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Obsolete Technical Skills
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Feb 20, 2008 05:32 AM
from the morse-code-will-never-die-oh-wait dept.
from the morse-code-will-never-die-oh-wait dept.
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Robert Scoble had an interesting post on his blog a few days ago on obsolete technical skills — 'things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us.' Scoble's initial list included dialing a rotary phone, using carbon paper to make copies, and changing the gas mixture on your car's carburetor. The list has now been expanded into a wiki with a much larger list of these obsolete skills that includes resolving IRQ conflicts on a mother board, assembly language programming, and stacking a quarter on an arcade game to indicate you have next. We're invited to contribute more."
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Assembly isn't obsolete! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Assembly isn't obsolete! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Assembly isn't obsolete! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Assembly isn't obsolete! (Score:5, Funny)
Well not reputable web programming anyway.
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Re:Assembly isn't obsolete! (Score:5, Funny)
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It's not obsolete, here's why: (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, there are many times less people capable of making horse buggies than in the XIXth century; that's obsolete.
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Re:It's not obsolete, here's why: (Score:5, Insightful)
In the context of this discussion, a skill is obsolete when it is no longer needed to do something that is still being done today - For example, nobody needs to know how to load a program off tape on a C64 these days, because we don't have C64s anymore.
By this definition, assembly programming is obviously NOT obsolete. We still need assembly programmers: for device drivers, for kernel programming, for writing compilers, for reverse engineering old code that is no longer supported, for cracking dumb DRM schemes that take away our fair-use rights, etc etc etc. The fact that not many people know how to write assembly is irrelevant: does the fact that few people know how to build a human-rated space launch vehicule mean that it is obsolete?
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Re:It's not obsolete, here's why: (Score:5, Insightful)
Coding in higher-level languages frees programmers up to create actual cool stuff. It's great that some ur-geek wrote a bitchin' disk driver in ASM that fits in 7KB of code during one Jolt-and-meth-fueled month back in 1991 but jesus, who cares. Given the chance, I bet that engineer would have done it in 1/4 of the time in C and actually done something useful with the rest of his month. Or at least stayed away from the meth and Jolt.
It's the technological equivalent of carrying buckets of water three miles from the stream to your prarie frontier home every single morning. Like, it's cool and admirable that people once did that, but thank goodness we generally don't have to do that these days. Even if my tap water really doesn't have any new functionality compared to that stream water.
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Re:Assembly isn't obsolete! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Assembly isn't obsolete! (Score:5, Insightful)
It was always a niche skill, possessed by only a tiny fraction of the population. There are probably more assembly language programmers today than there were forty years ago. And assembly language is used for the same things today as it was back then. If people want to say that today, programmers use languages like PHP and Java for creating web-applications not Assembly, then that is fine. Assembly never was used for creating web-applications because they didn't exist back then. Assembly has neither diminished in popularity nor entirely been superceded in its area. Shouldn't be on that list.
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Re:Assembly isn't obsolete! (Score:5, Insightful)
It was always a niche skill, possessed by only a tiny fraction of the population. There are probably more assembly language programmers today than there were forty years ago. And assembly language is used for the same things today as it was back then. If people want to say that today, programmers use languages like PHP and Java for creating web-applications not Assembly, then that is fine. Assembly never was used for creating web-applications because they didn't exist back then. Assembly has neither diminished in popularity nor entirely been superceded in its area. Shouldn't be on that list.
Some skills just seem like they're obsolete or dying because the proportion of people within a field that have them is getting smaller -- but they're really stronger than ever when you look at the raw numbers.
I agree with the parent and fully suspect that there are more people who understand x86 assembler today than there were at the perceived 'height' of assembler, back in the early 90s. There are just that many more people in the IT field. Learning assembler, if you happen to be interested, is also a lot easier now than it was then. Today, computers are basically a mainstream subject, plus you have all the information available on the Internet. In 1990, finding a good book on assembler programming would probably have required a trip to a large university's library.
