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."

Comments

Re:Assembly isn't obsolete!

[Zondar]

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.

Re:Assembly isn't obsolete!

[Oscaro]

I don't think GCC works that way. Actually, it does. You can use "gcc -S" to write the assembly output on a file. I find it very instructive, and you can see the effects of the various optimization options...

Re:Assembly isn't obsolete!

[Anonymuous Coward]

I don't think GCC works that way. It probably generates machine code directly.

No, GCC generates plain old text assembly, then calls the assembler (as) on that.

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).

Re:LIST of obsolete things

[Ihlosi]

where's the set of boot floppies with different emm.386 configurations to get all those early PC games going?

Sorry, those became way obsolete with Dos 6.22s ability (iirc) to have multiple configurations to chose from. :P

Anyone remember countless runs of memmaker to squeeze the last byte of RAM out of a config ?

Re:Jumping off the bandwagon?

[Kevin Stevens]

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.