The barred list is stacking up
“I find myself confronted with the ultimate dilemma,” says Martin Williams, a man who has graced our pages often. “Should I be excluded from The Stack myself?”
Martin has recently retired from Powys County Council, and is looking forward to spending even more hours at The Stack.
“I can enthral the youngsters for hours on end with exhilarating tales of *FX commands, OSCLI, and 6502 Assembler. But would I be welcome?” he says.
Meanwhile, Keith Swinford at Saint-Gobain Abrasives opines: “I must nominate a small spotty youth in PC World, who when I tried to purchase a budget PC nationally advertised on TV as ‘to take away today’, replied that ‘we ain’t got none’.”
And what about the next-cheapest? “We ain’t got none of them neither’”.
Keith went to Argos, where the PC was £20 cheaper.
We’d just like to say to Martin: you’re always welcome, just don’t talk to us.
Meanwhile, any of those purple-shirted people from the PC World advert – and their real-life counterparts – are banned for having the worst adverts on TV.
Smoking an e-fag
One of the facilities we can’t supply at The Stack is the ability to smoke indoors.
However, we received an email this week from a firm called SuperSmoker.co.uk, which claims to offer “an electronic, alternative cigarette which contains no tobacco and does not burn – rather it contains a microchip and a harmless liquid that when the user inhales, turns to a vapour which contains nicotine.
“The vapour has the appearance of smoke but is harmless and can be legally used in areas where traditional cigarettes cannot… No longer will IT staff have to walk outside and make polite small talk with other departments over an overflowing ashtray,” it says.
We always thought that other departments refused to talk to you because they didn’t want to talk about technology on their smoking break, but imagine how many pals you’ll now make by describing the microchip-based fag substitute in your mouth.
Any less geeky ways you’re beating the smoking ban, let us know.
Not even a mouse
Time for a little pre-Christmas competition, suggested by Bruce Parker at IRIS Legal Solutions.
“I would like to volunteer verses based on Twas the night before Christmas,” he says. Here’s Bruce’s attempt, and if you fancy a crack at it, let us know. We’ll publish the best entries, and there may be a Christmas prize if you’re good.
Twas the night before launch of a new Vista pack
When all who weren’t barred were drunk in The Stack
The landlord was happy, his tills rang with cheer
The punters were happy, there was still lots of beer
The CDs were nestled all snug in the shop
While visions of progress would come to a stop
The punters installed it (though most were still smashed)
A message disappeared, and the system had crashed.
Midwife crisis
In a slightly surreal development of our pretentious job titles thread, you’ve taken to owning up to past misdemeanours.
“I once, naively, thought I could stop getting a trade title each month by describing myself as a retired midwife from Zambia,” says Martin, who doesn’t give his second name, from Cambridge Kits.
It didn’t work. We’re not sure what job title would achieve this: maybe you could help him.
Family values
Our search for the UK’s oldest second-generation programmer continues.
“There are third-generation programmers around,” says Mike Harrison at HMCS.
“My father-in-law programmed a stock-control system at Aldermaston in the 1960s. His daughter became a programmer in 1979 (Cobol) and is still in IT, and our son has worked at Vodafone for several years.”
Mike wrote his first program in 1964. “Three generations, and between us 90 years of programming – or more accurately 90 years of debugging.”
Which must have made for some riveting conversations over Sunday lunch.
Kick off
Finally, we’ve been discussing what makes computers into people and vice versa. Paul Stanswood at Omron Electronics Europe knows that people aren’t obsolete yet.
“My computer beat me at chess,” he says. “But it was no match at kick boxing.”
Rules of entry don’t stack up
More requests for people to be banned from The Stack, starting with a point we raised last week.
“I think that non-existence should be a bar on entering The Stack, otherwise we will be overrun with helpful service desk operatives, honest salesmen, and new men,” says Jim Blair.
“In general, there should be a rule on how much technology is allowed in The Stack,” says Jeff Graham at Xor Systems, taking his inspiration from the advert where a punter is barred for using his Bluetooth handset. “It should either be a haven from any form of technology, or alternatively, technology should be encouraged, so The Stack would resemble a trade show.”
Our decision: we’re allowing non-existent people, because if helpful service desk operatives turned up, we wouldn’t just let them in, we’d buy them a drink.
But we’re banning technology, unless it’s so spectacularly obsolete as to be a topic of conversation in its own right. So, anyone bringing a 1950s mainframe to show the other punters is welcome – although it would probably need to be left in the car park.
And for his suggestion that The Stack could be made into a trade show, we’re temporarily banning Jeff. It’s the only way to teach him a lesson.
