Froedlich

The only true "system programming" I've done was in Microsoft Macro Assembler, a product I grew to hate with a passion.

A non-answer, but tangentially relevant:

I once fiddled with Forth, but never actually accomplished anything with it.

Several OSs are written in Lisp; in some of them the difference between OS and application is a bit vague. At the time none of them were available to me to play with.

I discovered Oberon and fell in love. My first real programming language was Pascal, and Oberon is part of the same family. Oberon consisted of a compiler, operating system, user interface, application software, and tools, all self-hosted on Oberon. There was even an Oberon CPU at one time. But Oberon turned out to be just an academic curiosity, and wasn't available for any hardware I had access to anyway.

On the other hand, the Ultibo OS for the Raspberry Pi is written in FreePascal.

That happened to me six years ago. After a few weeks I quit beating my head against the wall, created an email account elsewhere, and eventually got most correspondents to use the new address. And I quit using Google services for anything else, too.

Every year or so I'll check to see if I can log in, but it just loops around variations of "two-factor authentication", which I had never used, and therefore have no answer to.

Cloudflare challenges seem to be becoming more and more frequent on my general internet use. Yep, "Cloudflare loop" is a thing. No, I'm not going to download and install a different web browser, dump all my cookies, or whatever other nonsensical "solution" they recommend.

I've become to hate Cloudflare with a seething passion.

For me, "wrong" as in "blue glare." It only takes a few minutes for a glare headache to start forming.

Some of it could be because I have defective red/green color vision, but so do about 15% of all males.

"Streaming tape backups." Several different hardware formats, various software interfaces, native OS and commercial.

Backups are important, but only restores count. Thousands of dollars and years down the tape rabbit hole, I eventually realized (major denial factor there) that the number of successful restores was 'zero'.

By that time I could buy an external hard drive and enclosure for about the same price, and it would work perfectly. Particularly if I simply did a recursive copy of the files instead of using some backup software's weird-Harold file format.

Charles Moore, creator of the FORTH programming language, also created a one-hand "puck" keyboard that worked by chording.

Supposedly, he used it to write programs in FORTH while driving to work.

As far as the story goes, he programmed input-only, having no visual or audible way to review what he wrote.

"...and back in the day, we had to chip the edges of zeroes to make ones..."

We've had the "Mechanical Turk" version of AI-generated content for two decades; the pay-by-the-word "content farmers" and the spammy sites that use their output.

The main difference between that and "AI" is that we're getting the "AI" promoted as the search results, as opposed to diluting the usefulness of the links.

I'm re-reading Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" at the moment. It's about Data General and the development of a new minicomputer. I read it at the dawn of my IT career in the 1990s and found much of was still relevant then. (the book was written in 1981) Thirty years later, I'm mostly just nodding as I follow along; yep, yep, yep. "Engineering" is a distant second to corporate politics and office pecking order.

Reading Brian Shul's "Sled Driver" autobiography on the tablet. Shul was an SR-71 pilot, and the book is about 10% Shul and 90% SR-71. It reads fast and it's interesting, with unexpected bits of information.

Just finished David Goggins' "Can't Hurt Me." It's supposed to be a "motivational" autobiography. I can't say I felt motivated. Most of his problems were self-inflicted, and he treated his family and children like dirt.

All of my clients have their own servers, hot spares, and off-site backup.

We had a local election back in 2004, where Candidate A unleashed a spam tsunami at text and voice numbers. Enough that it angered enough people to turn the election to Candidate B. (best as we could tell after the fact)

Candidate B, it eventually came out, was the one who was running a sock puppet "Vote for A!" campaign.

Back in ancient times - the 1980s - one of the DAK-style electronic toys mail-order places sold an interesting box. It worked like this:

1) pick up line

2) play a pre-recorded message (default: "Please enter your extension.")

3) wait for the touch-tone sounds (or rotary clicks, those still being a thing)

4) when the correct three-digit code was entered, your phone would ring.

