The Old Has Become New

[The_Doc_Man]

To those old and new members who see me and wonder where I get off with the posts I offer, I thought it would be a good idea to reintroduce myself, including a change in status: RETIRED!

The older posts here that would have contained my history are probably long gone. I'm a Ph.D. Chemist (Analytical/Instrumental) with on-line experimentation experience as well as industrial monitoring of pipelines. I have also worked as the programmer for an oil/gas exploration system for the Gulf of Mexico where I had to compute navigational positions to fractions of a meter.

For a time when my father had passed away, I was my mother's care-giver as she descended into the abyss that is Alzheimer's Disease, and it was the need to change my work situation to accommodate her needs that led me to work for the U.S. Navy as a contractor. It was in this latter environment that I started to work with databases including DEC Datatrieve (an early SQL standard from before 1992), ShareBase SQL, ORACLE SQL, and eventually I started using Access for departmental projects to go along with my main job, riding herd on a set of dinosaurs running OpenVMS. (You can Google it, I'll spare you the gory details.)

My last project got so hot and heavy that I learned a LOT more about Office than I had originally intended, and it was from this forum that I was nominated as an Access MVP, which Microsoft acknowledged.

I'm experienced in a lot of ways based on a lot of back-end servers and front-end 3GL and GUI designs. I have a head for math and theory - but I sometimes take a more pragmatic approach. Which I'm SURE drives some of the purists here to total distraction.

Now that I'm retired, this forum will be my lifeline to the world of technology, so I'll be haunting the topics at odd hours of the day.

On a more personal note, I'm from New Orleans. I survived Hurricane Katrina and a few other little gusts of wind. Also some rising water. One thing I've learned is that life is too short to be grumpy all of the time. That's why my city is noted for being a party-hearty type of place.

 

[pbaldy]

Congrats on the status change! I hope to join you before too long, though this year I joined your other club as a grandpa. Glad you're not leaving, as you are a valued member of this forum. I go out of my way to read your posts.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

What a lovely post.



Sent from my SM-G925F using Tapatalk

 

[jdraw]

Good stuff Doc_Man. I am also a member the retired (2007), grandpa(*4) club.

Like you, I worked with DEC equipment ('74-78)--programming PDP 11/05 RJE station in Macro-11; PDP 11/45 RSTS/ RSx11D; then 11/70 - VAX Cobol to reduce datacentre(contracted) costs.
We brought in ADABAS in '77 (first database activity) into the IBM side, then Datamanager/Control Manager/DesignManager as base dictionary and development tools for corporate database. We also had instances of IEW and other CASE products; Predict (SAG dictionary) with our own interface to Datamanager and used by the QA group. Later acquired ERWin for data modelling and Rochade as corporate repository as we moved to Oracle.
I did a lot of local, personal development in dBase3, and then moved to Access 97-2003--2010. Access became a quick solution (ODBC) querying/extracting and ad hoc reporting from Oracle. I also find Access a great utility to manipulate various data for import and use in other projects.

I find the forum a great way to keep up with some of the technology. I also was accepted as MVP in 2012 via the forum. It is also satisfying to assist (or attempt to assist) others who are "up to their armpits" in database activity. It's always refreshing to see varied solutions/approaches to a given issue/opportunity - "more than 1 way to skin a cat".

Welcome to the retiree status and thanks for posting your background.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Ah, the PDP-11. If only Ken Olsen of DEC fame had opened his eyes to the possibilities, we would be talking about DEC-based PCs. The PDP-11 would have been a good base on which to build that foundation. But Ken wasn't receptive and we know what happened to DEC.

 

[Galaxiom]

My introduction to computers was a PDP-11/34 when I was at university. I remember the huge difference it made when terminals came in. Before that it had been one run a day of programs on mark sense cards.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Suddenly I feel Rocky Horror coming on because it's like I'm doing a Time Warp!

My very first part-time job was as a courier between the LSU-New Orleans and LSU-Baton Rouge campuses driving twice a week (about 70 miles) to bring long card boxes with batch jobs for the professors because our old IBM 1620 Mod II was maybe 10 KHz. (Yes, I said that correctly.) So I ran the card boxes up and picked up any prior runs and printouts. An early version of sneaker-net.

 

[kevlray]

In college (first introduction to computers), most of the programs for class were written to run on an IBM 360/50, tied to and IBM 370 on another campus (Most of programing done using high level languages like Fortran, COBOL, PL/1), the fun of typing out punch cards. But there was a computer lab on campus the had a Microdata 1600. Then somewhere in my tenure there we assembled a IMSAI 8080.

 

[jdraw]

My very first intro to anything computer-wise was an old Quicktran terminal ('65-'68). I was working as an after high school technician and helped one of the technologists with his homework, and because he was taking some classes, he got to go on a 1 week course at the university. It got my interest but gave me new perspective on helping. I still think that was the inspiration to go to university.
I later enrolled in night school courses at community college --IBM 1620 with Fortran. University '69 -'72 was IBM 370/155. I can still remember those late nights with punched cards and printouts almost before the card reader finished. University was 360/370 assembler, WATFOR/WATFIV, PL/1 and APL.

kevlray, your punched card story reminded me of a situation in one of the math classes where we were going to invert a matrix (or something). The package suggested was a batch based Fortran special library that had a horrendous appetite for punched cards. My colleague and I thought it would be a good exercise to solve the general problem --with APL. It took us just as long to solve the problem, but we learned some APL, matrix manipulation etc.(and have never used it since) and no punched cards. The general problem could be resolved by passing some parameters to our "function". There never was a "future need", but it was a great exercise. I can still picture others with mounds of punched cards.