Pulling our legs
In our increasingly philosophical column, having resolved – to no one’s real satisfaction – the question of how much of our readers can be replaced with artificial bits before they become machines, we ask two more questions on human existence.
“Do I count as a machine having had two hips and a knee replaced, and a tendency to mutter ‘users should be shot’?” asks Paul Smith at Ultraframe. We think the answer is probably “yes”, which might mean you can claim a parking space for yourself.
John Cameron-Pilkington at Federal-Mogul Corporation writes: “I have an artificial right leg. Obviously, I have a spare in case of breakdowns; does that make me a monopod, a biped or a tripod?” We’re certain there’s a government guideline on this somewhere. Opinions please.
Shop sheikh-up
Before we get out the latest batch of ageing second-generation programmers: “I was born in 1944 and I’m still working in the computer industry,” says Dennis Humby at Caradon District Council.
“I started in 1969 at a London-based computer bureau called MCS working on the Honeywell 400 series of computer, and moved into programming in 1971 when I became a diagnostic programmer correcting programs by substituting octal cards for errors.
One such error concerned a large firm that had a program which dealt with one-off purchases up to £99,999. No one imagined that anyone was rich enough to spend more than that in one store on the same day. We didn’t take into account the oil-rich sheikhs, one of which did just that and sent our program into apoplexy.”
Double Dutch
Shocking news from the Netherlands, where Dutch police have arrested a 17-year-old for stealing furniture – from a virtual hotel.
Habbo Hotel (slogan: “hangout for teens”) has seven million members in 31 countries and a turnover of £3m, and allows users to decorate their own rooms.
The miscreant hacked other accounts and moved their tiny pixellated furniture into his little room, to a value of £2,500, which makes us wonder: How can furniture that doesn’t exist cost £2,500? And will he go to virtual prison?
N:/uff, we say
Dan Davies at INPS thwarts our desire to bring the directory listing topic to a close by giving us a listing of every letter of the alphabet in the same format, which deserves a wider audience.
We can’t print them all because of space, but the highlights: B:\forMutton; C:\forMiles; I:\forTheEngine; L:\forLeather; R:\forMo and X:\forBreakfast.
Talking in maths
And so to the ongoing search for the oldest second-generation programmers.
Roger York, aged 63 and recently retired, started in the business in 1966, but is a newbie compared with his father, now aged 90.
“He was a mathematician working with computers in the late 1940s, using mercury delay lines. In the winter he would go inside among the ranks of valves to keep warm. He continued using computers and finally stopped programming them about five years ago.”
Saluting more golden oldies
This second-generation programmer is going to be hard to beat, unless this thread runs for a very long time.
“I was born in 1935 and am still, at 72, an active member of the BCS, maintaining and supporting Delphi software for the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry Stability Constants Database,” says Gwyn Pettit.
“My father, Arch Coulson, was born in 1905 and was a Fellow of the BCS, teaching maths and computing at Dover Grammar School, and later working at the University of Kent.”
Gwyn has been working in computing since 1960, starting out on a Control Data 1604, moving on to the Ferranti Pegasus, minicomputers and PCs. Now that may be hard to beat. Unless, of course, you know better.
405 error
“I think that John Harris” (who if you recall was the man who started our second-generation programmer thread) “has misremembered the manufacturer of the computer that his father programmed,” says former Elliott Computer Bureau Operator Philip Sugden. “If it was a 405 it would have been an NCR-Elliott 405 and not a Honeywell.”
Philip even has a copy of the charmingly detailed “June 1962 Computer Survey” (from an era when the purchase of any computer was news in itself) showing that an NCR-Elliott 405 was delivered to Joseph Lucas (Sales & Service) Ltd, Birmingham in January 1959 to run sales statistics and order scheduling.
“Daily routine maintenance alone used to take an hour-and-a-half,” he adds, proving that little changes, as the Dell PC used for Backbytes has roughly the same maintenance schedule.
Breaking point
We were concerned to find the exact point at which a man becomes a machine.
Is it, as suggested by the wife of Julian Cole, the point where he obtains a hip replacement? Is it, as David Hills, suggests: “When the individual in question starts muttering ‘Crush the fleshy ones’ under his breath.”
We don’t think any of our readers have crossed that line… yet.
King in the ring
Because it’s a sport we know will appeal to many of our readers, we’re delighted to hail the world’s first chessboxing champion – a German policeman named Frank Stoldt won in the seventh round by checkmate.
The rules, if you fancy a go, are that you alternate rounds of boxing and chess. A checkmate or a knockout settles a bout. It’s apparently very popular in Eastern Europe – the world title was fought in front of 1,200 fans in Berlin.
All of which leads us to wonder what sort of competitive sport could be a fair test of the skills of Computing readers?