Obviously there are some skills that really are on their way out, or will be when the current crop of people who truly understand them either retire or die. But in many cases I think it's easy to confuse the S/N ratio in a particular sphere with the number of people who actually are familiar with a topic.
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LIST of obsolete things (Score:5, Interesting)
- what to do with a Commodore 64 when its cursor is blinking at you
-----(everyone I know in my circle of friends would go "duh")
-----(they have no clue how to navigate without icons or explorer)
- how to write a simple basic program for your C=64:
----- 10 print "hello"
----- 20 goto 10
----- RUN
- LOAD "$" to get directory off my cassette drive (yes we used cassettes)
- LOAD "*",8,1 to autoload & start most floppy disks
- how to crate 16-color pictures that look good
- how to program the SID to make music
- dir df0: to get a directory on a Commodore Amiga 500/2000
- the difference between Chip and Fast RAM
- why it's a bad idea to multitask 2 programs off the same floppy
-----(because the floppy will knock itself silly trying to read two tracks at the same time)
- ATDP 5601750 to dial on a rotary/pulse phone (ATDT for touchtone)
- +++ to get your modem's attention so you can issue commands like:
- ATH to hang up
- how to create pretty pictures using ANSI
- what is Zmodem, and why it's better to download files with Z rather than Xmodem
- how long will it take to download a 3.5 inch floppy over 2.4k modem
-----(long enough to eat supper and take a shower)
-----(or watch the latest episode of Star Trek The Next Generation)
- how many hours you can squeeze on a T-180 VHS tape (9)
- how many episodes of Quantum Leap if you remove the commercials (12)
- how to repair your copy of Star Wars after the tape tears in half (scotchtape)
Most of the things I just listed were items known by "everyone" back in the 1980s. If you wanted to use a computer, you had to know the various commands and understand how/why things work.
Today people don't need to know command-line text.
They can just point-and-click; it's become easy.
And a lot of the things we used to need to know?
It's essentially automatic now.
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Re:LIST of obsolete things (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, those became way obsolete with Dos 6.22s ability (iirc) to have multiple configurations to chose from.
Anyone remember countless runs of memmaker to squeeze the last byte of RAM out of a config ?
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Re:Assembly isn't obsolete! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Assembly isn't obsolete! (Score:4, Interesting)
Two hundred million VB, PHP and Ruby programmers want to disagree with you. But you are right. Assembly is as much a part of the system as transistors and stack pointers. My first system had a 6502 with a BASIC interpreter in ROM. The back page of the instruction book had the 6502 instruction set printed on it (lucky it wasn't a Z80). That was much more interesting for a 13 year old than basic.
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Re:Assembly isn't obsolete! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Assembly isn't obsolete! (Score:5, Informative)
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Cracking protected information. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Cracking protected information. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Assembly isn't obsolete! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure 'smartphones' etc start getting programmable in high-level languages but OTOH simple microcontrollers enter more and more of daily appliances. You don't write firmware in assembly for a DVD player anymore, but you write it for a toaster or a bicycle lamp, devices that 5 years ago didn't have any firmware or programming capability. The frontier is and likely always will be assembly, and even though the frontier keeps moving and likely in 5 years the bicycle lamps will be programmable in Java, maybe ballpens will be programmable in assembly.
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All skills are of value (Score:5, Interesting)
Too many jokes and false entries (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:One more for the list: (Score:5, Funny)
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Navigating by compass is obsolete? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some things on that list are either silly or shortsighted.
Re:Navigating by compass is obsolete? (Score:5, Funny)
Another thing that's obsolete is like maths, because we always have calculators now.
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Re:Navigating by compass is obsolete? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Navigating by compass is obsolete? (Score:5, Funny)
You know, there is this one leg of my table that's a little short, so the log table comes in handy.
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I'll add one (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'll add one (Score:5, Funny)
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Using a rotary phone is a "technical skill"?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway , here in the UK new and refurbished rotary phones are a niche fashion item. You can pick them up in a number of places for a reasonable amount.
Churn butter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Churn butter? (Score:5, Funny)
The surprising part is how butter comes out in those brick shapes. Surprising for the cow, that is...
