Back compatibility?
...don't I wish.

Anyway, the year, my reader, is 1989. Or so -- I was stoned a lot then. See, I worked as a student assistant in a computer lab at a local community college whilst I was getting my own degree (in English, which I never got.)

Why was an English major working in the computer lab? Because my best friend was also my boss was also my dope dealer was also my roommate.

Two stories come to mind:

1) We had a mainframe computer on which the serious computer geeks learned to program in COBOL and FORTRAN and all those other archaic languages. It had been donated by a company that shall remain nameless but whose initials are IBM, and was 'experimental'.

Read, it was a piece of shit. One day, it just decided to stop compiling programs. No one could figure out why; computer technicians, my boss, and everyone from the guy who taught welding to my boss's girlfriend were beating on terminals, peering into the guts of this monstrosity, and otherwise trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

Nothing worked. The next morning, my boss walked in in a suit jacket. (This rarely, if ever, happened.) I figured out why when he pulled his 9mm pistol out from his waistband, set it on the main terminal, and said, "All right, fucker, compile."

And it did.

2) One of our students came in, an older gentleman who was going back to school. He was gray-faced, shaking, almost crying, and clutching a manila envelope. He went in my boss's office, and about twenty minutes passed. He then came back out and, wobbly-kneed, left the lab. Five minutes passed, then my boss came out, with a look that seemed to waver between hysterical laughter and tears -- and showed me what was in the envelope.

See, the guy had just upgraded from a computer with a 5.25" disk drive to a computer with a 3.5" disk drive.

And his wife had decided to be helpful.

And trimmed nine hundred dollars worth of software down to the new size.

With a pair of pinking shears.

I hold this example up as a definition of 'justifiable homicide'.
(springjack The King Of Pygmy Marmosets!, Thu 24 Sep 2009, 19:24, 4 replies)

I
don't think you can ever call COBOL programmers geeks.

Computer illiterates, maybe...but geeks. Never.

Geeks know their stuff.
(dchurch bah, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 12:30, closed)

Geek, definition of.
They were geeks for the time?
(springjack The King Of Pygmy Marmosets!, Sat 26 Sep 2009, 2:43, closed)

The second one is
something my mother would do. Then get angry when you pointed out the damage and extreme cost she had incurred.
(Dog Bum Cute, wiggly, has scary anal glands, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 16:26, closed)

Cobol's still around, you know.
Just had it's 50th, still in wide use :3
(Scritty Bakerman., Sat 26 Sep 2009, 14:20, closed)