No code, no ring. Simple. (and no voicemail, either!)

And if "extension 123" got compromised, you could just change it to "456" and let people know.

Call from another jurisdiction, and good luck trying to enforce any laws.

Back in the old days spam call centers were often in the Caribbean for that reason, but now that phone calls are so cheap, they might be anywhere.

Exactly. Which I have tried to explain (unsuccessfully, alas) too many times. We only answer calls from numbers we recognize.

This has caused some interesting issues, though. My wife answered one of the unknown-callers on her cellphone anyway, and it turned out to be from her doctor's office. Who couldn't (or wouldn't) explain why the clerk was using per personal cellphone to call patients, or how they got the number. We still maintain a land line, and only eight individuals have my cellular number, only five have hers. Yet somewhere a dataset was purchased, and both our cellular numbers have propagated throughout the Electronic Medical Records system, often as the only contact number.

In 2007 I put together a bunch of servers running openSUSE 10.2. They run some specialized application software that's version-dependent and is unlikely to ever be upgraded. The working network is not connected to the internet, so there's no reason to upgrade the OS.

They're full KDE installs, and openSUSE 10.2 wasn't a lightweight distribution in its day. But now, even running in VMs, UI and network response are noticeablly snappy, and are sparing of resources by modern standards.

Yeah, that's the usual response when someone doesn't have much data to keep track of, or thinks they can "just google it" to find something again.

I have a "knowledge management" system I put together over the years, based on a subset of HTML. Because if you can't find something, you're just wasting storage space.

If you get assigned to something like that, own it, no matter how useless it is. It's an opportunity to bulk up your resume for free.

Someone I knew was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years after taking his child to the ER. The doc there decided it was "shaken baby syndrome" and called the cops. After that, he was on the guilty-until-proven innocent track. The body was cremated with no second opinion.

He still has three or four years to go. No parole here for "baby killers."

> Having no understanding as to the technicalities involved, the project was given the go ahead by the directors after several meetings with a vendor -- Been there, got the T-shirt. Had the "sysadmin" job title and everything. And then the Board of Directors announced they had bought a complete data backup "solution", and I was to implement it forthwith.

Had anyone bothered to ask me, I could have told them that their "solution", being a Windows-based software package, wouldn't run on their database servers, which ran SCO Unix. Which was quite adequately backed up with tar and cpio, and rotating off-site tape storage.

Later, the desktop support group was surprised by the delivery of a couple of pallets of Compaq laptops and desktops with Windows 3. This was before "internet" was really a thing. The desktop guys set them all up, made sure they could log in to the Novell servers, and went home. However, the main application the clerks used was on the SCO boxes, which were accessed with NCSA Telnet. The Compaq machines had Ethernet ports, but their customized Compaq Windows version didn't have TCP/IP drivers, so the next morning they were frantically putting the old computers back so people could work.

Yet Another Account on Yet Another Service, and most people are already maxed out on what they can handle.

I periodically get someone trying to get me to sign up for the New Hot Thing. If I had time for that, I can find better uses for it elsewhere.

TCL/Tk and Lazarus for programming.

Trinity for a desktop GUI and file manager.

VirtualBox for multiple testing environments.

VNC and SSH for managing remote machines.

VLC for playing videos.

Speedcrunch for calculations. Imagine if your calculator worked like a text editor... it solved problems I didn't even realize I had.

Right now I don't have a preferred text editor, having finally weaned myself off the one I learned back in the mid-1980s, that had to run in an emulator on modern machines. I've been switching between several GUI and text mode editors, but I haven't found anything I like enough to stay with.

A thumbdrive with Puppy Linux, which is my go-to "unhork the gestupfed computer" Swiss-Army-tool. There are other distributions specialized for that task, but Puppy has managed to do the job so far.

A Raspberry Pi with a carefully curated Pi Hole, so I don't have to configure multiple hosts files and web browsers across multiple real and virtual machines. The Web is a miserable experience without adblocking.

