The Iron Age Page

for Survivors of the Iron Age Making the Transition from Mainframes to PCs

The Iron Age! Legendary era of computer pioneers! Before silicon, there was iron. Well, actually, there was rust -- little doughnut-shaped ferric oxide cores. We programmed right down to the bare metal.

You're probably still living with the results.

Die Young, Stay Pretty

You see, since there's never enough money to replace an entire system, each individual new piece has to mesh with the existing pieces. So the original design survives intact through many, many upgrades. The paper system that was transferred to unit record equipment was the basis of the 1401 version that no one wanted to monkey with when the 360 was installed, and since it was stumbling along OK ( well, almost OK) when they bought the 370, they figured it was probably safer not to make any major changes when they acquired the 3090. Funny how much trouble they're having with the changeover to object-oriented systems.

But we Airship Foundry veterans were an intrepid lot, always ready to learn a new language of the future. LISP, APL, PL/1, Pascal, Ada, "C" ... we always answered the gong. Some of us even wrote compilers ourselves. If you knew assembler, you knew it was all the same when it got to the machine's stomach.

But now ...

Strange Days Have Tracked Us Down

Q. So how different can this object-oriented stuff be?

  1. The analysis and design principles are the same. You just implement in a different language.
  2. There's a lot of carryover and some new approaches. If you were any good at the old stuff, you can learn the new stuff, easy.
  3. Analysis and design were completely reinvented while you stepped out for a beer. Everything you know is wrong.
  4. The whole thing is a scam. Learn the new buzzwords and you'll be OK.
  5. The whole thing is a scam. Tell the new guys to buzz off.
Try a few of these resources and you can choose an answer for yourself.

... and when it's time to knock off work, you can go for a nice web crawl.

If you feel lost already, try starting with the ABCs .

A special note on the dinosaur: it's Camarasaurus, whose head was for many years mistakenly mounted on the body of Apatosaurus, who in turn was for many years mistakenly denominated Brontosaurus.

... and There's More!


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http://pages.prodigy.net/feaudrey/ironage.htm





The Electronic Tin Cup

Send along any contributions or suggestions that might make these pages more useful.
(e-mail feaudrey@yahoo.com)

Note: Recreational programmers have pages that are "Under Construction". Professional software developers have pages that are "In Prototyping".

These pages last updated September 1998
Entire Site Copyright ©1996,7,8 Gail Beddow All Rights Reserved
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