this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Imagine both the annoyance and job security having to manage MS-DOS and 3.1 systems for a railroad would entail.
I would love it so much. I’d feel right at home. I miss sitting in my room and learning everything I could about DOS. That was the best time I ever had with computers.
I once built, setup, and maintained about 20 computers for a Christian school for free just because I loved doing it so much.
I wish I still had that enthusiasm for tech.
Me too.
In high school, there was a kid who was always trying to make money. Like even then, he wanted his own business. In fact he had a couple small ones back then.
One of his endeavours was massive LAN parties. He had the capital to rent spaces, hardware, and was even able to get sponsorships.
He did not have the tech chops to do it though.
Myself, and one circle of friends were THE computer nerds of the school, but it wasn't really seen as a negative for us - then again we did orchestrate a "free day" and got away with it by taking down the schools network from inside and one person had a loud fucking mouth, but we covered our tracks.
Anyways, we got in free to these LAN parties as long as we set up and maintained shit. Surprisingly very few problems, about once a LAN party we had to fix something. And it was useful experience.
That shit was fucking amazing. I loved it.
I got home from work. Wife works from home. She has had an ongoing tech issue I can't really touch because it's that companies property. But I just don't want to hear it. At all. I'm dead inside in that regard.
It's gotten so bad that I had an issue with my gaming rig.
I needed to reseat the RAM. Not hard, except the case is mounted on the wall as a display piece that would require moving a bunch of shit before getting a ladder and yada yada.
I just didn't game for three days. Just could not muster the energy to care about that. I hate it.
God, I feel that so much. Even with my Steam deck, if it requires too much tweaking I’ll ask my kid. If she’ll do it, great. If not, I’ll find something else to do.
People burned me out so bad. Everything they did was somehow my fault. Every relative I had called me constantly about silly problems. “My whole quickbooks is deleted. I had it on my desktop and now it’s gone!” “Ok, so I copied excel from my desktop onto usb drive and it won’t open on my other computer. The icon is there but it just won’t work. Oh, well I don’t see why not! It works fine when I click it on the other one!”
One time a guy brought me his laptop to repair. I repaired it and got the $75 bucks I charged. More than a year later I got a call, “Lithen, I don’t know what you did to my laptop, but it hathen’t worked, like, for crap, thinthe you worked on it.” I said, “ok bud, I’ve worked on hundreds. Which one was yours?” I asked him to download TeamViewer, went to his control panel, seen a pile of bullshit crapware he had recently installed, told him to kiss my ass and take it to “thomeone elthe”. I shouldn’t have made fun of his lisp, but I was ready to implode from the crap at that point.
People call me now and I play dumb and act like I just haven’t kept up with the changes. I. Hate. Computers.
And I fucking hate that, because I loved them so much when I was younger. It was like exploring a whole new universe.
Frankly that's nothing. In the worst case a train won't start, which for DB really isn't something unusual. It's far more disturbing how the whole global financial market sometimes rely on code that's still written in COBOL.
Does this really matter? It's more of a maintenance issue than a functional one.
It all gets compiled down to binary, anyways.
it matters because it is a language that few people learn, so the available talent is scarce, increasing the chance something bad happens. Keeping up with an evolving society is essential for the longevity of a service
I have a friend who is going to take over maintenance for a smaller regional banking system in a few years. It's mostly COBOL and the systems themselves have not been updated in like 25-30 years. He has been apprenticing under his mother who has been in charge of maintaining the infrastructure there since the late '80s.
Time 2 years top, there will be an AI that converts perfectly COBOL into JavaScript.
Well it matters when it comes to replacing ageing programmers with very few options available. It's definitely not something taught in schools today, so one has to be very deliberately learn it.
Don't get me wrong, you can make a lot of money in such a position. But you also have to deal with COBOL.
Well, DOS is open source now. And that old hardware was quite reliable. Fewer moving parts, I'd expect fewer things to break.
Only MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 are open-sourced under MIT license, anything newer is not. These versions were pretty bare-bones, only DOS 2.0 implemented directories for example.
Unless you mean FreeDOS, which is an open-source DOS-based operating system, which generally should work with any DOS programs/games, but it still may not be 100% compatible with some proprietary software.
Yes, meant FreeDOS, and older versions of DOS. Can't say I had issues with FreeDOS. But then again, it's not like I use it daily.
As a young person who loves legacy software - sign me up!