[waves hand] That would be me.

Other than a few web forums, I don't use my phone for anything that requires a password. Certainly not for email, banking, or anything that involves personal data, money, or business. A lot of stuff, I don't do on my desktop either.

Anything connected to the internet is insecure. No, it's not as convenient to do things by phone or paper mail, but I value security more than convenience.

I have about 150 accounts, though some of them are logins for vendors I dealt with once, a decade or more ago.

> I guess the next step would be to have usernames, phone numbers and even payment methods (apparently virtual credit cards sometimes work) also be more randomized and more compartmentalized, though something tells me it'd be a pain to do that. --- I do that. It's no trouble. I use various usernames to 'fuzz' tracking. Yes, anyone who really cared could track me by my IP address, but trackers are like whales sieving krill; they get so much, they don't bother to look very hard.

John Barnes wrote a novel called "Kaleidoscope Century" back in 1995.

AIs had been created, some went rogue, and then they were fighting each other for computing resources. Then humans started shutting down computers and fragmenting the network, the AIs wrote new software that would run in human brains. Once someone was running the new software, there wasn't much room left for "human."

Pretty much the worst-case scenario, at least of the ones I've seen so far.

I moved from Turbo Pascal and Delphi to FreePascal and Lazarus. I write business application software; mostly inventory and sales stuff.

Pascal was popularized by Borland, who sold a complete develpment environment that was tiny, fast, well-documented, and dirt cheap. They got rich doing that. Delphi cost more, but it did a lot more... and then they started jacking the price of Delphi into Twilight Zone territory; over a thousand dollars if you wanted the necessary "add-on" bits that you really needed to make it work. That, and other bad business decisions, killed Borland, and put Pascal itself in the shadows, as they'd pretty much dominated that market. Anders Hejlsberg, who had written both Turbo and Delphi, eloped to Microsoft to work on Visual BASIC.

Besides the price, there was Borland's "upgrade" policy. At first, existing Borland product owners could upgrade for a nominal price. The price kept going up, and upgrades started coming faster. New versions were just incompatible enough to be a hassle. Finally, for the piece de resistance, they started running full-page ads begging Microsoft compiler owners to "upgrade" to Borland for less than what they were shafting their own customers for. That's when I, and apparently a whole lot of other programmers, decided to part ways with Borland.

Vernor Vinge wrote a short story about something similar; "The Cookie Monster" from 2003.

I periodically hit pages where I can't tell what a vendor's product does. Or I already know what it does, but it's so full of buzzwords, trademarked terminology, and bafflegab I'm lost. VMWare's web site was a good example of that, last I bothered to look at it.

If a product is promoted as a "solution", that normally indicates it's over-priced, under-featured and not worth looking at further.

There are still a few companies out there so proud of their products they not only don't want to post the price of their products, they want us to pay a consultation fee so they can "craft" a "solution" for us. Uh, no. We're not a Fortune 100 company or a state agency; if you won't tell us at least a ballpark price up front, you're simply wasting our time.

Final fail: companies that only give you a bare outline of what their product does, but fail to tell you important details. You're supposed to leave voicemail for one of their salesmen, who will call you at his convenience to give you the hard sell. No. I'm the guy with the purchase authorization; you dance to my tune.

I usually used Binary Coded Decimal.

> enjoying the sort of expansive freedom that I have, where I could literally walk out my door right now and be thousands of miles from here in a couple of days with nobody saying boo about it... --- I've read several accounts written by Soviet defectors that mentioned that. Some of them huddled in their house or apartment, spooked by the idea they could just go anywhere, anywhen, without getting permission or even notifying anyone. A few of them eventually went back to the USSR, knowing what was in store for them if they returned, rather than stretch their wings.

"We're Number One; why bother to try harder?"

I would suspect GMail is costing Big G more than they're making out of it, and they're trying to gently shove users off the platform, but they've never had any problem simply closing a popular service.