Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
Well, they were different days. I worked in the Virtual Storage Manager group 2nd floor BLdg 706 POK My first line manager [sraight not homosexual] literally came to work sometimes wering socks with machine stitched images of Mickey and Minny Mouse on them. Everything except one program was written in PL/S (similar to PL/1). I was a "gray top", i.e., my desk was real plastic top not simulated wood. Nobody wanted to touch that one assembly language program: it was beneath their exalted dignity as higher level language programmers. eagerlyI scarfed it up and rewrote the whole thing (again, in assembly language0. This was the age of "Improved programming technologies". Mickey Mouse told me they were going to have a walkthru of my code. I knew that thet meant: the fake wood tops humiliating the gray tops, e.g., me. I flatly told him I would not "be ground up" and would accept only specific criticisms of my code. He cancelled te walkthru and my very risky code shipped unreviewded which didn't happen but it did that time. Then along aome the 3033-MP which was not marketable because it was too powerful for the processors to be kept busy on only 16 meg of real memory. There was a fix, mostly in the hadware but a small part in the OS. It wa close to eyes only secrecy. Management knew I did not get on with the people in the virtual storage department but that's where they needed a patch and they needed it done right, not politically correctly. We came to an agreement which management honored: I would do it but the people in the team would have no say in what I did. It was a small fix but my patch was politically incorret (using integer devision instead of IF...THEN...ELSE). It shipped and never any APARS. My 3rd line manager once told me: "We know you can do the work your way, but what do we do with all the people who can't tell an 'L' from an 'LA'?" Times changed and I got PTSD from undocumented apis including angular and even worser: django.
Dec 23, 2023, 1:50:16 PM
Posted to Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old