I know the feeling. I used to hang out on soc.singles (and before that, net.singles, before the Great Renaming).

I still read my email on my ISP's shell server, with Pine, still use trn.

I get the usual "Oh, is that DOS?" comments when people look over my shoulder. :-)

I'd thought it was DejaNews, which Google bought back in the day.

Yeah - I taught myself Basic. Then I was told that C was the language to learn next. But the symbols scared me (I was 13 or 14), so I took the next recommendation, which was to learn Pascal.

Learning C was very exciting for me, as it seemed all arcane and mysterious. You're right that the symbols were difficult to understand, but pointers were worse. I'd ask one of the programmers at the university I hung out at (to use their PDP-11/70s and Vaxen) what a pointer WAS. Their answer was invariably something like "It's something that POINTS to something else" or "It's a variable that holds a value that points to something else."

It would have been nice if they could have said something like "You know how a variable can hold, say, an integer or a character value? Well, that variable is stored in memory. All bytes (don't confuse a kid with the concept of word-size please :-) ) have an 'address'. *draws typical picture of a memory layout* So any variable you create has an address. What if you want to know the address of that variable? In C, you can say '&variableName'; the value that you get from that is the address of the variable. If you store that value in ANOTHER variable, THAT variable is a POINTER to the 1st variable."

THAT, I would have understood, but nobody seemed to want to take the time to explain it to me.

I used to stick a cassette recorder next to the acoustic coupler, and pull the phone slightly out of it to get a good recording.

Then, later, I would play the tape back to the coupler to review my session.

Especially fun was hearing the tape play both the coupler's signal for a character, and hear my physical keypress, at the same time, while watching what I had typed magically appear on the screen.

Pretty good low-tech fun, for the times. :-)

- Tim

GAAAAH! "loaned to me... by a friendly..."

You can tell I'm old, caintcha? :-)

- Tim

typo: "loaded to me... BY a friendly..."

- Tim

I'm an Old Programmer, too, and was introduced to the ArpaNet around the same time; had an adm3a terminal and a Ven-Tel 300 baud acoustic coupler loaned to me, while still a teen in highchool, but a friendly "free computing" promoter guy at UC Santa Cruz; years and years of watching all this stuff happen... and I never got rich! What'd I do wrong? D'oh!

Where'd I put my beard and suspenders? Damn kids, get offa my lawn!

- Tim

aka:

---> Tim Bessie ----- {ucbvax,dual}!unisoft!tim
---> Unisoft Systems; 739 Allston Way; Berkeley, CA 94710
---> (415) 644-1230 TWX II 910 366-2145

I had a Ven-Tel 300 baud acoustic coupler and a Lear-Seigler ADM3a terminal as my first bit of computer equipment. Don't know whatever happened to it - probably gave it all away.

- Tim

The fact that it is capped is my main concern; also, I have very little job security. I've never been an employee of a very big company (not that that provides much more security), mostly startups or smaller companies, or been a contractor. So work has been shakey, except in the best and richest of economic times. I suppose I could get a gub'mint job if I wanted security, and I've considered that.

Yes, $125K sounds like a great salary. If you live in a major US city, however (especially one with a hyper-inflated housing market, even today, like San Francisco), it begins to sound small. $125K, compared to the average house price in San Francisco, is a terrible ratio compared to other areas of the country.

It *is* my own fault that I've always been bad at saving and investing, however. I'd hoped, when younger, that I could live well and retire purely from savings from my work income.

- Tim

I'm about to be 45, and I've been a software engineer since I was around 18 (started way before, but didn't get my first "real" job until then).

Since then, the highest title I've reached is... Sr. Software Engineer, which is where I've been pretty much most of my career. Never had an interest in management, Lead, or anything that would take me out of the trenches of coding.

This also means my salary has been capped where I live at around $125K or thereabouts.

I had some strange idea that the more experience I had, the more money I'd make, no matter what my title was... but I've hit the wall.

There are some who are good at managing people and projects, and some, like me, who just like the CRAFT of it all, and not the overly-serious nature of the responsibilities one takes on in a management role.

Do you have any opinions on that to add here? Maybe I should Ask Slashdot myself? :-)

- Tim