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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."
Systems programmers worth their salt can at least read assembler output. It's a valuable skill when debugging kernel errors.
Navigating by compass is obsolete? That's like saying that keeping candles in your house in case of extended blackouts is obsolete.
Some things on that list are either silly or shortsighted.
Without assembly knowledge we'd have uncrackable IP "protection" schemes.
Churn butter is on the list. I guess it just comes that way out of the cow now. Science is amazing.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
I'm looking forward to the day when blogging becomes obsolete.
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I design embedded systems for a living, and this obsolete assembly language skill is what distinguishes my designs from those other companies. True, it takes me a little longer to get the code done, but it runs faster, has more features, and fits into a much smaller memory space than what I could do with C, or anything else. (Not to mention the fact that all the bugs in my code are all mine and none were introduced by a compiler.) I feel like it's to my advantage that assembly has faded from most designer's skill set. I won't deny that this skill is on the endangered species list, but to group it with the skill needed to dial a rotary phone made me speak up. It may be rare but it certainly isn't useless.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Using PEEK and POKE to 'unerase' that Apple II basic program someone erased when they accidentally typed 'NEW'. /S /AH /ON" without having to DIR /? first.
The skill to determine a modem's connect speed from hearing the negotiation sounds.
'Notching' an old single-sided floppy to be able to make it a double-sided disc.
Cleaning and/or aligning the heads on your cassette player.
Terminating or crimping coax.
Knowing you need to type "DIR
Was 'winding your watch' in the list?
I'd love to see some speculation on what skills you'd expect to be obsoleted by 2029.
I've been thinking about retiring - I'm 34 years old. I think I'd be happier if I'd jump off the bandwagon and started doing something totally different. Something that would not require me to study all the time and be stressed all the time.
I grew up with home computers. I learned BASIC when I was 11. That is obsolete skill now. Then I got my first PC in 1988 and learned DOS. That's obsolete. Then I learned Borland's Turbo Pascal. That's obsolete. Then I learned Microsoft C programming and started programming Windows 3.1 applications that used Windows menus etc. That's obsolete. I learned Gopher and Telnet in the 80s. That's obsolete. I learned Pine. That's obsolete. I learned to tweak Windows 95 registry. That's obsolete. I learned BEA Tuxedo at work. That's obsolete. Looking at it now - I've wasted countless of hours to something that is totally obsolete now! Had I invested that time into improving myself - learning who I am, how I behave, how to enjoy this life - I would be much happier now I guess.
Don't F**K with Chuck!
How much of the cool stuff you enjoy using today would even exist if it had to be coded in assembly? You think you'd be using a nice, modern web browser or game if they had to code the whole thing in assembly?
Coding in higher-level languages frees programmers up to create actual cool stuff. It's great that some ur-geek wrote a bitchin' disk driver in ASM that fits in 7KB of code during one Jolt-and-meth-fueled month back in 1991 but jesus, who cares. Given the chance, I bet that engineer would have done it in 1/4 of the time in C and actually done something useful with the rest of his month. Or at least stayed away from the meth and Jolt.
It's the technological equivalent of carrying buckets of water three miles from the stream to your prarie frontier home every single morning. Like, it's cool and admirable that people once did that, but thank goodness we generally don't have to do that these days. Even if my tap water really doesn't have any new functionality compared to that stream water.
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Actually, percentages are quite simply a sucky way of judging whether something is obsolete.
In the context of this discussion, a skill is obsolete when it is no longer needed to do something that is still being done today - For example, nobody needs to know how to load a program off tape on a C64 these days, because we don't have C64s anymore.
By this definition, assembly programming is obviously NOT obsolete. We still need assembly programmers: for device drivers, for kernel programming, for writing compilers, for reverse engineering old code that is no longer supported, for cracking dumb DRM schemes that take away our fair-use rights, etc etc etc. The fact that not many people know how to write assembly is irrelevant: does the fact that few people know how to build a human-rated space launch vehicule mean that it is obsolete?