As a thread in NC recently showed that there are several of us here who are, um, "experienced" types, we should have our own thread!

Idle, you mentioned COBOL for Rockwell. I worked at a division of Rockwell, NTSD, for five years in Dallas, before we were sold. (86-91 iirc) I did HP-3000 PowerHouse work rather than IBM COBOL, but we interfaced with "Big Blue" a lot. Just curious what division you were in and when.

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Idle, you mentioned COBOL for Rockwell. ...

COBOL, where you could say

DIVIDE X BY Y GIVING P REMAINDER Q.

Do that now and they call it AI!

I remember working in COBOL....get the Data Division correct and the rest was a doddle.......(starts thinking about Coral 66 and Mil Projects)....

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Cafe style (verbose and never to the point):

Actually my employment history is more convoluted than I suggest. I have a B.S. in Chemistry but -- thanks to Vietnam -- I never actually got the chance to practice it. Being in the ranks of the unemployed in 1974 recession I went to a community college at govt expense and picked up a two-yr degree in what they called "Data Processing". I had an interest in it during college and the Air Force but just never got the chance to try it.

I first worked for the county (Cleveland, OH) doing programming for the welfare roles. That wreaked. So I took a commercial job with Allen-Bradley Company whose HQ was in Milwaukee. I worked in the Systems Division in Cleveland; they manufactured numerical and programmable controllers, #1 ahead of Siemens. I didn't work in the software or hardware engineering section and had nothing to do with making product; I was admin overhead doing business systems like accounting, inventory tracking, etc. Hence, the IBM mainframe and COBOL/IMS/DB2.

Allen-Bradley bought Reliance Electric to get the Motors Division to complement our Drives Division. Then Rockwell came along and bought out both of us. Eventually the entire mess was called "Rockwell Automation". And would'nt you know it, eventually all the Rockwell business units were spun off (semiconductors, rocketdyne, automotive, etc) and all that was left (the money maker) was the Automation part (essentially Allen-Bradley), which ended up being run by the old Allen-Bradley regime with a new name. I don't know if Collins is still part of Rockwell or not.

I don't know if my storyline can be followed, I barely remember the sequence of events myself. All I know is "What goes around comes around".

I worked there for 20 years (~1982-2002). The place began to stink more and more. So much bureaucracy and politics that it took days to do what I used to do in minutes. That's when I decided that I had enough years in to retire early (ten more years to full retirement) and uplift my life. That's why I hate the "good ol' days": they weren't really good, just tolerable. Heck, a friend of mine -- also retired from Rockwell -- refuses to have a computer in his house, no internet, no email. I don't blame him. If it weren't for my wife needing the PC for her job as school principal I probably wouldn't have one in the house either.

What is NTSD? Not familiar with that moniker? Also not familiar with "iirc". I must get out more. Educate me.

@River: AI at Rockwell? They were certainly artificial, but no intelligence there. People scoffed at me being a COBOL programmer (too infantile), but I loved it, and was good at it. But time marches on and so did I. BTW, I prefer the COMPUTE verb.

My first introduction to computers was while I was a Freshman at Case Institute of Technology in 1969 (now Case Western Reserve University much to the chagrin of the old CIT alumni having to associate with those liberal arts types!) I was a hardware Electronic Engineer student. The school *knew* that computer skills weren't really needed by EE's. We were told that if you had a job to run you would just hand it to the guy/guyette behind the computer shop window. We would never need to sully our fingers with programming which we probably couldn't understand anyway (my numerical methods professor's words).

The school required EE's to take 2 semesters of numerical methods so we would at least get a feel for what a computer would do. Great, prepare me for the real world with ALGOL 60 programming on a Univac 1104 mainframe! Even back then listing ALGOL experience on a resume would bring a chuckle from the interviewer. They only taught advanced programming like FORTRAN 66 and COBOL to EE's silly enough to think computers were important.

We had to buy a box of punch cards and time on the computer. We got 3 minutes for $10--very expensive . Professors and senior grad students could use the tube room terminals, but us lowly undergraduates had to stand in line to submit jobs at the card reader.

We paired up to do class assignments. Piotr and I teamed up. Piotr was a real nice guy, but dumb as a post (last I heard he was a taxi driver in Cleveland). We decided that I would write the programs and he would: 1) stand in line waiting for the punching machine, 2) punch the cards, 3) stand in line to submit the cards at the card reader, 4) submit the cards, 5) stand in line waiting for the job to print on the line printer, and 6) retrieve the print out so I could fix the errors and he could do this all again (several times). I thought this division of labor was a good deal.

