Page 92 - The Milestone Posting Thread

500!

So do I get a reward or something? Possibly a tax refund? Hmm, maybe a cookie? A taco? Bah...well it only took me about 7 years to get this...Oh...and just started folding.

I spend way too much time in these forums.

Not really a DS milestone but ...

Today I have been 'in the job' for 30 years. God, that's depressing! Back in Aug '78 I started working for Her Majesty's Government and just over 4 years later I was still there but had progressed to IT (using an ICL 1904 running George 3).
Still in IT but thanks to HMG now been 'owned' by EDS and later Fujitsu as part of 'contracting out' IT to "make it cheaper" (tm). Yesterday I was handed a letter and a pen as thanks for work on a project. That was from ANOTHER company (Cap Gemini, with whom Fujitsu is in 'alliance' with in the contract) as part of their internal 'well done' processes but the project manager thought me (and 2 colleagues) deserved it and his management agreed.

Anyway, been a long old road, from an old ICL (it used 6 bit bytes) using COBOL to an IBM 3081 using MVS, and various IBM upgrades, dabbling with IBM PC XTs en route (DOS 2.1, 10MB hard disks, green screen CRTs, memory made up to 640KB by an AST SixPak expansion card adding an extra 384KB, dual 5 1/4" floppies) using Multimate (I still have fond memories of using it!), dBase II, Lotus 1-2-3 v 1a, and (back on mainframes) CICS, IDMS - both programming and systems programming/support. Finally ending up with HP servers, followed by Sparc-based beasties.

Nah, the 1904 used 24 bit words (4 bytes worth). What was 'interesting' about this is that being a 6 bit byte meant it had only 64 characters in it's character set (I think it was anyway) and to store binary numerics (defined in COBOL as PIC S9(6) COMP SYNC RIGHT) it used all characters, which meant that it was possible to have valid numbers as proper 4 letter words. It also meant (as I found out in one of my first ever programing tasks) that if you had a subscript go out of range of the array (not much internal error checking generated by the compiler!) the CBOL was more than happy to compare dates to bits of names without causing an error.
Also, unlike a lot of character sets 0 WAS 0. Not F0 (EBCIDIC), nor whatever in ASCII. Binary/Hex 0 was numeric 0 and character "0" both.

I've just completed my masters degree in Computer Applications (MCA) with First class from University of Mumbai.

Ryan James Coehoorn, born 8/8/8 weighing 8lbs 8oz and 22in long at 3:41am.

For the DevShed posting milestone purists, this is also about a week from my 5th year at DevShed, and I'm closing in very rapidly on my 4000th post.


[edit] Lol: with the rep from this post I can now honestly say that "I am the very model of a modern major general." Mouse over the blocks next to my post count to see what I mean.

This will be my 1,000th post. Not that impressive compared to you fellas with 10,000+, but hey, these are mine, and I'm proud of them

Did dev-shed help you get through the course then?


Congrad on completing your course


Woo 60th post, this is a milestone to me!

Stopping by for some cheap rep since it's my birthday today, I'm 22.

Last year I got super drunk and lost my birthday money at a casino. Plans to do the same this year.

Hmm.. well I believe DS is like a family to me where we help others and get helped in return by others. So I just shared my joy with my family



Regards