Yeah, not so much. I was a Jr. in HS. He was a Senior, and he was the student SysOp. A Cherished title. But having a Jr. show him up was bit over the top for him. The fact that I did that and he had ZERO idea how to fix it...

He eventually stepped down and handed me the mantle 1/2 way through my Jr year. Making me the first Jr. that had the SysOp title!

The teacher was okay with it, because I flew through everything. I Finished the 16 Week Cobol course in 1 month. And then the 16 Week Fortran course in 7 days! (Which completed my senior year classes in my junior year). So it became independent study.

We learned so much.
The teach, Tim Spanke, would let us into the School in the AM, and call the alarm company. He would leave and we would spend all saturday cranking on code, etc. And then we would call him at home, he would call the alarm company and say he ws leaving.

you cannot fathom how much we learned. After 2yrs of that intensity. My first job, I was teaching the much older developer how to optimize their systems. Heck, I even showed them how to write "CODE" onto track 0 of tape, to make the Tape BOOTABLE. Something they thought was impossible.

The value of having a teacher see something in you, and encourage you. Priceless. May he rest in peace.

Brilliant. If I'd been Mark, I'd have saluted you and offered to buy lunch. If I'm a moron and someone points it out like that, I have to respect it, and laugh at myself.

Okay, I am a few years behind you guys.
I got to punch a punch card for fun! (Learned how to change our phone bill, tape over the other hole), and send the check for the proper amount, it marked your account fully paid if the check matched the card. LMAO. NOT that I did that. I learned about it.

But I did grow up with CLOAD on the TRS-80. (Cassette Load, or read from cassette tape). Where you learn they stored your program as sounds. SO Cool.

Later we realized we could connect a voice activated recorder to a phone line, and record the entire computer conversations (username, password, etc). And by building a bandpass filter, you could clip the audio to ONE side of the conversation and play a lot of it back into an Acuostic Modem and get a lot more information than you thought possible.

Doing that kind of stuff as a teenager is what caused me to fall in love with software. I was almost published in the DEC Professional Magazine as a high school student. I rewrote the startup routines that used to take 5 minutes to initialize the system, and had them done in 26 seconds. This allowed us to reboot the computer between classes, and during lunch, to try out crazy ideas on scratch systems. (I crashed a LOT of systems back in the day, learning).

Last Great Memory. We had ONE guy who always booted the wrong disk. I changed the message from "Non-System Disk Error" To "Good Going Valade, you did it AGAIN!"

The entire room went wild the first time Mark Valade hit that message. He kinda hated me for that...

Whe I arrived at DoD, i was told to look at the Cobol code of a black woman who had screwed up the entire comm system software. This for an agency which is responsible for world-wide US communication - embassies, military bases, etc. She had reversed the register readings - instead of going from right-to-left, she went left-to-right - like ASCII code for the character "9" is 57, and its binary representation is 00111001 - however she set the registers backwards - 10011100. She was an affirmative action hire with a degree in psychology, while the position was supposed to require a tech degree. She reopeatedly threatened management with lawsuits if she was not constantly promoted. One time I informed her I knew the minister at her Alabama church, and she accused me of being in the KKK (Our churches worked together). Dumb as a rock, last I heard she had transferred to the IRS, was pulling down $250k in Senior Executive Service.

My first boss there was also black, who wasted a scholarship to Carnegie-Mellon (their wishful affirmative action program attempted to help selected blacks, who simply lacked the ability to get through their hi-tech progams) and spent the whole day in the next cubical on the phone proselytizing for his church and arguing with his ex-wife.

I did all the coding for these underqualifed jerks who blamed all their problems on "racists".

Did anybody have an Amiga or Atari? I wrote "Audio Gallery" in 1989 but MSFT came along and bankrupted all other platforms, except Apple, they clung on the edge with a 5% share. MSFT set back technology about 10-15 years.

"Coding Regimen (a prescribed course of treatment) may have referred to FedGov regulations - such as at DoD, we were told to use certain font colors, font types, how to arrange things on the screen, etc. Anal oversight.

And to Zohran Mamdani every arm is an opportunity.

Love the Statue of Liberty moving to FL!!!!!

Love the DonkeyCrat injecting hate. They are injecting it into any willing or distracted arm.

Clapping..I like nerd jokes. (And no, that was not an insult. I wear it with honor. My "badge": I had a pocket protector in high school, and I was on the chess team.)

I grew up on a PDP-11/34a in High School.
I taught myself MACRO-11 Assembler. Which was a lot like Motorola Assembly. Very Rich. Unlike Intel, Uggh...

Later, I found C, and I took to it like a duck in water. I actually rewrote one of Peter Nortons utilities and sent it back to them, I have a letter on their letter head while I was still a student, LOL.

