On 11/01/19 8:57 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 6:48 AM DL Neil <pythonl...@danceswithmice.info> wrote:
Working with a bunch of younger folk (who may technically be of the age
of 'grand-children' - pardon me, I almost fell over my (long, grey)
beard), I am frequently the butt of their gentle, if ageist, jokes.
However, my sardonic amusement is to watch them wrestling with concepts
'we' readily recognise, perhaps from as long ago as mainframe-days.
My Dad was in computing back in the mainframe days, and used to regale
me with stories of holding a kilobyte of memory. But now I've started
doing the same sorts of things - I can expound upon the wonders of
engineering floppy disk boot sectors and finding that one spare byte
that I could use for something unrelated, or writing MS-DOS TSRs, or
*avoiding* writing a TSR by having it invoke another program and then
clean up after itself when that program finished... I distinctly
remember hooking the Print Screen interrupt to switch from one screen
to another so that I could play Colossal Caves (aka "ADVENTUR") and
keep track of which treasures I'd collected. Young folks these days
would say "why couldn't you just alt-tab"...
Ah yes, the ?good, old, days! Things were so much better then, before
'young experts' came along and complicated 'everything'...
However, as I rock my porch-chair and reminisce, I find that even
nostalgia ain't as good as it once used to be...
PS the smart reply: who do you think coded the Alt-Tab window-switching
mechanism?
or, whose shoulders' do you young, whipper-snappers think you're
standing on? (and, "please get down, and go and wash your feet")
...
--
Regards =dn
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