Technology moves fast

We had some relatives over for dinner the other night, and my sister starts talking about how she's learning Latin in college. "It's a dead language", she says. My uncle, being a computer programmer, says "That's nothing, I know more than 30 different dead languages." :-D Sad, but true seeing as he has been programming code since back before computers were "personal".

It got me thinking, though, since I'm going for a college degree in computer science, most of the programming languages I learn now probably won't have any real significance when I actually get into the working field ("Java? Ha! No one's used that since 2013!").

 

Computer technology doubles every six months. By the time you have your degree it will be obsolete.

 

How true, I used to know and use COBOL, FORTRAN, and BASIC quite fluently, but now it's passe'.

 

Gawd @ FORTRAN and punch cards!uke:-D

 

I remember this well

 

Oh I dunno so much, where I work our point of sale system is DOS... I mean real DOS, the software was written in 1987.
Oh and get this, my boss needed one of the til computers and asked me to hook up the backup, I couldn't do this because the backup keyboard port is.... wait for it..... 5 pin-din :strong

Finding a 5 pin-din keyboard is tricky, even harder is finding a 5 pin-din to USB converter :-D

 

I used to be good at programming in Basic on my Radio Shack TSR80
Can you believe that it cost $700 and that was a load of cash then.

http://img837.imageshack.us/img837/3972/trs80i9492938.jpg
The technology has long since passed me by.:confused

 

Yeah great point,lots of business's use older software and PC's,it just not economically viable to upgrade a million dollar machine to an I7 with windows.

I knew a guy who worked on a CAD station in a factory and all he had a was a keyboard and screen and that was just 2 years ago.

If there's one good thing about the recession is you can get some great deals on CNC machinery:-D Factories are shutting down at an alarming rate and selling off all their machines,you can buy a £20,000 CNC lathe for £1000.

I'd buy one but they only run on 3 phase electricity,I need to come up with a solution without changing the whole motor and controller board,a three phase UPS maybe?

 

Ricky, love the profile pic, big fan of loony tunes!!!:major

 

i write on the same box that powered Watson (the jeopardy computer) which has it's architecture based in the 80's, write in a language - rpg (wonder how many here have heard of that without googlerolleyes) - that was developed before i was born, and no i'm not that old:kissmy. And those boys right up the road that wrote windoze, they haven't been without their IBM boxes for all that long. If the h/w or s/w is any good it'll stick around, question is are you good enough to pick a path that won't end in a cliff in 6 months:confused

 

Thanks,I can see you'll do fine around here:-D

Welcome.

 

Ah, the memories. :-D My first PC was the TRS 80 sames as the one shown. First "portable" was my 4P Tandy.
First "laptop" was my EPSON PCAX33, (Yes EPSON), in '92 which cost me $4,000 and I took it to Sierra Leone , WEst Africa,at the time.

Bazza

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In the same vein as "Some languages never die...":
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