I would have to get former coworkers to dig through Jira. I would not bother. These are all proprietary applications supported by dead or dying companies. Most of the original developers are retired or no longer with us. The apps get picked up by acquiring companies rinse and repeat when they chapter 11.
More useful is finding newer, supported and open source applications that can replace their functionality but that's a whole other topic around prioritization and people paralyzed by fear of change due to the amounts of money flowing through their unsupported applications.
I teach in a tech/trade vocational program where 1/2 the students are your generation. All kinds of reasons they are there. (Didn't do well in High School, College, University, Grad School, Gaming in their parents basement since they were 10)
When one of the skills click (some try 2 or 3 of the ones we teach) and they start working the says that life is happening for them. The failures, in retrospect, become steps the had to take to get where they are. Perseverance is probably good personality trait to develop.
I chose my handle to have the word prosaic in it because I did many thing in tech (and other fields), none at extraordinary levels, but all done by learning by trying things out. You don't have to be wildly successful in life, prosaic can be good enough.
Early 80's VMS had a Keep/Purge system for history of files. Everytime you edited a file a version number was bumped up by 1. There was a command, "purge", I think that set the Keep count which was default to 3.
This would have been within the contemporary Dos and disk capabilities and size of 160-360kBytes, although slow (5-15 seconds).
When Dave Cutler moved from DEC to MS I expected the Dos console under windows to get that same feature.
Disappointed. A gajillion lost hours could have be saved.
Incidentally, I was just reading https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/wi19/cse221-a/papers/bobrow7... about TENEX, which offered roughly the same version numbering facility as VMS, though without the hierarchical filesystem directories VMS and Unix got from Multics. I don't know if TENEX got the idea from an earlier system. They don't mention one.
It's kind of amazing that this one paper introduced command-line completion, copy-on-write pages, load averages, and CAM TLBs.
The way I remember it, there was a SET command to set how many versions of a file should be kept, and PURGE would delete all but the most recent version. You could see the date of each version in DIR (they were listed on separate lines) but there wasn't a convenient way to open "FOO.FOR as of yesterday morning". You would have to figure out what version number to ask for and open "FOO.FOR;53" or whatever.
I agree that implementing this functionality in MS-DOS would have been relatively straightforward and acceptably efficient.
It'd be great to have long-lived transactions in a filesystem, permitting higher-level undo and redo.
TL;DR Don't sweat the future, it will mess up eventually.
Just Do something now that is productive for a while and don't be afraid to change you mind or your job.
Doing the same thing I have been doing since I was your age.
Learning some that interest me now that could be useful.
Started out as a math and science geek: Organic Chemistry was the target. Two chance encounters: one with two real working chemists that warned me to get a PHD to get a real job. I was to impatient to do that much school so the second chance encounter was with a obsolete computer that was plotting graphs and space games on paper. Three years os CS later I was working on Flight Simulation.
The 1st PC era happened and 5 years later I switched to install 1st gen PC networks. Then Unix got big and I did Sysdmin on that for a while. Then Perl programing which morph into webdev for handful of years.
Then I was "old" at least to the HR 15 guy, years my junior, who would not hire me, so I became a manager. Then there were to many managers I went back to school and got an accounting degree. Did that for a bunch of years and started teaching System Administration. Now looking for my next obsession.
I have seen the effect of tools building in several contexts. The most successful were teams that respected the process in that they each, could and would build tools themselves and would adopt other's tools.
Without the symmetry then the creators has to make sure to keep up the pace on the global progress or be label as distracted by the tool creation.
Worst case the tool creators get separated from the main production and have to maintain the core groups utilities (which will become any code they don't want to maintain).
Tools have to be short to build, widely useful, and placed in a repository that is collectively maintained.
Remember the context that created the need for the tool may move on and the existing tools will have to be upgraded. The group should have a plan how to handle that.
Chilictl, the tool in the article, is maintained by the team that also uses it the most. So we know its applications best, and even though it's original author is not around anymore, we are still very motivated to maintain it collectively.
I may be a little more "temporally ludditish" than the author. I have bought the cheapest unlocked cellphone that Best Buy, Staples, or Costco had to offer. Most times on Black Friday.
I typically paid 150 to 250 Canadian. They last 2 to 3 years and meet my needs right up to the next purchase. I am due this year for a switch.
As for PCs and Laptops. All are old BF buys or rescued "garbage". I am setting up a Dell Latitude E5420 (2013) for a current need. (Official disposed by my employer and intercepted before sent to electronic recycling.) Other resurrected acquisitions that are operational are from 2013 and 2015. I can do this because "what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career".
I like keeping this systems out of the garbage for a few more years.
>I typically paid 150 to 250 Canadian. They last 2 to 3 years and meet my needs right up to the next purchase. I am due this year for a switch.
Seems penny wise pound foolish compared to getting something like an iPhone SE or a low end pixel (eg. 7a) which have 6-8 years of support, rather than the 1-2 years support you get from low end phones.
There could be secondary factors. If you're physically hard on your devices, you might be scuffing up screens and permanently smooshing USB sockets with a couple years of hard use. Yes, they might be repairable, but the breakeven math is getting pretty close.
Replacing every 2-3 years also means replacing the battery every 2-3 years, which you were likely going to want to do eventually anyway.
TBH, I don't get the flagship phone thing at all. When my employer was paying, I got some of them-- a Lumia 1020, a LG V10, and a Samsung GSII-- and I didn't really use any of the performance. The phone that was the biggest upgrade for me was a Umidigi F1, because it really had two-day battery life for the first time.
>TBH, I don't get the flagship phone thing at all. When my employer was paying, I got some of them-- a Lumia 1020, a LG V10, and a Samsung GSII-- and I didn't really use any of the performance.
With the proliferation of javascript heavy SPAs and electron apps, you'll definitely notice the performance difference even if you're not gaming or whatever.
I am well past 60. For the first 30 odd years I was an individual contributor in both programming and system administration and manager of the same.
When one of the financial crises and ageism ended my management career, I went back to school and switched fields. After a few years I got the chance to teach new computer support professionals in vocational program. I have been doing that for 15 years.
As a side note for ageism "victims" our school is growing and is struggling to find enough competent teachers (Window/Linux Admin, Database, Scripting, Networking, VMs, Cloud, Mobile devices...).
Check out your local vocational programs. You can find permanent or bridge work teaching at this level. Usually industry experience is more important for these jobs than a teaching degree.
This is not a topic that can be explained while standing on one foot.
It is a multi layer cake of hand-offs of information
similar to the ISO OSI model of networking (which of course is I/O through the network.
At the top end is a program asking built in function or library to print some text. Many layers down is
the final hardware receiving the text and displaying it.
These two video will cover the lower layers
Do you know of any examples of these "walking wounded" applications? Can we bring some attention to reduce their foot print.