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Obsolete skills (Score:5, Insightful)
Another one (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah yeah, Troll.
So, I'm obsolete, huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Creative Destruction at Work (Score:5, Interesting)
I've noticed that we on Slashdot seem to struggle with this concept daily, be it the loss of jobs to outsourcing, development and adoption of new technology, reform of IP laws, the slow death of the MPAA/RIAA, and even the subject of this article (which is the perfect example). It is probably a little off-topic, but I think this common thread should in these subjects should be pointed out, because all of our discussions seem to hinge on this critical question: Is the creation worth the destruction?
I can think of a few (Score:5, Insightful)
The skill to determine a modem's connect speed from hearing the negotiation sounds.
'Notching' an old single-sided floppy to be able to make it a double-sided disc.
Cleaning and/or aligning the heads on your cassette player.
Terminating or crimping coax.
Knowing you need to type "DIR
Was 'winding your watch' in the list?
I'd love to see some speculation on what skills you'd expect to be obsoleted by 2029.
asm is NOT obsolete! (Score:5, Interesting)
Every serious programmer should have some experience of assembly language so they can grok what's really going on. Nothing tells you why buffer overruns are so bad than watching a program written in asm run over its own stack obliterating the return address. It doesn't need to be a fancy 32 bit or 64 bit desktop chip, an 8 bit ISA or one of the classics such as the Motorola 68K is enough to understand the principles of what happens at the chip level. If you want to see what happens when programmers simply don't grok the hardware, just check out The Daily WTF.
By the way, get off my lawn!
That's just great (Score:5, Funny)
Everything I learned as a kid is obselete now... (Score:5, Interesting)
He was the master at converting 3-cylinder Saab 96 (and 95) models to the newer V4 engine. He had it down to a science, and cars we converted ran all over the country.
A few of the more mundane skills I learned back then:
--Setting the dwell angle by adjusting the ignition points, then rotating the distributor to set the ignition timing.
--Disconnecting the ringer on Western Electric rotary-dial phones, so Ma Bell couldn't detect how many extentions you had (illegally) connected to your line.
--Dialing only the last 5 digits of a 7-digit phone number: within the same exchange, the mechanical switches at the local Bell office would make the connection.
--Scraping conducting material off the rotary dial in the cable box to enable HBO and Showtime.
Jumping off the bandwagon? (Score:5, Insightful)
I grew up with home computers. I learned BASIC when I was 11. That is obsolete skill now. Then I got my first PC in 1988 and learned DOS. That's obsolete. Then I learned Borland's Turbo Pascal. That's obsolete. Then I learned Microsoft C programming and started programming Windows 3.1 applications that used Windows menus etc. That's obsolete. I learned Gopher and Telnet in the 80s. That's obsolete. I learned Pine. That's obsolete. I learned to tweak Windows 95 registry. That's obsolete. I learned BEA Tuxedo at work. That's obsolete. Looking at it now - I've wasted countless of hours to something that is totally obsolete now! Had I invested that time into improving myself - learning who I am, how I behave, how to enjoy this life - I would be much happier now I guess.
Re:Jumping off the bandwagon? (Score:5, Informative)
Basic:
Basic programming building blocks- variables, statements, control of execution flow with if/then/else and goto
DOS:
directory structures, command line navigation, computer architecture (and how bad design time decisions can lead to decades worth of headaches)
Turbo Pascal:
Not too familiar w/ Pascal anymore, but if IIRC, you should have learned how to use functions, namespaces, and the modular programming model.
Microsoft C Programming:
Event driven programming models, resource handles, GUI development issues- how to expose just enough complexity to make things useful without cluttering the screen, and the C aspect... you learned the syntax underpinning just about every other major language since and the basics of using structures, pointers, handling memory, the list could go on for pages.
Gopher/Telnet:
How plain text internet protocols generally work- and if anything you learned some cool tricks to do a raw telnet session on port 25 and spoof email from the boss.
Pine:
Email concepts/netiquette. Was Pine really so hard to learn anyway?
