What's Your Job IRL?

I am obsessed with brain and neuroscience. To the point I have been considering applying for medical school.
Probably only thing keeping me is little kids - I want to be around until they still give a shit.

 

Nah, man. Not worth it.

There are in fact specialized neuroscience curriculums, you don't need to go to medicine, if you ever do decide to go for it.

Medicine as a study was really difficult, and it doesn't in general have many parallels to neuroscience. Medicine is abhorently enormous and focused on everything that can harm a human being. Neuroscience is a small part of medicine - actually - a small part of neuroscience is a part of medicine.

Just go full neuroscience.

But even better, get a Principles of neuroscience by Kandel. That's the bible pretty much, at least for us here in Croatia. It's easy enough to read, and probably touches every subject to some degree.

No need to go to school to have a hobby.

 

I am an architect (I always wanted to be an architect), pediatric heart surgeon, captain of the Yankees, and runner up Miss America two years running…

Seriously @Ardacer I’m in the market for a life coach. Would you consider taking me on? My mother always said I had lot’s of potential

 

Ha!

I'll be happy if I live to see 54!

And with AGI coming round the corner, I bet the world will be a vastly different place, pretty soon...

I just have much more hobies than sense, is all.

 

So true story. 1981. Digital Equipment Corp. Marlboro campus (DEC-10/DEC-20 and all assorted SW, etc.). In our lab we had dozens of every kind of Line Printer imaginable. For those not familiar with Line Printers back then, some designs used a form of continuously circling belt/chain drive which moved under impact hammers to “push” the carbon/“ink” onto the paper with the proper characters. IIRC page width was 132 columns (much bigger than the 80 columns we had on data punch cards… but I digress).

I worked at the time in Software Support, specifically for all our Input/Output systems (Tape mounting/reading/backup, line printing/spooling to other areas, disk mounting, batch jobs, etc.). I had responsibility for (mostly) batch, but also did a lot on the tape and printing/spooling area. All in Assembly language (Macro 10/20 depending).

We received a SPR (software problem report we called them). It came (as most usually did) with an associated 12”/9 track tape. (Usually tapes held core dump images for us to use debugging).

This one didn’t.

This one simply said: “Problem. Print this file and the LP05 will fall over”.

We were like, “what????”

So, natch, we did it.

And in less than one minute, this multi-10’s of thousands of dollars bespoke line printer, started “walking” across the floor, and then fell over!

(Turns out this particular “hacker” - back then hackers - the OG hackers btw - championed their expertise by finding super obscure bugs/issues with computing systems and then calling them out; ofttimes with a fix - to the vendor)… anyways this hacker had figured out that if the print file had special characters (like “backspace” and “no carriage return/line feed - among others) embedded in the right places… it would trigger a physical resonance (ever see that suspension bridge collapses in the wind video).

Wild weird printer Schiit #1

#2…. Two weeks later got a “Print this and the printer will catch on fire” version…

So, given this dude now had cred, we were right there with fire extinguishers…. And, sure enough, within 1 minute we had smoke, and by 2 minute mark legit fire… (He’d discovered how to get the chain to run continuously, hammering (scraping) the same row of paper over and over and over again….)

So yeah, printers are WEIRD.

IRL (TODAY) I’m in tech, software marketing, specializing in optimizing performance that end users experience whilst using web applications (a new offshoot/branch of Application Performance Management - where I did 2 startups between 2007 and 2018; first one succeeding, second one not). Been in product marketing/management for about 30+ years, after about 10-15 in SW development/support. Like others on this thread, too many expensive hobbies (Nikon digital landscape photography, astronomy and astrophotography, audio, wine, gourmet cooking,…)

 

Well damn. I visited that campus several times in the early 80s. DEC was a big customer of ours (connector company; I was a ribbon cable connector engineer at the time)

 

It's a separate discipline?

Doh! Of course it must be. Just contemplating how ribbon cables have changed in 40-plus years, from wide cables with parallel conductors to stuff which is more like an actual ribbon. And how some of them need to flex. And all the different connectors that go with all that.

Thanks for making me think!

 

The KL10 processors in DEC 10/20’s had the MOST amazingly complex wiring/pins on the main boards (literallly thousands of pins needing connecting… these mainframes were quite literally hand-built. Yeah there were boards, but lots of them and they all needed interconnecting. The backplane (think a giant squarish “board” with 3/4” “pins” sticking out every 1/4”) as like a giant pin cushion “bed”…

so, yeah, connectors and cabling were HUGE. Layout affected speed/performance of the system, EMF and noise were a constant issue. The Field Service techs for the hardware were legendary. I was just an operating system software dude, doing stuff in assembler, building things and fixing things…

These were 1/2 to 2+ Million dollar hardware configurations, so they literally had an ecosystem of companies, products and technicians, etc. all in the ecosystem.
Fun days, learned a ton.

