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Obsolete Technical Skills
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Robert Scoble had an interesting post on his blog a few days ago on obsolete technical skills — 'things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us.' Scoble's initial list included dialing a rotary phone, using carbon paper to make copies, and changing the gas mixture on your car's carburetor. The list has now been expanded into a wiki with a much larger list of these obsolete skills that includes resolving IRQ conflicts on a mother board, assembly language programming, and stacking a quarter on an arcade game to indicate you have next. We're invited to contribute more."
I guess they're forgetting about things like optimized device drivers, true performance-oriented embedded systems architectures, microcode segments, and anything to do with hardware development.
I'm neither a console programmer nor a demoscener, but isn't assembly very much alive and kicking in these two fields?
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
Everything which is written in Java uses C.
Everything which is written in C uses Assembler.
Everything which is written in Assembler uses machine code.
And so on.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I would say understanding and using the manual octal grouped switches on the front of a PDP11/35 is high on the list. Using the halt/run switch is a lost art.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Pdp-11-40.jpg
Running a shmoo curve on magnetic core memory is an obsolete skill.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/20/22897/01066073.pdf?arnumber=1066073
The truth shall set you free!
Here's a programmable pen, couldn't find a bicycle lamp, so here's a NetBSD Toaster instead, for 4096 levels of burned bread and a web server.
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein
Have a good look around the car and you might notice the mono-motronic ecu, the catalytic converter, the fuel pump for the injection system. Take the air filter housing off and you'll spot the injector aswell...
In fact, the gcc or g++ commands are 'drivers' that first call a preprocessor, then a compiler, then an assembler and finally a linker (all of them separate executables).
Sorry, those became way obsolete with Dos 6.22s ability (iirc) to have multiple configurations to chose from.
Anyone remember countless runs of memmaker to squeeze the last byte of RAM out of a config ?
Are you sure its all obsolete?
Basic:
Basic programming building blocks- variables, statements, control of execution flow with if/then/else and goto
DOS:
directory structures, command line navigation, computer architecture (and how bad design time decisions can lead to decades worth of headaches)
Turbo Pascal:
Not too familiar w/ Pascal anymore, but if IIRC, you should have learned how to use functions, namespaces, and the modular programming model.
Microsoft C Programming:
Event driven programming models, resource handles, GUI development issues- how to expose just enough complexity to make things useful without cluttering the screen, and the C aspect... you learned the syntax underpinning just about every other major language since and the basics of using structures, pointers, handling memory, the list could go on for pages.
Gopher/Telnet:
How plain text internet protocols generally work- and if anything you learned some cool tricks to do a raw telnet session on port 25 and spoof email from the boss.
Pine:
Email concepts/netiquette. Was Pine really so hard to learn anyway?
Windows 95 registry:
Eh probably the least portable skill here- you at least learned to be comfortable with digging into a blackbox OS and looking under its skirt. The registry is still in use in XP, not so sure about vista, so this is a skill you will get at least 15 years of use out of.
Bea Tuxedo:
not too familiar w/ this product, but if I remember correctly, its all about virtualization, which is now one of the hottest new technologies in the sysadmin/IT world.
Sounds like you learned a hell of a lot. Sure none of these are all that employable *today* but couple that background with a weekend spent with a Java book and I would employ you with a 6 figure salary in a second over some newly minted sun certified ITT Tech grad.