All suggestions welcome – after all, you could become a world champion.
Getting it out of your system
More nominations for people to ban from The Stack, as gradually we whittle our customer list down to single figures.
“I think that male system managers should not be allowed into The Stack,” says Sue Pringle at Mayday University Hospital.
“What a strange and abnormal breed. Alcohol makes them have strange, delusional rantings – they think they manage systems that do what users want, within a project delivered on time, within budget and with all staff still on speaking terms.”
This all sounds somewhat personal. Sorry Sue, we’re keeping the system managers, because delusional rantings wouldn’t seem at all unusual among our clientele.
Meanwhile Malcolm Swallow, suggests: “The first person to ban from The Stack on the grounds that he is likely to incite extreme violence from otherwise peaceable customers would be the government’s e-Envoy.”
Sorry Malcolm, but the role of e-Envoy was discontinued some while back, which raises a whole new issue: can we bar someone who doesn’t exist?
Wonderful listing
In what might be our final directory listing, Jason Slater – stung by the accusation that his rock’n’roll listing confused two songs – has spent a long time compiling something with no conceivable use whatsoever. Which is fine by us:
“I:\ C:\ T:\rezof G:\reen A:\nd R:\edrozes2 I:\ C:\themb L:\oom4m E:\and U:\and I:\think2mys L:\fwhat A:\1d4lworld” he suggests.
Generation game hits half-century
“I rather thought that I was the oldest second-generation computer scientist,” says John ffitch, professor of software engineering at the University of Bath.
“I wrote my first program 50 years ago for a Pegasus computer. My father Edgar was a government servant, and learned to program a week or two before me and my sister.
“He will be 90 in six weeks, and is still programming. I still write programs on a daily basis, both open source and commercial.”
We checked John’s bio and he was born on 10 December 1945. Which means if he wins our competition, it will be just in time for his 62nd birthday. Any challengers?
The RAM that time forgot
Mike Saunders, who aptly writes from Wrinklies.org, is only first generation, so we can’t include him in our competition. But his memory is still sound.
“To put today’s technology into perspective, I was with IBM in 1962 when it announced an increase in memory for the 1401 computer from 24K to 48K. It worried the sales force no end. ‘How the hell are customers going to use another 24K?’ they kept asking.”
Brains, booze and the biped
Our thread about sexual relationships with robots has moved onto trying to work out what’s human and what’s not. We’ve sort of established that people with artificial hips are still more or less human already, so this is truly pioneering work.
“Isaac Asimov declared that the definition of human was that no matter how much metal there was in you, having a human brain made you human,” explains Kevin Rowe. “But on that score, half the cabinet would be excluded.” And, indeed, some of our readers.
Kevin suggests the ability to get drunk – surely humanity’s finest accomplishment – might be a more distinctively human trait.
Rejection slips for second-raters
Talking of which, two more nominations for who to bar from The Stack.
“I would bar the people who design those infuriating surveys that I keep being phoned up to take part in. They ask everyone to mark ‘on a scale of one to 10’ whether the beer is flat, warm, cloudy or value for money,” says Rick Harper.
Meanwhile “Woody” requests that “all marketing managers who hear technical terms and try to use them as buzzwords without having a clue as to their meaning” be barred.
He especially wants to give a marketing colleague the boot. She wrote a form asking respondents if they wanted output in “html, text only or askey”.
We’re going to keep Woody’s colleague, though, because marketing has an expenses budget for entertaining. But the market researchers can take their clipboards and go stand outside in the rain.
A wopbopalula a wopbam boob
We like to get things right, so need to make good a very serious error in our directory listings.
“Jason Slater, in Backbytes 25 October, has blurred the distinction between two deities of the rock ’n roll pantheon,” writes David Victor. “B:\bop, A:\lula is, of course, by Gene Vincent and was the B side of Woman Love. Tutti-Frutti by Little Richard starts A:\wopbopalula A:\wopbamboo.”
We apologise for this oversight, and hope that, like David, you’re storing your rock trivia in the right directories. As David says:
“V:\valadifference.”
Being there
A new angle on our thread revealing some of your pretentious job titles.
“A long time ago when my trade magazine subscription expired I filled out the re-registration card,” says Dave Edwards at City Computing. To liven things up, he listed his job title as “Supreme Being”.
When the magazine arrived, it was addressed to “Dave Edwards, senior consultant”. An educated guess, in our opinion.
Click and groan
“As an IT professional…” begins an email sent to reader David Alexander at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office “…take the Qualys test and see how secure your network is. Click here to test your network.”
“As an experienced information security professional, I know a lot better than to click on a link that promises to ‘test my network’,” says David.
