BreakPoint
I'm old
Ben wrote:
* My wife was the system manager for a PDP11 running RSX11-M+ when I ment her. She claims it was our form of computer dating.
I guess you wrote love letters to each other on those rolls of punched tape?
/Y
It is showing two lines for CR NL. What was your question Ben? The Data General paper tape image brought back memories of carrying a box of diagnostic programs on punched tape on the plane, with a "high speed" optical punched tape reader, to my various customer sites back in the late 70's. High speed was relative to the mechanical readers on the ASR33 teletypes that many of the systems had as their primary consoles. I'd plug it into the backplane, and toggle in a "bootloader program" through front panel switches. And you think booting Windows is painful!!! Then there were the times I loaded the diagnostics at my office, powered down, pulled the 15"X15" core memory card (16Kbyte) to carry to test the Data General Nova systems I supported. And for some really strange concepts on machines I worked on look down this link to the Nixdorf ROM core memory. It is from this type of experience, where I have seen the multitude of ideas in computers that have led to the current concepts (which was by no way guaranteed, would be totally different architectures if IBM hadn't decided to build "personal computers") that causes me to laugh when a scifi movie has someone walk up to an alien computer and figure it out. The Nixdorf computers I dealt with had highly modified IBM Selectric typewriters as I/O devices.
@tbob wrote:
However, I know that is not the usual case with older guys. Managment sees them as more costly, less productive due to health down time, and other things. This is the place to vent your frustrations. I've had my share of frustrations with being "let go" because my salary and vacation time were higher than the younger guys. Of course this is discrimination, but it can't be proven in court. One company even went as far as providing a list of people let go along with their ages to show that it wasn't age related. They let go much younger guys to bring the average to the middle. That was a parlor trick designed to skew the results. Shame on them.
It's ofcourse the same situation in Sweden, though i dont really understand it at all! At 50+ there's not really any child care (dad's get 3 months parental leave and also get to use VAB, Care of Child, when the kid gets sick), experience is good (though sometimes too well ingrained (read stiff necked)) and the chance of them leaving for another job in 3 years is alot lower, so it's a good chance you'll keep them all the way to retirement.
As to layoffs, it's Last In First Out principle (by law), though you can get some exceptions which is good. There's workarounds to this, ofc. A Reorganization can move you to a new section, which is later scrapped totally ...
/Y
