learning burnout (was: Mac/Mac Programming/Cocoa/HyperTalk Books free - Melbourne)

On 12 December 2011 18:29, John Many Jars <john at yoyodyne-propulsion.net> wrote: I had to get a PDP/11 talking to a bunch of Mac SEs running MacOS 7 once. This involved ordering a tape of Kermit from the University of Lancaster, installing it on a computer of an entire family which I had never seen, touched or known /anything/ about ever before or since, and getting it running and sending and receiving files. Of all the work I have ever done, I think that is one of the single jobs I am most proud of. Truly flying blind, but it all worked. (The client came to use and said that they wanted OCR into their office wordprocessor. Little did we know that some unsung hero of a DEC salesman had sold them a PDP/11 and a bunch of dumb terminals *in the mid-1980s* as an office WP solution. Quarter of a million quid they paid, for something a decade out of date the day it was delivered. Absolutely astounding. So we replaced most of the terminals with Macs, networked over the same cabling system. They wrote text in MS Word, OCRed with Caere Omnipage, and then used a terminal emulator and Kermit to send it to the "mainframe" host and print it. Seriously Heath Robinson (er, what do they call that in the Colonies? "Rube Goldberg", I think?) solution, but it all worked and the customer /loved/ it. It allowed them to get a few more years of use out of the DEC kit before we replaced it with a proper Mac network - after I'd left the company - and LaserWriters. It was sad that the LaserWriters mainly printed in Courier, but hey, they were lawyers, they liked that sort of thing. Other moments of the driving of obscure-or-unknown-systems that rescued an employer's collective nether regions from the fire a few times were mostly document or data transfer. * From a Torch Bridge running CP/M 2 on a BBC Micro over to a PC. That required the interesting combination of CP/M knowledge (good old PIP) and Acorn MOS and ADFS knowledge. * From a QUME hardware wordprocessor with hard-sectored disks in an unknown format to DOS. We wired up a crossover cable, attached a PC to the WP's serial port, worked out the baud rate by guess and by gods, and captured printer output to disk. Only to discover that the WP did bidirectional printing /in software./ Every other line was printed backwards: line feed, backspace, backspace, character, backspace, backspace, character, backspace, backspace, character, all the way to the end of the line, then linefeed. And of course the text might start on an odd or an even line, so you didn't know for sure which ones were backwards. Bold was achieved by overprinting the character twice, with 2 backspaces, and italics by printing underscores and double backspaces. I unravelled all that in QuickBASIC. :?) * Getting data off an accounts system running under CCP/M (v3.something, I think) on a Jarogate Sprite. (Which seems to be an almost forgotten system, now. There were quite a few on the Isle of Man in the 1980s.) It was DOS-floppy compatible, 1.2MB ones I think, but it contained something like 40MB of data. Floppies were quicker than the serial ports, but still, we were looking at a *LOT* of disks. My main contribution to this one was working out that, if limited to certain specific commands, PKZip could actually be run successfully under CCP/M, meaning that we could reduce the file sizes to transfer by about 2 orders of magnitude, and a task that looked like it would take weeks took an afternoon. But all this weird and wonderful stuff, all this variety, is gone now. Now, it's MS Office on Windows, or on Mac OS X, or Linux, which means Ubuntu or a derivative. Everything else has gone away. And it's all very boring. Windows is still is pig in many respects. OS X is lovely in many ways but there is a limit to how much you can customise it. Linux contains legions, but it's all a bit samey and increasingly it seems to me that Ubuntu is the way to go. (Although I am curious about GoboLinux and have some Ideas in that direction.) But really, most of the interest has gone out of IT now, for my money. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508