We spent hours refining the programs (usually about 30 cards or so--toy programs really). Several times after days of looking at the program errors we found out that certain punch machines were out of alignment so even if the program was correct and the holes in the card looked OK, the card reader wouldn't read them correctly.

All this confirmed my suspicion that computers would never catch on and that I didn't want to have anything to do with them. I went off to build hardware for the US Government.

Well darn if these computer thingies didn't become important. I bought a Heathkit H89 in 1979 and taught myself Z80 assembly, BASIC, and FORTRAN on it. You haven't lived until you compile a FORTRAN program on a 2 MHz machine with 100 KB floppies of which 24 KB was Heath DOS.

The world changed some more. The last 10 years of my career I spent doing computer and network security. I'm really glad I had those ALGOL courses :-)

So I took a commercial job with Allen-Bradley Company whose HQ was in Milwaukee. I worked in the Systems Division in Cleveland; they manufactured numerical and programmable controllers, #1 ahead of Siemens. I didn't work in the software or hardware engineering section and had nothing to do with making product; I was admin overhead doing business systems like accounting, inventory tracking, etc. Hence, the IBM mainframe and COBOL/IMS/DB2.

Allen-Bradley bought Reliance Electric to get the Motors Division to complement our Drives Division. Then Rockwell came along and bought out both of us. Eventually the entire mess was called "Rockwell Automation". And would'nt you know it, eventually all the Rockwell business units were spun off (semiconductors, rocketdyne, automotive, etc) and all that was left (the money maker) was the Automation part (essentially Allen-Bradley), which ended up being run by the old Allen-Bradley regime with a new name. I don't know if Collins is still part of Rockwell or not.
<snipped>
What is NTSD? Not familiar with that moniker? Also not familiar with "iirc". I must get out more. Educate me.

"iirc" is "if I recall correctly" :-)

I may be able to cast some light from the other side... Rockwell Collins, which is where I started, became part of Rockwell Network Telecommunications Systems Division (NTSD) while I was there. The HP-3000 work I was doing partly involved driving an Allen-Bradley PLC-3 system which ran a robotic warehouse where we used Macs as workstations. So I wound up doing code on all three pieces of it. (AB PLC-3 GA-BASIC and ladder logic. Shudder.) Soon after Rockwell bought AB, they sold us.

The _sad_ part is, as bad as Rockwell was, they sold us to Alcatel, who was far worse. Alcatel was a French company that decided to become a major player in the US telecomm market, and spent billions to buy a number of good companies. For about five years they poured money in, but had no idea how to run a US operation. Then it was time for us to be profitable, and they made even _worse_ management decisions. (Example; the multi-million dollar robotic warehouse was hauled out in the parking lot and sold for scrap, PLC's and all, replaced with a pencil-and-paper system. Second example; all the custom computer applications developed over many years, and running on the "best" hardware for the purpose, was replaced with purchased packages running on DEC VAX/VMS, in the name of "standardization". The purchased software, bought in 1995, was not Y2K compliant.) Eventually they wound up laying off some 60,000 people and closing most of the plants they'd bought. I have no idea if they still exist in the U.S. at all or not, but the plant in Dallas that I worked at has been sitting empty now for several years.

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Still own an elderly Alcatel modem. <big eyes> Explains why it was the only time I ever saw one. <grin>

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FADBeens

Hey I was running a couple of HP 3000's at the main Royal Signals Officer Training school in the mid 70's......nice piece of kit at that time!

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I loved the HP-3000s... Even into the late 90's, the PA-RISC processors did a great job, the MPE operating system, while having some minor problems, was _very_ "programmer and user friendly" compared to the alternatives, and the IMAGE database was _incredibly_ fast and stable; ran circles around ANY relational database. But HP couldn't sell ice cubes in the desert. They couldn't compete with all the Unix boxen in the marketing arena (including their own wares, which kept them from slamming the OS since they sold it too), and couldn't compete with anyone waving the magic buzzword "relational" around. Sigh.

VMS was a big step down on the "friendly" ladder from MPE. Instead of being designed for business transaction processing, it was designed for engineering. More powerful, but harder to learn, and MUCH harder to manage and administer. Unix is another rung down the same ladder. Totally unfriendly, but much more powerful, designed for programmers, and only someone _truly_ knowledgeable should be trusted to manage and administer a Unix box in a business environment.

