Software

… are in the computer you are looking at right now?

You probably don’t know the Red Baron Operating System, “R-Boss” (RBOS). It was named for a strip bar in Houston Texas and it carried billions, probably trillions, of dollars of credit card authorizations for American Express – including long after they lost the source code for it.

… and this is bad because?

I’m switching from “Old cranky that overheats” running Winders XPat to “New and obscure that isn’t supposed to do that (overheating), at least not until I really need it” computer running Windows 7.whoKnowsWhat.What.What.

Back when 300 baud dial-up was new – yeah, that’s a long time ago, all right – we had a “guest” login to a mainframe where a friend worked. He had administrative privileges and, being the generous sort, we were “in”.

There is a country, which I will allow to remain nameless, that receives a lot of “off-shoring” of software engineering from US companies. I teach a fair number of engineers from that country and, for whatever reason, I have to say they seem to be grossly under qualified. By and large, in the classroom they ask few questions – that could be a cultural thing, I admit – and in the labs they have more problems than others in following the detailed instructions – again, that could be a cultural issue.

My first programming job was for the American Express Space Bank at the end of the 1960s. “Space Bank” was a relatively short-lived hotel and motel reservation system run by the credit card people.

Once upon a time, there were three RTOSes named VRTX, pSOS and VxWorks.

Rarely, only very rarely, do I teach a group that is close to if not completely indifferent to the topic at hand.