About me
When I started my career in August, 1954 I was fresh out of high school and I knew high school stuff, but nothing that would earn a living. Luckily, my school had endowed me with a decent work ethic anda lot of experience studying. I developed a strong arm toting a load of books to and from school every day. I had also learned to be patient. A lot. And they had taught me to admit my errors and to learn from them. In short, they had unwittingly turned out a future programmer.
Throughout my career I benefited from the advice and help offered freely by experienced fellowtechies. They were not hoarding information fearful of losing their jobs. I never encountered that virus until quite a few years later. And so it was my obligation to pass on to others the useful tidbits we pick
up so often in the world of Information Technology.
I retired in 2002, closing out a career which had been mostly fun, and sometimes grueling effort to penetrate that stone wall we sometimes hit. But the payoff was always the elation we experience when we’ve worked with a team and produced a successful, and sometimes elegant, product. I loved my job.
Some years into retirement I decided to re-visit programming. I have this beautiful machine on my desk and I could use it only through the applications developed by someone else. All these specification tools, and script generators are fine, but I wanted to work with a procedural language once again. I had
used Turbo Pascal back in the DOS PC days. And I did some fun things with it. But now C is the language, I gather. I don’t have time to devote to learning another low level language, let alone to develop a library of .dll’s to make it fly. And so I finally found a COBOL dialect with no strings attached. I worked with IBM COBOL for over 20 years, as well as similar languages such as Natural.
So, as I learn more about this beast I plan to pass on my experience to others by way of documentational and tutorial products. I don’t have to protect my job.