Same trend with languages. Powerhouse was the MPE, COBOL was the VMS, and C is the Unix. River, if you think COBOL was "AI"ish, you should look at Powerhouse. I'll throw out a snippet: (by "snippet", I mean a complete, executable, program, ready to compile)

access customers link customer_id to customer_id of orders
choose customers where customer_state = "TX"
select if order_status = "Open" and shipped_status = "Unshipped"
sort on order_date of orders descending, on customer_id
report order_date print at order_date customer_id print at customer_id order_total
footing at order_date order_date order_total subtotal skip 2
final footing order_total subtotal

Here's what the output would look like - except it would have page headings, etc., that I'm leaving out.

Order Date    Customer ID   Order Total
12/30/2005   12345           $1,257.28
                                                900.72
                       14791            1,512.49
                                            ---------
                                             3,129.69

12/29/2005   16011                852.20
...

EDIT:: I give up - pretend all of that mess is aligned, I can't get BBCode to leave it alone.

And it works - transparently - whether the database underneath is IMAGE, Oracle, SQLServer, MySQL, or even indexed files... and the language is the same on MPE, VMS, Unix...

So naturally it's dying, being replaced by C. Sigh.

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...The _sad_ part is, as bad as Rockwell was, they sold us to Alcatel, who was far worse.... Then it was time for us to be profitable, and they made even _worse_ management decisions....

All I can say, Bill, is "SHOCKING". Sooo, um, commonplace these days. Rockwell and A-B underwent many evolutionary changes and I still don't think there was any underlying "plan", more like reactions to the market moment. And these clowns make the big bucks? In spite of the organizational mess, the products were good and they treated employees reasonably well, most of the time. I can't complain too much about my compensation and work environment except near the end before retirement. Hope your life after NTSD was much better.

I didn't cut my teeth on the big iron, but on the small stuff. Tiny little 8 bit micro in about 1973 / 1974, long since faded into obscurity.

Kids of today look at you like you're from Mars when you tell them about a computer with 512 bytes of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM.

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My first program printed out "Hello World" - on a teletype machine that was about the same size as a refrigerator. There was no monitor. Must have been around 1978 or so.

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Wow! another Chemist. I, also, was trained as a Chemist, have finished the research but not yet written the dissertation. I developed software for a few years before starting Graduate School. I look forward to building my on cluster of computers for doing Molecular Dynamics simulations as soon as I get some time; I do not plan to ever work as a Chemist. I probably wouldn't qualify as a geezer, but I found these posts very interesting.

Cafe style (verbose and never to the point):

Actually my employment history is more convoluted than I suggest. I have a B.S. in Chemistry but -- thanks to Vietnam -- I never actually got the chance to practice it. Being in the ranks of the unemployed in 1974 recession I went to a community college at govt expense and picked up a two-yr degree in what they called "Data Processing". I had an interest in it during college and the Air Force but just never got the chance to try it.

I first worked for the county (Cleveland, OH) doing programming for the welfare roles. That wreaked. So I took a commercial job with Allen-Bradley Company whose HQ was in Milwaukee. I worked in the Systems Division in Cleveland; they manufactured numerical and programmable controllers, #1 ahead of Siemens. I didn't work in the software or hardware engineering section and had nothing to do with making product; I was admin overhead doing business systems like accounting, inventory tracking, etc. Hence, the IBM mainframe and COBOL/IMS/DB2.

Allen-Bradley bought Reliance Electric to get the Motors Division to complement our Drives Division. Then Rockwell came along and bought out both of us. Eventually the entire mess was called "Rockwell Automation". And would'nt you know it, eventually all the Rockwell business units were spun off (semiconductors, rocketdyne, automotive, etc) and all that was left (the money maker) was the Automation part (essentially Allen-Bradley), which ended up being run by the old Allen-Bradley regime with a new name. I don't know if Collins is still part of Rockwell or not.

I don't know if my storyline can be followed, I barely remember the sequence of events myself. All I know is "What goes around comes around".