 

The server rooms of corporate IT in the 90's and aughts (my time) were plug and play beginner Lego sets compared to this stuff:

 

And THAT was the computer I *first* programmed (in High School in the mid 1970’s). I paid my way through college as a programmer OF DEC-10’s (working for the University) as well as tutoring any/all in the Engineering college in Fortran for the princely sum of a tax-free $5 an hour…

Digital hired me, and 3 other “hackers” like us straight out of the UofA to Marlboro in late 1980/Jan 81… (I got the paid gig at UofA after reporting so many “bugs” to the Ops folks (along with suggested fixes) they figured they’d just pay me)

There were literally only TWO techs sufficiently proficient in the backplane wiring, and debugging associated with them across the entire country! We almost worshipped those guys…

Memories indeed. Thanks for finding that shot of a KL-10! The systems could support around 100-150 simultaneous time-sharing users (think a real time bulletin board such as SBAF) with sub-second response time. Hugely innovative for that era when the only alternative was big-ass IBM mainframes that had to be run batch and “worshipped” by operations acolytes in white coats…

Fun fact: the KL’s running Tops-10 or Tops-20 *required* a completely separate and dedicated MINI computer (PDP-11 running RSX) to just get BOOTED (think BIOS in today’s terms). We called it the “front end”. Now there’s 1000 times the computepower, 10,000 times the memory and storage…. On an entry-level iPhone.

 

DEC was a client of mine in the mid-80's, and I visited their HQ several times.

Didn't realize at the time that DEC (then peaking in market share) actually was the leading edge of a dying tech paradigm. In the mid-'90s it went under.

 

I only met computers in the late 80s. In a rut, a 14-year run doing the same thing, but having attained a name for a certain techiness by researching and bringing in-house, and then learning and doing, phototypesetting.

We had a printing works that was quite modern, but the admin was ancient. Hand written invoices and the old IBM mechanical accounting machines that went k'chunk k'chunk k'chunk. They'd already taken up a "micro" computer system to replace all that, and suddenly asked me if I'd like to manage the project.

It tuned out to be a Unix machine. And, somehow, we took to each other. I had a shelf put up for the manuals, which I devoured avidly. Or as avidly as my comprehension allowed. I became a self-taught Unix systems manager, eventually especially IBM's AIX and RS6000.

From the start, I was soon reporting solutions to problems to the company that was supposed to be supporting us. It just worked out for me. Like meeting a person one can easily talk to*.

I was never a programmer, but could do more than enough shell for admin. And I could do more than enough with awk, sed, etc to do some fairly complex manipulation of the the accounting package data. Like, two jobs later, a chart-of-accounts redesign that was sort-of-logical but not one-for-one, all written in awk. in nested ifs. Which I then wrote another script to optimise.

I envied people who'd come up the computer science ladder! But then, as a maths dumbo, I would probably never have got on to it, if it had occurred to me at the time.

I've forgotten most of it now. Have to struggle with basic shell syntax.



*I had exactly the opposite reaction when first meeting MS-DOS! And just about everything from Microsoft thereafter.

 

I agree about the msdos part. It's totally subjective probably but I had the exact same response as you. I use windows for office and gaming, ok and for browsing.. linux for any serious work when something is related to servers or scripting of any sort. Microsoft scripts and languages just don't agree with me, I don't know. It's probably me, but I've never even had a need to delve much into ms, *nix takes care of everything.

I've tried to move away from office many times. It just never works. Pptx files in particular are always a mess, documents could get a pass most of the time. Excel and its vba integration and math, I also find best on ms office, unfortunatelly.

 

Well, the “death” was self-inflicted (alas). Too many excellent engineers. Too many excellent engineers promoted ONE level too high into management who couldn’t know how to, let alone make, hard decisions. Too few people that could actually MARKET. When I was there in the 80’s, we were literally kicking IBM’s butt. But, they came out (the second try, we won’t count OS/2 which was actually extremely elegant - but see “don’t know how to market, with IBM PC/MS-DOS… Digitals immediate answer was to come out with THREE, each technically different (and elegant in their own ways), completely incompatible platforms (so each needed separate compilers, spreadsheet programs, etc. etc.). Just like we had two (again incompatible) “mainframes” (36 bit DEC-10/20’s and 32 bit VAXen), and FOUR flavors of 16/32 bit PDP-11 Mini’s… each were purpose built and engineered to within an inch of their life to fit specific purposes…. Only by the end of the 80’s were we making interoperability efforts (e.g. we figured out how to ensure that any/all programs written for TOPS-10 would work unchanged on TOPS-20 as one example); product lines were so silo-managed (profit/loss) that it was anathema to try and make a decision to INTEGRATE into common platforms, etc… (all the things that commodity PC hardware basically forced on the entire industry in the 90’s as X86 architectures became commodities).

