Yeah, I saw some show where they put high school students in a room with a computer with a modem and dial up internet to see if they could figure out how to get online.
They eventually figured it out but it took them a lllllloooooooooonnnnnnnggggg time.
Still, I think about the Y2K patches my employer put in place and the amount of COBOL code still in use… they use date windowing and won’t work right after 1/1/2030. It was hard enough to find good COBOL programmers 22 years ago. In 9 more years there might not be anyone left who even remembers what Y2K issues are, let alone knows how to solve them.
So like there’s harmless amusing ignorance and then there’s ignorance that has the potential to cause problems.
I get the impression that in videos like that they pick the stupidest of kids. Anyway, I’m not sure I know how to use dial up. probably could figure it out though.
Oh man! I think we’re close in age… I remember signing out laptops from work just so I could use their dial-up ISP to send email on weekends. Because of course I was too cheap to pay for internet myself… being a future actuary & all. That shit was expensive… I think AOL was like $7 a month!!!
In fact, I didn’t even have my own computer until 2003… when I joined AO (not a coincidence).
But from 1999-2002 I could easily borrow one from work if I wanted to.
I have a friend who was laid off as a COBOL programmer about 10 years ago, after being made to train a team of Indians to do his job. I think they will still have competent Indians in 9 more years.
i lived at home until 2001. i’m not sure when i got my own computer or became an internet regular to want my own computer. the ao started in 2001. i don’t think i was an internet regular yet then. i think when i finally got my own computer, it was not dial up.
actually, we might have had dial up at my parents house. don’t really remember, and if we did, i don’t think i was on the internet much. i don’t recall the internet being this massive thing back then, but i could be wrong.
Hmm, maybe we had academic access before it got cheap? I think we’ve paid for internet access through the 90s, though. But it was really slow service. I used to use Lynx as my browser, because it was so much faster when you didn’t have to download any of the images.
I had friends working in Japan and Israel and Germany and England, though. Way cheaper to correspond by email than any other way.
Actually until early 2001 I was married to my first husband and he had a computer and I think we used a free dial-up internet service that had advertising.
So it would have been 2001-2002 when I was borrowing laptops from work. How time flies.
I remember his sister and her live-in boyfriend had something… now this is sort of ridiculous so brace yourself. They had TWO COMPUTERS!!!
Seriously! In case they both wanted to be on the computer AT THE SAME TIME! And they had a fancy thing called a network so that they could even both be on the internetat the same time.
I don’t remember when we got separate computers. Certainly in the early 90s we shared one family computer. By the late 90s we may have had our own laptops. Maybe the early oughts?
Now I am sitting here with two of my own fairly recent laptops, one that I’m using for voice (Zoom and Discord) and the other has an open screen for Google docs etc. that I’m using with the people I’m talking with.
True… once they figure out what the problem is and where the code resides that needs fixing. Indian programmers won’t be able to help with that.
It’s also a lot easier to give Indian programmers your specs and have them write something from scratch than it is to have them go in and edit production code.
I had a desktop at my work space but there were laptops that we could check out. Either to work over the weekends from home or to take on a business trip.
The sales team was assigned laptops as their only computers, but if they brought a nerd like me along to meet with a client or prospect then I brought a checked-out laptop if I needed a computer on the road.
seems like these days, there is no reason for a desktop. i don’t even know why we don’t all have laptops. that will be rectified in pandemic america though.
Did you miss that a decade ago they trained a team of Indians to maintain and work with their production COBOL code? Some of those employees were young. They have a team in place that knows the code well by now.
Very good point. I have mostly all desktops, one at my office, one at my home office, my SO has a desktop in their home office, etc. Probably because I’m a bit nerdy and like to build my own desktops. And, we use dual monitors, wired keyboards, etc. Also I can upgrade if/when I want.
Still, everything we have is location agnostic - I can do almost everything from any computer/any location these days. The last system I put together here I did the laptop thing - a laptop and 2 docking stations (one for their home office, one for when/if they ever return to the office) and put dual monitors/keyboard etc into the docking station. So they can just truck the laptop between home and the office as they choose. That’ll be what I do for everyone going forward.
Yes, because that step never happened at the company I’m talking about. The code didn’t require frequent maintenance. At the time I worked there precisely zero people knew how to update it. There were just a few people who knew that it was going to stop working correctly in the future.
probably could figure it out though.