I worked there for 20 years (~1982-2002). The place began to stink more and more. So much bureaucracy and politics that it took days to do what I used to do in minutes. That's when I decided that I had enough years in to retire early (ten more years to full retirement) and uplift my life. That's why I hate the "good ol' days": they weren't really good, just tolerable. Heck, a friend of mine -- also retired from Rockwell -- refuses to have a computer in his house, no internet, no email. I don't blame him. If it weren't for my wife needing the PC for her job as school principal I probably wouldn't have one in the house either.

What is NTSD? Not familiar with that moniker? Also not familiar with "iirc". I must get out more. Educate me.

@River: AI at Rockwell? They were certainly artificial, but no intelligence there. People scoffed at me being a COBOL programmer (too infantile), but I loved it, and was good at it. But time marches on and so did I. BTW, I prefer the COMPUTE verb.

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I started on an IMB 360 60 back in 72, after donateing time to the country for the war in Vietnam, but with some good luck I never went there.

In 1977 switched from private companies to the Govt. and stayed there. Companies have many advantages over working for State Govt. but I got to retire with a good penson at the age og 55. Figure I should go out while the health is good and enjoy it, than take something part time later.

In '78 through '80, I was allowed to take classes at the local community college to learn BASIC, then Fortran, Cobol and Pascal. In '81, as a Freshman in Highschool, I bought an Apple II+ with 48K ram, and a 150k? single sided floppy disk drive. Adding a z80 cp/m card, and I was able to buy cp/m Fortran and Cobol compilers.

It's humbling to note that my Apple II+ which was several stages beyond some of the other "first" systems mentioned here - is probably outclassed by the processing power and ram on my watch. *sniff*

And the local college no longer teaches programming. They hold classes on MS Word, MS Excel, typing, and Introduction to MS Windows. Some of the local miscreants could use programming to help keep them out of trouble. :)

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In '78 through '80, I was allowed to take classes at the local community college to learn BASIC, then Fortran, Cobol and Pascal.

We did not have anycommunity colleges open when I learned programming so I went to a private school for Cobal, Fortran, assembler, and RPG in 1970. Later I went to a community college, than a 4 year college, being a Vietnam Era Veteran they waved the tuition, which was a big help.

The young people these days do not know what they are missing when they don't have to keypunch there programs onto cards to enter them into the computer. I must have waisted thousands of cards due to my bad typing.

The JCL for a mainframe was always fun also.

After College I went into Auditing for the state of Connecticut rather than DP due to bad nerves. Than in 2003 they wanted to cut the work force so they offered a good early retirement program. I had already qualified for reqular retirement (Age 55 with 25 years of service) but was going to work a few more. But with the early retirement they offered there was no incentive to stay.

The last 3 weeks at that job were not fun, I was doing the DP stuff for my unit and had to teach the job to someone who did not want to learn. At the same time the data that was being audited had a big change in the format that it came in so had to redo all the programs for pulling out random samples at the same time as teaching another person. Doing the two at the same time with a deadling of my leaveing was really a strain on the neerves. Wow was I glad to get out of there.

Now this is great, go up to Maine when I want in the Summer, and down to NC and FL when I want the rest of the year to see the children and Mom. Yes she is still doing good at 86.
Cheers
Ray

You folks bring back memories. Fortran, Cobol, yup. Still have the Kernighan & Ritchie C book. My first "Hello World" was on a *printing* terminal off of a Vax, running 300 baud....

Regards,

Ardis

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I started out in my freshman year in 100 level BASIC classes then moved on to FORTRAN. I also remember learning JOB CONTROL LANGUAGE and walking around campus with stacks and stacks of computer (do not fold, spindle or mutilate) cards which input my program to an IBM mainframe. The results would printout on a line printer which the computer lab geeks would put neatly in my box a day or two later.

I had no idea monitiors were even invented until I passed an Apple Computer store one day in 1979 and wondered what the heck was an Apple Computer. What a shock!!

My first computer turned out to be a dual floppy KAYPRO running CPM a very sweet 8 bit system.


Have a great day .................

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Started with the original TSR model and PDP-11 (ticket tape with text terminal). Then bought a Vic 20, then Apple ][+ clone for most of the 80s, before finally making to a 386-40 (AMD) many years later.

Started with the original TSR model and PDP-11 (ticket tape with text terminal). Then bought a Vic 20, then Apple ][+ clone for most of the 80s, before finally making to a 386-40 (AMD) many years later.

You were way ahead of me, all I used till about 1984 was a mainframe. The first one at home was a early 286, a lot of people had them at home by than.