When I first started looking for a career, COBOL was very common in banks and they recruited heavily for students just out of college (less than 20 years ago) and were willing to give them time to learn the language. As I understand it now, nearly all the COBOL is done at the mainframe/backend and the front-ends are all stuff like ASPs, JSPs, java, etc. I'm guessing the jobs are still there, just a lot less of them.

As for Ada, yeah, it was designed for and used by the US DOD and even required by them until 1997.

My personal rarely used language is Forth, which I learned to hack Open Firmware so I could make my mac boot either Yellow Dog Linux or OS X (installed on separate drives). That saved me a cable swap (boot ordering didn't work so well - the mac always wanted to format the unknown drive), but eventually I just started using XonX and not using the dual boot, and that was similar to my older setup that ran OS 8 on Linux (MacOnLinux). Been 10 years at least, so I doubt I could still program Forth without a refresher.

That process works better for fungible young talent who might be plenty gifted but have no experience to set themselves apart from the pack. The best defense against seeing your job outsourced is becoming so good at it that you don't have much competition. The second best defense is becoming friends with the greybeards who are positioned to argue against the manager who wants to rightsize your job.

That being said, let companies hire who they want. I don't really understand the forced-melting-pot concept of hiring. If a company wants young people, who am I to force them to take me?

s/young/white

that's why

Sorry, son, but society (and the Supreme Court) voted and you're wrong.

Woz felt he needed a high level language on his computer, as well as one that could be used to write and play games. The 4k minimum memory on the Apple I and Apple ][ were so the computer could run them in BASIC, even though that made them "100-1000x slower." Woz wrote his own BASIC (based on HP BASIC) from scratch with no knowledge about how to write a compiler, though he did borrow some school papers from his friend Allen Baum. He felt FORTRAN was for engineers and chose BASIC because he wanted regular people to be able to write and run programs in it, and wanted to run the games in a book of 101 games in BASIC (don't know if that is the exact name - something like that). He demo'd Breakout, written in Integer BASIC to Jobs and showed how easy it was to change little things like block color, something that would require a hardware redesign to do in software.

BASIC may suck, but the reason it was chosen was it was a programming language targeting beginners, not engineers (the effing name tells us that - Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). I too have a lot of disdain for it, but the fact is it was my first programming language and I probably never would have learned to program had I not learned that (and graduated to writing assembler by the time I was 12).

GEM was doomed more from Microsoft's exclusive licensing agreements with vendors. That is when I saw it and all other competition to DOS/Windows vanish from the market. GEM was awesome, too, especially compared to early versions of Windows. Microsoft had two extremely crappy versions before anything comparable came out, and they didn't even do that right until the first point release (3.1).

Killdall thought the personal computer thing was a fad, so yes, was completely to blame for that.

As for Microsoft's part, you've got to give Gates some credit - not only did he try to negotiate with Killdall, when he did ink a deal with IBM, Microsoft had no OS experience but promised it in a ridiculously short time-frame. That was solved that by licensing an existing DOS and rebranding it. I can also sort of see why IBM would think he could do it, being the first to get BASIC working on Intel processors, the same ones IBM planned to use.

I didn't really see them as shady until they started making exclusive deals with vendors for cheaper software, often bundled software like DOS and Windows (and later Office) for about the same as other vendors were just selling DOS as long as that company signed a deal to sell no other vendor's software.

Pretty sure Microsoft bought a license from Seattle Computer Products that allowed them to sell DOS under their own brand. That was one reason Killdall wasn't able to sue Microsoft - their lawyers basically redirected any lawsuits to SCP. I recall SCP attempted to pull the license later and sued for something like $60 million and eventually getting just under a million (and Microsoft getting to keep the license).

Most versions of BASIC mimic'd the DEC version, and most wanted to be the first on new platforms. Gates had one of the first versions on Intel processors, for instance. Apple's Integer BASIC (or Game Basic, as Woz called it) was based on HP BASIC, which Woz grabbed from his office at HP, which I've heard was a weird mutant BASIC.

Yep. There are plenty of banks to choose from that - whatever their other flaws - at least take security seriously. If your bank can't or won't lock down their website, then you already know that they're negligent in at least one area. What else are they neglecting?

I don't think it's extreme at all. I think we're past the point that's it's socially reasonable or responsible not to encrypt all traffic by default.

Even if you're 100% OK with visitors to your site being snooped on, consider that adding to the amount of crypto in use worldwide makes it hard for repressive governments to tell what their citizens are doing online. Maybe your site would be the straw that broke the Great Firewall's back and lets some kid read uncensored news.

Get off my lawn, sonny.

(Thinks tattoos can be ugly or beautiful, just like the people wearing them.)

4-digit UID, just over 40, no tats but I've thought about it. I've never considered anything massive like a sleeve before because I don't think it'd look good on me, but I couldn't care less if other people have them.

Outside of Portland, what percentage of the population has full sleeve tattoos? 1 in 10,000, maybe? I'm not asking to be funny; except for in very certain cities, those are almost unseen. Even working in San Francisco I see very, very few. Oh, there are lots of smaller tattoos, but sleeves are unusual.

I'll bet more people are sensitive to the materials used to make the watch than are unable to use it because of their ink. That's not Apple's fault or a flaw in the watch, though: no one product can be useful to everyone.