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494 words by attila written on 2025-08-23, last edit: 2025-08-23, tags: cobol, hacking, history, lisp, me, pdp11, personal, vax ⋔ Previous post: BlueSky's Followers Problem
originally posted on LinkedIn and yes I feel shame
I started on PDP-11s and VAXen, the occasional PDP-10, dialed into the ARPAnet with my trusty modem and ADM3A (I miss it). I loved LISP, was befuddled and amazed by MDL and BLISS, but it was PASCAL, C and, believe it or not, COBOL that found me steady employment, with lots of little gigs in DCL, assembler... whatever. I was a child of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and if I felt I belonged in any community it was DECUS and the plethora of DEC shops in southern California.
I spent four years working on what I now know was a 4GL, in C on the PC (horrible little thing!), with the proposition that I would own the framework and my employer would own the application I built for them using it. Nice idea. C-TREE, anyone? I learned about writing parsers and the joys of finite state machines on the run, so to speak, and had it all working only to come to work one day and find it padlocked: my boss failed to mention they were in serious trouble with the IRS. All of my code, my machine, backups, everything was taken: welcome to the Work Won't Love You Back Sweepstakes, kiddo. I was 21. Had studied philosophy at UCSD on and off but had dropped out because (a) I was paying attention, but really (b) work.
Moved from San Diego to Pittsburgh on a lark, nothing keeping me anywhere, and answered an ad in the paper for a job at Carnegie Mellon University. My interview went surprisingly well, and then my soon-to-be boss said: "OK, the interview is over. I have a problem here, can you help me?" At this point I was a legitimate Unix expert, when that wasn't all that common, and the problem was that my interviewer, who turned out to be an amazing hacker, was not: he didn't understand how Unix archives worked. I typed two commands and fixed his problem: hired.
For the next 20 years I worked in pretty much every area that has now become commonplace and which was anything but: distributed systems, graph visualization, relational databases, OOP, compilers, filesystems... you name it. I worked at Lycos, the first real search engine, and a bunch of failed startups. Got cancer, went back to work too soon (won't love you back, Beardo... remember?), did a stint at CERT until DHS was announced, so screw that.
More startups. More failure. Success is much more a function of luck than any skill on our part, my hearties, sorry to tell you.
Finally, here I am, on LinkedIn with the lot of you, at the end like the beginning: looking for work, willing to work cheap. No lessons learned, yet I know so much.
Anyway, we'll see how it pans out. That's why we play the (hunger) games, amirite?
EOF