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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.
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.
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Navigating by compass is obsolete? That's like saying that keeping candles in your house in case of extended blackouts is obsolete.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.
Here's mine: writing decent stories for slashdot.
At the bottom of the
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Voting for a democratically elected official?
Yeah yeah, Troll.
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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.
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!
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I was gonna simply say sex, which became an obsolete skill once I got married.
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!
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.
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?