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Entirely possible.
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Amarnath S wrote: Must be one of those mainframes.
was going to say the same thing. my guess though is that this developer is still using a relatively new machine to access that older mainframe machine.
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Not necessarily. I've still gotten a 25+ year old Win 3.11 PC sitting in my home office, for the reason that it has a 5.25" floppy drive. Or rather, the last time I turned it on was because a friend of mine wanted me to check if his old floppies were still readable (they were!). I've got a couple other rather outdated interfaces to it as well, such as a MIDI interface card, an interface card for a tape cassette unit, and for a hand scanner. The cards are for old bus systems, so I can't move them to a newer machine. (For the MIDI, I could of course buy a brand new USB based MIDI interface, but not for the other two.)
I am not doing any development on this machine, but if you work as a consultant, you should be prepared for the strangest requests. If I was offered a six man months project on adding some new functions to a 16-bit Windows program system (that is entirely possible, even today!), I guess I would take it. Then, this Win 3.11 machine would be my development environment (it has a C++ compiler and debugger - but I have forgotten the name of the debugger!), and for a period my main development machine would have been 25+ years old.
I haven't had such a project, but about fifteen years ago a fellow came with a pile of 8" floppies (I guess most of you have never seen a real-life 8" floppy!). "I think these may contain some essential data, but I don't know the format...". He couldn't tell what kind of machine or software had created them, their age (except that they were old!), nothing. He gave us a cost limit (which turned out to be high enough to get his data out).
At that time, we had an old minim machine (not a PDP-11, but same class, from around 1980) with an 8" drive and a good selection of drivers for various track/sector formatting, and I managed to get a binary dump of the floppies. Then I could start poking around. The blocks looked like line noise, so I suspected that it could be encrypted in some way. In those days, some people were still using primitive encryption (like xoring or code shifting). Octet values were indeed unevenly distributed. By plain luck I came across an EBCDIC table, and saw that the two most common octed values were the EBCDIC codes for 'e' and 't'. The very most of the contents were plain text in EBCDIC coding. The customer confirmed that the floppies might come from an old IBM system.
For this project, we at least made use of a 20+ year old machine to dump the floppies to a hard drive. Not quite "software development", but it illustrates that some projects may call for that kind of equipment.
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I've worked with 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppies, but never with an 8" one. This is new to me.
About 18 years ago, when I was with GE in India, they had a bunch of test machines, about ten of them, one of which was a Win 3.11 machine, on which they wanted the software to be tested.
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With the 8" floppies, the term "floppy" really made sense
Belive it or not: Even those stone age 8" floppies came in capacities up to a whooping 1.2 Mbytes/floppy! I don't think IBM's DSDD version was very successful (the 5.25" had already arrived), but I used a lot of 1.2 MB versions with a proprietary formatting (sectors where 180 degrees, 2 kByte to the sector) and proprietary file system, for a popular 1970-80s "(super)minicomputer" series. The (super)minis did get 5.25" drives, later, but before the 3.5" floppies (which we jokingly called "stiffies", but that could be misread by mislead people...) arrived, the (super)mini era was over.
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only count the date you purchased the initial unit.
My actual PC is 6 years old, but initial unit is way older.
Patrice
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Albert Einstein
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Fair enough, no sandwich for you then.
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I think I have had only two full tower size cases over the years, each for a series of different mainboards. I don't think that metal skin is essential to the evaluation of my development computer.
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If you replace all of the parts one at a time, is it really still the same machine?
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Perhaps as old as its chassis?
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I bought it just earlier this year, but it's second hand as I got it from my old employer.
It was new when I got it when I started working there two years ago.
So I voted 1-3 years.
I could buy it for a very reasonable price
250 GB SSD + 500 GB HDD, 32 GB memory, Intel i7 @ 2.70 GHz... No reason to get a new one just yet
The SSD is brand new as the old one somehow didn't work after I quit my job.
Most of my other stuff, monitors, keyboard, mouse, docking station... Is about a year old.
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I'm running an old i5 powered by the souls of VB6 developers.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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I know you're lying... VB6 developers don't have souls
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And just why do you think they don't?
I'll tell you why.
*slurp*
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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This is a once in a lifetime, but... I'm putting my pitchfork away
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It's the circle of life, predator and prey.
The world demands blood. I didn't make it that way. I just accept my role in the order of things.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Sander Rossel wrote: VB6 developers don't have souls
They used to have souls, until codewitch took them.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Is this considered as the "main development machine"?
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Unfortunately, when your brain starts to lose performance (say next to a 25-35 year old's brain), and your memory starts to leak, and the power supply starts to fizzle, you can't just go online and order a new brain.
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I never work on a computer older than 3 years (personal or work); just like I never own/lease a vehicle older than 3 years, all for the same reasons.
My personal is 2 year's old, and my work laptop is 1+ year's old.
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I couldn't do that: changing keyboards is traumatic enough (all the keys are in subtly different places, and have different travel depths so I misskey, a lot), changing KB, and mouse, and monitors, and ... that would be horrific!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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only my machine changes, not my keyboard, mouse, or my dual 27" monitors. If I had to give up my monitors, that would be horrific for sure.
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And that's continuity past your 3 years, isn't it?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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My comments were centered on the "development machine". I don't consider peripherals to be part of the development machine.
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