Computing

 My computing life began on the NOS and NOS/VE operating systems, which ran on Cyber 170 and 180 series mainframes from Control Data Corporation. This was long enough ago that the world described in Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal was still current.

the best that 1988 had to offer
(This picture was taken in 1988. Technology isn't the only thing that's changed a bit since then. :-)

...and yes, I've programmed in Pascal. And FORTRAN*. And BASIC. And COMPASS, LISP, Cybil, CCL, COBOL, SNOBOL, APL, C, C++, Java, sh, csh, Perl and Python. Among others. Not necessarily in that order. :-)

After NOS I moved on to various proprietary Unix versions on systems from MIPS, Sun and DEC Compaq HP, and then to more than a few Linux distributions (including but not limited to Slackware, Mandrake, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch, Debian, Mint and Manjaro).

I've spent most of my career as a systems programmer and system administrator, manager of system administrators. I've also worked on site reliability in a large IT department, and taught computer science courses at the bachelor's and first-year master's level.

...but except in extraordinary circumstances, I don't do any of the above early in the morning. :-)

 

* I've never actually used the COME FROM statement, but I did once teach it in an April 1st lecture in a beginning programming course.

[ SMW, April 2019 ]