justify it so it gave idle hands something to do. Of course if they were better at managing then they might realise that maybe if they shared the training with the staff who were actually on chargeable account codes they may end up with more staff on chargeable account codes and fewer staff at the extremes of being either burnt out or bored shitless. But that's not how they think.
The culmination of this was the horror called Rapid Application Development, which meant dragging some unwary, unwitting and unwilling programmer into an ill-defined project involving systems they'd absolutely no experience of, knew nothing about, often never heard of and certainly weren't going to receive any training for. The specification would be verbal, imprecise and would change every time it was discussed typically in that ubiquitous meeting place better known as the corridor, and requests for clarification typically resulted in being signposted to somebody else who predictably knew nothing about it and/or was so pissed off with the whole thing that they didn't want to discuss it either way.
Oh, and of course there was absolutely no sort of planning, design nor version control of any sort. Better project managers liked version control for the usual reasons but it seemed to be viewed as an obstacle to the rapidity of RAD.
Even as a fairly green programmer who ended up having to learn a lot of stuff the hard way I realised this absolutely stank to high heaven. To this day I feel pretty awkward about anybody encountering any of the stuff I wrote back then, whether or not it has my name on it. Though to be honest, prior to RAD there were my own inept attempts to find my feet in a team of pretty much one, so they were... well, hopefully not as bad, but still quite random. I'm also reminded of the poor chap who worked on one such project before I did: how I swore about him at the beginning of my tenure, but after not very much time spent working in that environment I quickly realised he'd made the best of a bad job and subsequently and sensibly made his excuses and left.
The ethos was pretty much "make it work any way you can. I don't care how, just do it quickly", the obvious undertone being "make it look like it works, I'm expecting a botch job that's good enough to get a sale". Not nice. I wonder if whoever was intended to be in receipt of this wondrousness knew what was the deal; or likewise if they even cared. Which seemed to be the problem: a lot of bonuses and promotions for both producer and customer were riding on being seen to have something delivered and nobody really gave a toss about whether it worked or would even be used. Nobody who was making decisions, that is: the people at the ugly end tended to grumble until sooner or later it was time to call it quits.
Oh yeah, the original PET's "electronic till" keyboard was not awesome. Ours were more conventional, somewhat similar to the VIC-20/C64 though with different symbols and profile compared to what I recall of their smaller siblings.
I think most BBC Micros used the Futaba keys. They're the ones I prefer, anyway; nice linear clacky action. Actually I preferred the Electron's keys (same as the Master IIRC) but they apparently have some issues with longevity. That said, my Electron died before its keyboard did. I recall there was a great deal of snobbery about keyboard types back in the day with the Dragon's being lambasted in comparison, but having tried out both more recently I honestly can't tell much difference at all between the BBC's Futabas and the Dragon's Hi-Teks. The BBC had a nicer key profile (which nobody mentioned; and is a very subjective matter anyway, both having good quality keys especially compared to most of today's offerings) and a more comprehensive layout, which again (almost) nobody mentioned, curiously...
I find that the contemporary Cherry MX Red switches have a not entirely dissimilar feel and sound but I prefer them with "retro" key-caps: the old-style spherical (i.e. bowl-shaped) keys are nicer IMHO than the cylindrical profile which has been pretty much the standard since the IBM PC happened. I'm slightly loath to make glowing comments about Cherry MX keys which is entirely based on my hatred of their tactile switches, which seems a bit unfair and probably slightly silly.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
