Back In The Day

My love for programming began in my second year at the university. We did a course on FORTRAN 77 (outdated I know, but what could I do?). It fascinated me so much.

There is this friend of mine who was trying to develop an email application for a mobile company. He was hoping that if all was well, he would just tell them he had something they might need and all the blah blah blah of marketing (or whatever it is).

I remember when a place I worked for refused to disengage me to the contracting company I really worked for so I could go to a better paying and using more of my skills contract. I asked 4 times, and had fulfilled the 1yr minimum of a 1+ongoing contract. I kept asking the contracting company, and they just kept asking my supervisors even though I had fulfilled my minimum assignment time.

I get a call from a small group of users working on a project, they are trying to embed a video into a powerpoint presentation, but it doesn't seem to play. They decide to show me over and over again that it doesn't work. I ask what file format it is in, and I get no response. I ask them what player they need to use, I get no response.

I work in Health care ,started before they had IT departments in hospitals. My computer hobby suddenly became an important part of the job.

I work in the IT department of a hospital and we have a lot of places in patient care areas that have buttons to press to open the doors. The buttons are right by the door, you hit the button and the door either unlocks or opens by itself.

Ok, this is a different sort of "Big Red Button" story.

We had scheduled a night to re-work the layout of our entire computer room. Everything was running smoothly for the first two or three hours. As I was working under the raised floor I got a wisp of that familiar electrical smoke smell.

I'll add to everyone's collection of "Big Red Button" stories. This one's a little different, though. I was told about this by my brother, who is even older than I am, so any errors are his fault, not mine.

I used to work at a large company in the southwest that had a computer center housing the company's big iron. To get into the main computer room, you went through an unlocked double door that lead into an outer room. This room is where you could use a reel to reel tape drive or pickup your green bar printouts. There was also a phone on the wall out of sight from the general office area.

It must have been 1990, late autumn...for those who recall, Windows 3.0 was launched May 23 that year. I was on the R&D team in the IT department, some 120 strong at an intl. govt. organization, consisting of about 2.200 users in total. It was my task to pilot Windows 3.0 - and where best to start than within the IT department itself...or so I thought.