An argument can be made that w/o Digital (and especially their 36 bit Tops-10 systems) the Internet would never have gotten off the ground. The original ARPAnet was primarily DEC-10 based. The systems I worked on then had ETHERNET networking, real-time bulletin boards, chat, file sharing… all the foundations of today’s Internet. Not IBM. DEC. the first REAL internet search (before Google, et al.) was DEC AltaVista… and so on… Heck, the vast majority of Linux/Unix was directly related to DEC as well (but of course OUR product line managers HAD to have our own PROPRIETARY variant (called Ultrix). THAT was the disease that ultimately killed DEC (and all the other companies working that way - the dinosaur way).

There was a culture invented that pervades the Linux software universe to this very day: Hackerism (no, NOT “Crackers”). I urge anyone remotely interested to look up the Hackers Jargon and other such artifacts of the time.

The peak was indeed 1988; for our global user event DECWORLD, we literally rented every hotel in Boston, and brought in two more cruise ships for sufficient on-site hotel rooms for the 10’s of 1000’s of customers who came to the two week (!) event.
PS @Thad E Ginathom I *sucked* at Math! In fact, I dropped out my senior year of university for electrical engineering for two reasons:

1. Sucked at math. Billy
2. Found out I could get paid a shit-ton of money w/o a degree because I could PROGRAM… and it wasn’t HARD

 

which at that time were long lengths of coax cables
Thicknet or Thinnet, make your choice

 

Yes, but it was the protocol… full 7 layer stack… DECnet…

Anyways, that’s getting really far out there. Should reel things back, methinks.

 

Thin with the connectors, thick with the "bee stings."

I recall going to install a small server and a handful of PCs at a customer site (Oh god, that was Novel, which, thankfully, I never had much to do with). Connected everything up. Networking: zilch.

I then recalled that, as I'd connected the stuff, I hadn't noticed a terminator. Anywhere.

The customer had put the cable himself: "Oh, you mean it isn't supposed to be a circle?"

LOL. Thankfully I had spares in my box.

When I was first introduced to hubs/switches, I had a comprehension difficulty. mental breakthrough: "Oh, you mean its like a network cable coiled up into a box!"


PS. I have a feeling that I have told the story of my transition into a computing career at least twice before in this thread. Sorry. <blush>


PPS. Just to close on a controversial note. IIRC, thin ethernet was rated at 10mb/s? Today, audiophools demand CAT7 and greater. I'm pretty sure that almost all their audio stuff would work over thin ethernet!

(And when mentally speccing the fastest storage components for an audio PC, remember: one can play music from a CD drive. What speed is that?)

 

Well, I just don't have a Windows machine now. But I double-hate Libre Office because of its Microsoft inspired/copied basis. For the minute amount of correspondence/spreadsheet work I do I can live with it.

Jargon is interesting. I recommend people take a look at The Jargon File . The differences between gamer jargon, hacker jargon, techie jargon. There was some highly intelligent re-use/creation of words and language. Compare that to current (last few decades) mangling of techie concepts by management and marketing people, which unleashed a heap of utter crap bullshit into the language. Binary, anyone?

Consider the difference between reading Unix documentation and reading Microsoft documentation.

I'm now thinking of the thick, glossy, wordy brochures from IBM that passed my desk on their way to the bin. They were a phenomenon. They could persuade me that this new thingie would change my life, revolutionise my business --- but also leave me scratching my head as to W-T-F it actually did!

And I'm thinking of IT managers promoted to their jobs because they could bullshit best.

I'm thinking... I'd better think about something else, lol.

 

I work on the marketing and communications team for a large not-for-profit Healthcare organization (for the last 12 years). I absolutely love the people I work with and have never considered looking for a different employer, competitive pay be damned. My goal is to be around people I don't feel like murdering while at work, so I have no complaints.

I also build DIY amps (mainly Bottlhead) for folks, although I've slowed down this past year.

My main job is being a father of 2 amazing 6-year-olds, husband to an amazing woman and son to an incredible mom.

 

Thanks for linking that. I was first exposed at the very beginning in around 1979/80. I knew some of those guys personally (Marc Crispin, Stallman, the Multics dudes, Dan Murphy, etc.). Hell, I even worked for a couple of them for a while.
The OG Hackers were all DEC-10/Lisp/AI dudes from about 5 years before my time… the freaking instruction set (for assembly language) literally had instructions - as in wired into the hardware - to do special LISP processing tasks… half-word instructions with 18 bit pointers (max address space for Lisp pointers IIRC).

Fun days, immensely talented (and strange) folks, one and all of us. We had cowboys, freaks/stoners, dweebs, gay/lesbians, trans, white, black, Asian, Latino, you name it… and it was early 1980s - go figure. World got along better then than it does today, that’s for sure.

For another hoot, try to chase down a copy of “CPU Wars” (1978)… I’ve a copy somewhere in my too-many boxes in the basement…