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Comment 40 years in the trade (Score 2) 162

Roughly 34 as systems programmer/sysadmin (things were kind of blurred in the mid 70s); Did my time on:
IBM 360/30 (new) (DOS)
Burroughs Medium Systems (B2500 and B3700) (MCP/V) (Pronounced Master Control Program Five)
Raytheon PTS 1200
Honeywell DPS-8/44\ (GCOS -3)
Honeywell DPS-6 (field systems; replaced the Raytheons)
IBM 4381 (MVS)
IBM 3090-200 J (MVS-XA)
IBM 9672-R1 (MVS-ESA)
And finally, starting in 1996 - IBM RS-6000 systems; got into storage area networks with these.

Retired in 2009; 34 years at my second employer, starting with the Burroughs systems. And yes, AIX LVMs rocked! Especially when the DBAs were showing up every other day needing more room in an Oracle filesystem (First cut on database size when we converted to SAP/R3 - 120 GB would last a year; 3 months later we were at 240 GB and waiting for the next shipment of SSA drives and shelves to arrive. We hit 580 GB that first year)

Comment And all because a copyright expired! (Score 5, Insightful) 127

D&D was loosely based on concepts from "The Lord of the Rings", recently published back then by Ace in paperback format. The American publisher of LOTR had allowed the copyright to lapse because the books just didn't sell. And the people at Ace were explicit after-the-fact -- if the had been required to negotiate royaltie payments the project would never have been done. The consensus at the time was that adult fantasy does not sell.

Within weeks there was a set by Ballentine books (at 95 cents each, vs the Ace 75 cents) as the 'authorized edition'; shortly thereafter, Ace announced they had made royalty arrangements. Then Houghton-Mifflin re-printed the hardbacks. Lancer started issuing paperbacks of the Conan stories and Lord Dunsany's fantasy stories. New fantasy stories started to appear - and Gygax and Arneson came up with D&D.

Look at all the LOTR and D&D spin-offs in books, movies, other FRP games - and most would probably never have come about if the copyrights to LOTR had not been allowed to lapse.

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