Ahh, now, my dear wife has a say in just about everything. Whether I want it or not. For such a petite and innocent looking lady she certainly excels in fiestiness (if there's such a word) Say no more.
Not sure either of them are worth idolizing. Sure, Windows brought PCs to the masses, and Apple know how to design sexy hardware without involving stockings and suspenders. But they have also been responsible for restrictive practices and some pretty horrendous software - ME, Vista, bloated Office, My this, My that. And as for iTunes, I don't think I've used it once without swearing at it. Although, I have to say that Gates has gone from being the devil incarnate to someone I can now respect because of his and Melinda's philanthropic efforts to give something back. But the one we should really idolize is Dennis Ritchie, whose passing went almost unnoticed. The IT world would have been a very different place without his work.
You often find the really dedicated 'techies' don't get the appropriate recognition. They neither seek it nor know how to secure it. Look through history and it's clear. Sewing machine, electric lightbulb, steam engine and steam locomotive the list is almost endless. But in principle you make a very valid point.
Oh dear, that's really sad, I completely missed this, very sad news as he was still quite young. Yes I'll bet there are still bits of Windows written in pure C even today, and probably loads of bits of Unix. I wrote my first C programs for John Menzies warehousing operation using Symbol MSI LDT scanner kit back in 1991, it was not an easy language to get to grips with at the time as so much of the code relied on pointers and I had come into the industry from a slightly different direction, starting out with higher level languages, but I always aspired to learn C. As you say Paul the world would have been a very different place without him, C was the language of of the metal just barely one step above assembler and is used in all things hardware even to this day, of course now more through it's later evolution C++. Welcome to the site Paul (Genghis ) Read all your posts and I like your sense of humour
Thanks, oss. I suppose it's easy to understand why Ritchie's passing was ignored by most of the press, as he never appeared on a reality TV show, didn't have big boobs, and wasn't involved in Princess Diana's death. The Guardian covered it, though, and it was on The Register, of course. I'd read some of your previous posts, and suspected you might have a computing background. Interesting that you use the word "assembler" rather than "assembly" - does that mean you have an IBM background? I was an IBM sysprog for many years, and I still have a fondness for 360/370 Assembler and VM. After we got rid of our IBM mainframes, I moved on to being a Unix sysadmin (mainly Solaris, with some AIX and Digital Unix), and the programming effectively stopped (apart from the obligatory shell scripts). I keep thinking I should make an effort to update myself by trying some Android development, but inertia usually gets the upper hand. Anyway, I took early retirement in August, so working on being a grumpy old git is my priority at the moment
wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo..................... English............. Please................
I assumed it would be OK to wear a nerd hat in a tech section. Anyway, the hat's not really my colour, so I may as well :badpc:
You already do.............. You are more than welcome to do that............ I was just trespassing somewhere I absolutely understand nothing about............ I like to read stuff.......... even if can't make sense.......... At the moment I am reading something in aramaic.... Dunno the title yet........ squiggle, squiggle, more squiggles, doodle, squiggle..
No I didn't work directly for IBM although I had friends who contracted for them in the late 1990's implementing Siebel. I was inside the Spango Valley complex once for one of my customers when IBM were laying down the law to their suppliers regarding Orders and Invoicing, they were switching to EDI overnight and forcing suppliers to adopt expensive EDI systems, which IBM never ended up implementing, terrible waste of time and money but even saying that I have a lot of respect for IBM as a company. Anyway it's odd, I've just always used the term "assembler" when talking about assembly language in a generic fashion, no other reason. Maybe just comes from the era I grew up in, as I did write my first program (in Fortran IV) when I was very young, 14 years old These days I work for a small company in a very specific vertical market, all very dull stuff, I write mostly in C# these days and for the new stuff we are largely using SQL server as the back end, but I have worked with loads and loads of languages, databases and operating systems over the years.
