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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."
My Dad started out working on valve amplifiers in the 1950's. Now that he has retired I want to start a business with him fixing valve amplifiers.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Assembly language is FAR from obsolete. Embedded hardware outships PCs by probably 100 to 1, and much of that is programmed using assembly language (especially if you want to get the most out of the tiny hardware). I have modern microcontrollers in my parts box with 64 *bytes* of RAM and 1kbyte of flash (Atmel ATtiny13) - while you can write a C program for this device, you can get much more out of it with asm, and it doesn't really take any longer to write (AVR asm is one of the nicer 8 bit ISAs). Portability is rarely an issue for devices like this, since even the C code won't be portable to other microcontroller architectures.
...oh, and I have a rotary phone, too. It was first installed in my grandparents home in 1969 when the house was built. It's just the plain GPO phone of the time, but it's a little reminder of them each time I phone someone.
Every serious programmer should have some experience of assembly language so they can grok what's really going on. Nothing tells you why buffer overruns are so bad than watching a program written in asm run over its own stack obliterating the return address. It doesn't need to be a fancy 32 bit or 64 bit desktop chip, an 8 bit ISA or one of the classics such as the Motorola 68K is enough to understand the principles of what happens at the chip level. If you want to see what happens when programmers simply don't grok the hardware, just check out The Daily WTF.
By the way, get off my lawn!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Oh this is cool! I could go on and on and on. While it's true some of these skills are still necessary for a few "elite" programmers or engineers, most of these skills are no longer used by the average user. To wit:
- what to do with a Commodore 64 when its cursor is blinking at you
-----(everyone I know in my circle of friends would go "duh")
-----(they have no clue how to navigate without icons or explorer)
- how to write a simple basic program for your C=64:
----- 10 print "hello"
----- 20 goto 10
----- RUN
- LOAD "$" to get directory off my cassette drive (yes we used cassettes)
- LOAD "*",8,1 to autoload & start most floppy disks
- how to crate 16-color pictures that look good
- how to program the SID to make music
- dir df0: to get a directory on a Commodore Amiga 500/2000
- the difference between Chip and Fast RAM
- why it's a bad idea to multitask 2 programs off the same floppy
-----(because the floppy will knock itself silly trying to read two tracks at the same time)
- ATDP 5601750 to dial on a rotary/pulse phone (ATDT for touchtone)
- +++ to get your modem's attention so you can issue commands like:
- ATH to hang up
- how to create pretty pictures using ANSI
- what is Zmodem, and why it's better to download files with Z rather than Xmodem
- how long will it take to download a 3.5 inch floppy over 2.4k modem
-----(long enough to eat supper and take a shower)
-----(or watch the latest episode of Star Trek The Next Generation)
- how many hours you can squeeze on a T-180 VHS tape (9)
- how many episodes of Quantum Leap if you remove the commercials (12)
- how to repair your copy of Star Wars after the tape tears in half (scotchtape)
Most of the things I just listed were items known by "everyone" back in the 1980s. If you wanted to use a computer, you had to know the various commands and understand how/why things work.
Today people don't need to know command-line text.
They can just point-and-click; it's become easy.
And a lot of the things we used to need to know?
It's essentially automatic now.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.