Re: For The Gamers

rbowman wrote this post while blinking in Morse code:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 08:15:13 -0600, chrisv wrote:
>

But I had my safe, and tolerable, niche in electronics manufacturing,
and I was too cowardly to risk the career change.

>
My career started in the machine tool industry, which at the time was
mostly based on relay logic. As microcontrollers entered the mix, drawing
ladder diagrams and wiring up ice cube relays was replaced by programming.
Logic is logic.
>
With my first exposure to programming being FORTRAN IV and punch cards I
wasn't interested in programming. When it got to the point where I could
wire-wrap a board on the kitchen table and program it the field became
interesting.

I went into physics because I thought I would become bored with programming.
The I transferred to hearing science and ended up writing FORTRAN code to drive
stimulus/response boxes and noise generators on the PDP-11. Also wrote a pretty
decent HP pen-plotter program in FORTRAN. Around that time I took a course in C
programming on the PDP-11, using TECO as the text editor.

As time went on programming slowly took over and most of my work life involved
writing code.

Today I am retired, but still writing a lot of code (and doing a lot of
debugging, too :-D). C++, a little C as well.

--
If any man wishes to be humbled and mortified, let him become president
of Harvard.
-- Edward Holyoke