Windows 95 registry:
Eh probably the least portable skill here- you at least learned to be comfortable with digging into a blackbox OS and looking under its skirt. The registry is still in use in XP, not so sure about vista, so this is a skill you will get at least 15 years of use out of.
Bea Tuxedo:
not too familiar w/ this product, but if I remember correctly, its all about virtualization, which is now one of the hottest new technologies in the sysadmin/IT world.
Sounds like you learned a hell of a lot. Sure none of these are all that employable *today* but couple that background with a weekend spent with a Java book and I would employ you with a 6 figure salary in a second over some newly minted sun certified ITT Tech grad.
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Starting a fire with sticks (Score:5, Funny)
Crushing a Mastadon with a bolder
Killing your enemies & impregnating their women
Being a Sun God
There are hundreds of obsolete skills. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't have MCSE, CCNA or anything else because the sheer fact is that by the time you've passed the course and been using it for a year, its content is out of date. Not all of it, but quite a bit of it. Especially on those courses designed for particular bits of software. And they are nothing but memory tests. That's not learning.
I've done assembly, I've done BASIC and everything in between. My University tried to teach me Java until I stopped attending the lectures for that part and was instead "hired out" to other students as the person to ask about the Java coursework. I'd only ever dabbled in it but having programmed in a lot of other languages it was no more than a curiousity to flick through a Java book and pick up the syntax. I did the coursework myself at home, taught many others to pass the course, and passed myself (good grades for that course) with barely a sweat. I'd dabbled in Java before but it was merely a matter of flicking through a half-decent book on the subject, applying everything else you already know and making sure you have a list of function-method-procedure (call them whatever you like, OO is just a shortcut that saves you typing so much functional-programming code) name changes handy. KMP search algorithms are the same in any language, it's just a matter of learning or merely memorising (which is NOT learning) the differences between languages.
Similarly, my primary job is being hired by schools to manage their networks. First one was 98-standalones with Ethernet cables basically used for display.
Formal training in any of the above OS, network management, network management software or application software? Zilch. Number of networks exploded? Zilch. Number of networks more productive once I had finished with them? 100%. Number of schools chasing me for further employment to work on their next big network, next OS, next suite of applications? I lose count. And these are critical networks - they run everything from the canteen to the staff wages to the legally required paperwork to the student desktops to the fire and security systems. You have no idea how crippled a school is nowadays if its servers go down... lessons stop, systems go haywire and the students get sent home. And they literally fight over getting an imbecile like me in to manage their systems, or even just clean them up so that they can employ a "normal" technician next year.
If you can learn, you can run any OS, of any age, at any time, in any combination without a problem. If you can't then you're stuck memorising "Windows Vista for Dummies" until the next OS comes out a
This is the list for morons. (Score:5, Funny)
Balancing a checkbook
Clicking on the up and down arrows of a vertical scrollbar
Commuting
Extracting square roots
Handwriting (How to fill out forms and sign stuff and write notes.)
Having Cash (and how to properly make change)
Long division?
Look for a job in the classifieds?
Looking up a business on the yellow pages
Local Grocery Store?
Paying for something with a check
Playing solitaire with playing cards
Reading a paper map
Searching a card catalog
Using a cell phone to make a call
Untangling the cord of a telephone
Using a card catalog
Using a fax machine
Using the Dewey Decimal System
Zipping your pants
If your new hire can't do any of those, you do you really want them?
Phone Books (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when I was a kid, I grew up in a modest town of about 50,000 people. Too big to be a small town, not big enough to get on most maps. Our phone book was about one inch thick. Small towns had phone books that were essentially glorified pamphlets, about 1/4" thick, and even then they shared it with all the neighboring towns. I knew people from small towns who thought phone numbers were four digits long, since the first three digits were always the same (and the then-optional area code was the same for probably a hundred miles).
When my family would go on trips we would visit "big cities" like Dallas, Houston, Orlando, Memphis, etc. (yes, I'm from the South) and in the hotel rooms I would notice that the phone books were always really thick. Like 4-5" thick. And sometimes, that was just the yellow pages, the white pages were an entirely different book, itself 3" at least. And they always had these awesome pictures on the front of the local skyline instead of the giant public domain "fingers do the walking" logo that would grace the phone book back home.
