I think my dad took an IBM training on mainframe programming when he was in college getting his business degree in the 60s. My earliest "tech memory" is from the huge Digital TSR-80 desk computer he bought in 1980. He did a lot of dBase II/III/IV and Clipper back then, bought a load of PC and Byte magazine and pirated a lot of diskettes. You could say he's a quintessential MIS hacker type.
Today he's responsible for reporting the hell out of a telecom's database (Oracle DB for the most part) in a large IT department. He's an "expert", not a manager nor team leader. He does a lot of SQL wrapped in Java spit out by Tomcat (iirc) and uses a deeply customized Eclipse editor. He's also created several logistics sw on the side through out the years, launching a couple of startups in the 80s and 90s, mostly for automating shipping and manufacturing processes, and that's how he paid for my college degree in CS.
I remember when he bought one of the first IBM RISC 6000 computers ever in 1990 (he was even featured in an IBM paid ad-article), loaded with AIX (IBM's Unix flavor). I wanted to help him out setting it up or just hack on it, I logged into the console and I asked "how do you edit a file in this thing?" (I was doing PC and DOS back then). He came over and said "I think it's called `vi`". He keyed in `e` or `i` and said "there, now type ESC + :wq to save the file". It blew my mind. I was 15.
Today he's responsible for reporting the hell out of a telecom's database (Oracle DB for the most part) in a large IT department. He's an "expert", not a manager nor team leader. He does a lot of SQL wrapped in Java spit out by Tomcat (iirc) and uses a deeply customized Eclipse editor. He's also created several logistics sw on the side through out the years, launching a couple of startups in the 80s and 90s, mostly for automating shipping and manufacturing processes, and that's how he paid for my college degree in CS.
I remember when he bought one of the first IBM RISC 6000 computers ever in 1990 (he was even featured in an IBM paid ad-article), loaded with AIX (IBM's Unix flavor). I wanted to help him out setting it up or just hack on it, I logged into the console and I asked "how do you edit a file in this thing?" (I was doing PC and DOS back then). He came over and said "I think it's called `vi`". He keyed in `e` or `i` and said "there, now type ESC + :wq to save the file". It blew my mind. I was 15.