Sorry, Older Programmers – What's on Your Mind Today?
Today, I woke up sympathizing with older people for their contribution in science while people like me take for granted the hours of sweat, blood, and divorces it took to lay the foundation for the 21st Century. You risked so much for millennial. You are my heroes regardless of the accolades you received or didn't because you participated in transforming the world.
Sorry, older programmers, what's on your mind today? I want to listen to you talk about life such as thoughts on the industry, pet peeves, or your ex-girlfriend Summer. Depends. That was a (very old) joke, of course. Actually, being away from 'have to' programming (work-related) means we can go back to our 'hobbyist' programming (stuff we enjoy) and do lots of entertaining things that don't need to satisfy anybody else but ourselves. Who cares if we happen to spend weeks poring over 30-year old technical manuals or diagrams to emulate in software a floppy-disk controller card that hasn't been manufactured since 1981. I did that a little while back. When integrated into an emulated machine and paired with a floppy-disk boot-image from that era I got this:
64K Graphics CP/M 2.2 rev 1.2.0 for Advantage HQ from North Star Computers,Inc.
Hard Disk Boot In-Process
To review connections, enter Semicolon (;) within a second or two
No ; entered, so proceeding with prior connections
A>DIR
A: --VDISK- AAA : -CPM120- WM- : PIP COM : XSUB COM
A: ED COM : ASM COM : DDT COM : LOAD COM
A: STAT COM : DUMP COM : ONECOPY COM : SUBMIT COM
A: DIRDUMP COM : COLDBOOT COM : HDOFF COM : DUMP ASM
A: DIRDUMP ASM : FORMAT COM : COPY COM : SYSGEN COM
A: GMGRADD COM : LOCAL COM : USER ASM : HDBOOT COM
A: GDDT COM : FILLDISK COM : XDIR COM : WS COM
A: SERIALZ COM : WSMSGS OVR : WSOVLY1 OVR : CPMGEN COM
A: FRED C