One of my coworkers sent an email to our team mentioning a recent article on slashdot about how to “Monitor a Linux box With Machine Generated Music”. The post isn’t that interesting but this follow-up response by a another co-worker, describing a job he had about 30 years ago as a new grad, blew my mind…
I once worked as the night operator for the University of Alaska Honeywell system. The console was constantly clacking away and I didn’t like having to always go over and read the usually routine messages. I found that if I put an AM radio next to the processor cabinet the variations in the static would give me enough information to know when the batch job was done, letting me stay in my chair and snooze some more.
I wonder if in 30 years I’ll have to be explaining to new grads how I used to use my 14.4kbps modem to “dial-up” to a BBS? Actually, scratch that, I recently had to explain to a co-op student what a BBS is.
along the same lines, check out this review, for Johann Johannsson’s latest album which was inspired by his dad’s ‘orchestration’ of EM static from IBM 1401 which could be captured by a radio receiver.
It starts with, well, kids, when I was young, I used to have to learn postscrpt just to use my HP calculator. It has a frquency generator that used to make free phonce calls from payphone with it. Back in the days, I used to use bitwise operation to pack a set of booleans into an int to save space from word alignment. Kids, do you even know what XOR is?
Sadly my developers don’t.