So consequently I made the connection early on in my mind that living in a huge city meant you were a success. And living in a huge city meant a huge phone book. Therefore, having a huge phone book in your home meant you were a success. A tenuous connection, but even then I had big dreams of moving to a "big city" later in life and one of these days I would have a big phone book in my house because hey, that's what big successful people living in big successful cities do.
Years and years pass. I grow up, go through High School, go to College, graduate, get married, and eventually my Wife and I move to the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. We get good paying jobs and rent then eventually buy a house. Initially the phone books that would appear on our porch would be the same standard one-inch affairs I grew up with because we live in the suburbs and they only cover the suburbs, but then one day a bag with two phone books, a 3-inch white pages and a 5-inch yellow pages, shows up on our front porch. These phone books cover the entire Metroplex. They have amazing photos of the Dallas skyline, with Reunion Tower (the one with the ball on the end) on them (under a stuck-on ad for some ambulance chaser, but that peels off easily enough).
I'm elated. After all these years, I've finally made it! I'm finally in a good job making good money and living in a big city and hey, like all big successful people living in big cities, I have a pair of bigass phone books. I've arrived! Every time I look at these phone books I'll remember how I'm in a big city.
So I put these phone books next to the phone and the first thing my Wife says was "Just throw those things away. We have the Internet now."
I ignore the order and I keep the phone books under the phone cradle for a few years, exchanging them out when a new one comes in. I never tell my Wife the insanely silly "but I've always wanted a big phone book" fantasy because I'm not in the mood to get laughed at (though, apparently, I don't mind that people on Slashdot will laugh at me). I get to keep them in place with the razor thin "well what if we want to look up a phone number when the power's off or our Internet is down?" excuse.
But then one day I'm cleaning the house and I'm trying to reduce some clutter and it occurs to me that in two years I've never opened these things, ever, and they're just collecting dust and the odds of the power going out or the Internet going down at the same time as my cell phone battery dying and me having to have some obscure phone number are vanishingly small. Oh, and in the years since we moved out here we've switched to Vonage so we couldn't even use the phone in a power outage anyway. And I now have Internet access on my phone (hell my wife has a Treo) so if we needed to
Simplistic thinking in this list (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the summary contains a dubious suggestion, "Changing the gas mixture on your car's carburetor". Perhaps the author is unaware of the vast numbers of motorcycles and small engines sold each year that incorporate carburetors?
"Cast lead bullets"? Thousands, if not millions, of ammunition reloaders would disagree.
"Changing vacuum tubes"? Millions of musicians would disagree.
"Darkroom photography skills"? "Developing photographic film"? Obviously, this person is not a photographer!
That's as far as I can get without becoming even more disgusted with the state of humanity, or at least the supposedly tech-savvy people who probably are contributing to this list.
Re:Shorthand is not redundant yet (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Assembly language is obsolete? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:But what is going to be obsolete ? (Score:5, Insightful)
In a nutshell, it doesn't matter what language you use, which language is the next big thing, or what language becomes obsolete tomorrow. You will probably not know all those fancy functions that do what you used to do by hand, but what matters is whether you know the math behind the code. I've seen so many people claiming to know Java, C# and whatnot, just to give me that incredibly blank stare when I ask them for hash tables. Yes, they know every function, every class in Java by heart, but they have no knowledge of what they should actually DO with it.
Now, it might not be a "necessity" tomorrow when there is a function that does it for you. But it is VERY easy to learn about a function (hell, look it up, it ain't like there's no online help file for it) while it is not so trivial to understand what it actually DOES.
So it does not matter what language will arise or what language becomes obsolete. What matters is that you know the theory behind the structures you're supposed to use. When you know that, you can understand what the functions and classes do. When you understand that, you can more efficiently and sensibly fill them. When you do that, your program will work with fewer bugs and fewer "why the fu.. doesn't that work now, it did last time" moments.
Don't learn languages. Learn theory!
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