Amusingly, under these circumstances I may qualify as one of the oldest, as I not only remember Mapics from 1982-ish (we decided not to use it at that company) but I currently work at a company actually using Mapics on an A/400. RPG (various flavors, of course, as some of Mapics hasn't been touched since the early 80's.) I feel a frequent need to wash my hands.
It's my fault, I admit it. I didn't have money for college in the 70's and later after I'd worked my way into programming jobs I took the occasional class but with plentiful wok a degree never seemed all that high a priority. I had a great job for years and years as IT manager of a small manufacturing company but they got bought out by a very large company with a corporate data center and didn't need local IT staff. Finding a new job under these circumstances was... prolonged and ultimately disappointing. In today's environment (at least, here in the Midwest USA) it doesn't matter how long you've been working with modern tools and languages, if you don't have a degree your ability to get a job is entirely dependent on good fortune and how good a talker you are. So now I'm an RPG programmer on an AS/400, back where I started (on an IBM S/34 at that time, of course) in the early 1980s. Learn your lesson, rugrats! Get that union card stamped.
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Amusingly, under these circumstances I may qualify as one of the oldest, as I not only remember Mapics from 1982-ish (we decided not to use it at that company) but I currently work at a company actually using Mapics on an A/400. RPG (various flavors, of course, as some of Mapics hasn't been touched since the early 80's.) I feel a frequent need to wash my hands. It's my fault, I admit it. I didn't have money for college in the 70's and later after I'd worked my way into programming jobs I took the occasional class but with plentiful wok a degree never seemed all that high a priority. I had a great job for years and years as IT manager of a small manufacturing company but they got bought out by a very large company with a corporate data center and didn't need local IT staff. Finding a new job under these circumstances was... prolonged and ultimately disappointing. In today's environment (at least, here in the Midwest USA) it doesn't matter how long you've been working with modern tools and languages, if you don't have a degree your ability to get a job is entirely dependent on good fortune and how good a talker you are. So now I'm an RPG programmer on an AS/400, back where I started (on an IBM S/34 at that time, of course) in the early 1980s. Learn your lesson, rugrats! Get that union card stamped.