You know its quite discourteous to just eat and run. I would imagine your interpreter's family was a bit put off, probably won't even get an invite back soon.
Never really been shot at, ducked a set of orders to Thailand in '72, probably should have gone but the thought of an early discharge was compelling though there were Reserve stings attached which proved to be decades long in the end.
Computers have really done a number on me. Been trying to use the beasts since the early 70s. Crossed paths with a number of ancestral types. I pretend to understand acronyms like VM/CMS MVS, MPE, NFS etc. Am now specialized in a mature and declining operating system.
In the 80s all my peers kept saying "Why do you want to stay with VAX/VMS ? Look at Unix..." I had already done Unix by that time and was thoroughly impressed at its masochistic requirements but in my rather dull and unperceptive mind decided to continue on the path less traveled. Now I'm fairly much a fish out of water, Unix is the standard in networking and the OS of choice in most design arenas, though WinNT is starting to encroach, where much of the action in Silicon Valley occurs.
Surprisingly to some, VMS endures, being the first production worthy multi-user multi-tasking OS in the manufacturing arena of semiconductor firms, its demise is largely exaggerated. Justification for abandoning the infrastructural engines that guide the manufacturing of INTC, MOT, NSM, LSI, AMD, ALTR, SERA, XICO, Chartered Semi and many others has never fully developed. Even now, these companies continue to run old applications with scads of local customizations without which they could not produce product much of this on VMS based systems.
The advent of replacing these engines appears years off more years than I concern myself over. So what I do is largely nothing, more precisely I live for risk taking. Am self-employed, contracting with several Silicon Valley denizens promising to bail them out when their core midframe computer goes belly up, and spend my waiting hours performing routine operational maintenance on these things to see that they don't call me in the middle of the night with an over-full system disk, batch job failures, lost communications or the like. Also I plan, and advise them on system growth necessities, and do things like add new cpu cards or memory or disks or network links, occasionally tune, and negotiate maintenance contracts, troubleshoot wiring, etc.
Mundane stuff, a necessity though, and I have virtually no competition, which makes for a nice sort of problem come April 15th. Definitely not leading edge stuff now, though in my prime I did some rather unique things, like chaired the committee that set standards for the first 2000 PC and XTs ever to run at Intel back in the early 80s, those were the Model T days, better left forgotten and involved myself with linking computers to factory floors in Asia. Now I just point and poke like the rest and read status messages on my beeper hoping for the mundane, mentally preparing for the inevitable, and fearing things like hard disk crashes during the last week of the quarter, better go check on some backup logs... |
