This is me and my dog "Ville" onboard our sailingboat, guessing who is who is left as an exercise to the reader.
Milestones in my history of computing
The slide rule
It was probably in the beginning of the seventies, I had
calculations with the slide rule as homework from school.
My grandfather who was about 75 years old at the time was
rather upset about the slide rule and told me in a harsh
voice that it was a bad thing and that I should be doing
the calculation in the head instead.
Well I'm still using my head and not using the slide
rule, so I guess he was correct.
HP-21 pocketcalculator
I bought it in 1974, for around $100 which was
approximately 1-2 weeks pay for a normal worker at the
time, most of the others bought the cheaper Texas
Instruments. The HP used RPN and had a
"slightly" steeper learning curve but the
reward was great. Us HP people won all contests that were
later to evolve into what the Perl community knows as
GOLF, if the expressions were complex RPN would save you
a lot of keystrokes. The HP-21 also layed down the
foundation for my trust in the quality of HP products, I
just hope that the imminent Compaq merger won't put an
end to that.
Nord-10
In 1977 was my first meeting with a real computer, it was
a Norsk Data Nord-10, I don't remember much about it
apart from that it was huge and had a "real" core
memory(ie a large panel with crossing wires and small
ferritic thoroids in the intersections), that would keep
it's information even without power. I guess the
information density would have been in the order of a few
bits per sqr.in.
It was in the last week before the summer holidays began
and the teacher said that I could either join the group
that was rehearsing derivatives or go try to make a
computer program. Do I need to say that the choice was
easy.
The assignment was to make a program that would solve a
quadratic equation given the coefficients. The
programming language was some proprietary dialect of
BASIC.
I learnt two things from this experience:
Computers are stupid, they do not even know that
there are two solutions to a square
root.
Computers do not think for themselves, they only
do exactly what you tell them to.
Client-Server
In the mid-eighties I was involved in the development of
a geophysical interpretation system, consisting of a
Pr1me 750 mini computer for intensive numeric calculations
and a FCG graphics workstation (CP/M & Z80) for the
MMI.
The communication between the client and the server was
done through a 9600 baud serial line and we had to
develop a special asciidecimal protocol. to overcome that
bottleneck{sigh}.
I also remember that the compile/link cycles on the
workstation took 15-20 minutes, lots of time to dream
away.
Perl
In 1992 I went to work for a telecom company as a
software tester. I was assigned the task to automate the
evaluation of verification logs. While looking for a tool
to use a colleague pointed me in the right direction and
I met with Perl 4.036. Love at first sight.... on my part
anyway.
The Monastary
In 2001 I found this place which IMHO has more merits
than just being fantastic knowledge base for Perl
related issues. Moreover I think of it is a self
adjusting site for personal improvement, Perl and
otherwise. vroom++