Anyways... While learning C, I found out. It was first written on a PDP-8 and it was made to reflect the ASSEMBLY on that machine, so it was easy to transform almost right into assembly.

Everything was so simple in those days. C++ did to C what the Alphabet did to Math... (An algebra Joke my daughter loved... I love x. I have no problem with x. Except I hate finding him! My life would be a lot easier if X wasn't always needing to be found!)

My favorite FORTRAN joke:

God is Real... Unless declared otherwise...

For non programmers, variables starting with various letters had various types. G variables were a Real type (meaning a floating point/not an integer, like A-F, specifically I)

My next favorite FORTRAN nugget.
The values of numbers were stored in an array.
You could write:
7 = 5
And change the value of "7" to be equal to 5.
I believe this is called BAD PROGRAMMING.

Interrogating and loading registers...now that IS a blast from the past.

Pythonized COBOL, LOL, I like that.

We had an old saying, "Real programmers can write FORTRAN code in any language." If that didn't work, assembly would have to do, LOL.

Well done. Nice to see the light go on for people living on the dark side.

Over the years I've read articles about Curtis Sliwa and caught him in a few interviews and TV appearances. Seems like a good guy that I admire, but Like Dagny, won't give up until the last possible minute. He is David without a sling and Goliath is on the move.

Me dino's Swedish half heeds the advice of Buster.
The one quarter Irish immigrant in me and what started out as French and got their genes mixed after the British kicked them out of Canada ain't interested one bit.
No, I don't know if there's any Indian in me. Got asked that a couple of months ago.
My deceased father researched all that. Not about Buster, though.

NY, NY is not a place to seek perfection.

I was born in New York City and moved away during its hellhole heyday of 1978.

Once in a while some completely clueless person asks me, "Oh. Why don't you still live in New York?" and instantly broadcasts his or her worldview and self-loathing voting pattern.

This year's Republican NYC Mayoral Candidate, Curtis Sliwa, came to speak at the church I was a member of about 15 years ago. I waited in a long line to speak to him afterwards, just to commend him for staying in NYC during the late '70's to fight the madness, while I scramoosed the heck out of there with a lot less hesitation than Dagny had leaving NYC for Galt's Gulch.

It would be nice for Sliwa to have a chance in the upcoming NYC mayoral election, but the primary win by a Communist pretty much compels every sane person in the city to get behind the most likely candidate to beat him, and that is the incumbent Mayor Adams.

Well at least it's better than the pure Communist alternative.

Men med surströmming på? From what I can tell, even our Swedish DNA cannot automatically confer a liking for surströmming. Look up the videos of people opening a bulging tin of it to sample the stuff. Best done outdoors. An extremely mild auditory version is listening to bagpipes, again outdoors.

Here is a cat trying it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcvXF...

That's reassuring.

This is what happens when writers of articles and editors have no clue what they are writing about.

I am confident NOBODY on the DOGE team that codes called COBOL a "Regimen". Having worked briefly with COBOL and PL/X (a custom variant of PL/1)... I have better names for cobol.

But good luck getting rid of it. (I remember opening a DB table, and seeing a group of 8 fields, repeated like 24 times in a row, numbered, and when I asked WTH? I was told. Oh, that's how COBOL stores an ARRAY of options. I said "Well it's ONE way to do it. And it's clearly wrong"... But the normal way takes too many I/O cycles, LOL).

So, the upside of the COBOL is that it is working.
After that. Ughh.

In my book, you add another language inside the cobol code, a more modern language, like Python.
Make them interoperate. And slowly rewrite the system into Pythonized COBOL. Until you have nothing but Python remaining. Then refactor it to normal.

Otherwise, having worked on huge code bases. Good luck. It aint moving unless you just write a new version and switch.

Meanwhile... CitiBank still using their COBOL screens! While you scan your card and type a pin into a machine.

Actually, the incumbent "Independent" mayor is running for re-election, and is very likely to win.

It's Orwellian how well they control the messaging.

I just spoke to a cashier complaining about getting rid of the illegals who "do the jobs nobody wants to do".

I said, if I offered to pay you $1,000/hr to clean toilets would you?

So, it's about "At that price". you are right, they are willing to come here and work for far less.

But did you know they send a TON of money back home, so it doesn't help our economy. Next, because they support their family back home, they have learned they can file income taxes, and get a REFUND for supporting the family members they name. This has ONLY made it out in a couple of clips, but when most people find out about this scam...

It's just like the EBT cards they get, the free healthcare, etc. etc. Most people don't realize the true cost of these people on our society.

She finally got the point that "Oh, so they keep our wages lower"... EXACTLY.

Now, she is no convert. But the dam has a chip in it.