On 3/7/25 17:20, David Collier-Brown via talk wrote:

Ditto DEC VMS

It's been over 35 years since I last touched a VAX 11/780.  We had 7 of them where I worked.  I did a lot more work on Data General Eclipse though.

IBM mainframe are DEC VAX too old. There must be some job category for 50+ men. :-) On 2025-03-07 17:20, David Collier-Brown via talk wrote:

Companies using AI were insta-rejecting me.

The first thing I looked at was ageism.

* I pruned my resume so that AI says I'm in my sixies, and in the two cases I have tried since, the rejections came in one or more days later.  The companies may not be ageist, but the black-box AI tools appear to have it bad.

* Conversely, some folks advertise themselves as Unix greybeards. I was recruited twice /because/ I'm old.  A former employer consciously looked for candidates for VP and director who were in their mid-fifties to low sixties.

Lexis Nexis and a couple of other companies still have IBM mainframes, so that's a opportunity. Ditto DEC VMS.

Hmmn, I should set up a search for Solaris jobs (:-))

--dave

On 3/7/25 16:04, William Park via talk wrote:

...

Hi,

Do you know any job site, for old guys with legacy skill sets? Regular job, contract, full time, part time, anything is okay.

Right now, I'm using Indeed and LinkedIn to look for job.  For search, Indeed returns more relevant job posts than LinkedIn. LinkedIn returns too many irrelevant posts, but I nevertheless dig through them, hoping for that right fit.

Anyways, I'm finding, my expertise and skill sets are old.  I don't have the latest lingo in tools, programming language, GUI framework, web this and that, etc.  I don't pass filter (AI or human).

-- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain

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If you want really old, I have a Multics simulator. -- DRBrown.TSDC@HI-Multics.ARPA On 3/7/25 21:53, Nick Accad via talk wrote:

Anyone wants to play with OpenVMS 7.3/VAX let me know :) I have a couple running under Simh and I can help you set one up if you want.

On Fri, Mar 7, 2025 at 17:41 William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

IBM mainframe are DEC VAX too old.  There must be some job category for 50+ men. :-)

On 2025-03-07 17:20, David Collier-Brown via talk wrote: > Companies using AI were insta-rejecting me. > > The first thing I looked at was ageism. > >   * I pruned my resume so that AI says I'm in my sixies, and in the two >     cases I have tried since, the rejections came in one or more days >     later.  The companies may not be ageist, but the black-box AI tools >     appear to have it bad. > >   * Conversely, some folks advertise themselves as Unix greybeards. I >     was recruited twice /because/ I'm old.  A former employer >     consciously looked for candidates for VP and director who were in >     their mid-fifties to low sixties. > > Lexis Nexis and a couple of other companies still have IBM mainframes, > so that's a opportunity. Ditto DEC VMS. > > Hmmn, I should set up a search for Solaris jobs (:-)) > > --dave > > > On 3/7/25 16:04, William Park via talk wrote: >> Hi, >> >> Do you know any job site, for old guys with legacy skill sets? Regular >> job, contract, full time, part time, anything is okay. >> >> Right now, I'm using Indeed and LinkedIn to look for job.  For search, >> Indeed returns more relevant job posts than LinkedIn. LinkedIn returns >> too many irrelevant posts, but I nevertheless dig through them, hoping >> for that right fit. >> >> Anyways, I'm finding, my expertise and skill sets are old.  I don't >> have the latest lingo in tools, programming language, GUI framework, >> web this and that, etc.  I don't pass filter (AI or human). > > -- > David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify > System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest > davecb@spamcop.net          |              -- Mark Twain > > > --- > Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org > Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk

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-- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain

From: Alvin Starr via talk <talk@gtalug.org>

Even older. https://youtu.be/54-9SoeG1is

The video showed up in a new scientist article about old code.

Not sure how well the link will work since they tend to be a subscription based source. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535330-100-the-critical-computer-sy...

Thanks. As I remember (from reading American histories) the EDSAC was kind of a cut down copy of the EDVAC but it went into service sooner. Certainly M.V. Wilkes attended the 1946 summer school at the Moore School of Engineering where the design EDVAC was a major topic. Apparently the first stored program computer was the Machester "Baby", 11 months ahead of the EDSAC. But it wasn't actually useful. One of the key people programming the EDSAC was Beatrice Worsley, a Canadian. She helped write the square program. I never met her even though she died on a sabatical at the University of Waterloo, while I was a student there. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Worsley> I went to a talk by M.V. Wilkes in the 1970's. It's funny to realize 1976 is closer to 1949 (before I was born) to 2025. Apparently the LEO computer was derived from EDSAC. I always check on it when I visit the Science Museum (in London). It has been many years. I programmed a PDP-8. That seems to have an instruction set that is similar to the EDSAC. But the PDP-8 had core memory: random access. The ALU of the PDP-8/s was serial, just like that of the EDSAC.

Just curious. Anybody on this list ever use ZOPL?

No, but I knew the founder of GEAC before he founded it. <https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/remembering-gus-german-pioneer-in-waterloo-computer-science> I also knew Bob Zarnke, but not Hugh Williams (all in that photo). I was in charge of the IBM 1620 mentioned in the caption, but starting four years later.

www.oreilly.com JavaScript: The Good Parts <#> Most programming languages contain good and bad parts, but JavaScript has more than its share of the bad, having been developed and released in a hurry before it could be … - Selection from JavaScript: The Good Parts [Book] 🔗 https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/javascript-the-good/9780596517748/ <https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/javascript-the-good/9780596517748/> On 3/14/25 18:20, William Park via talk wrote:

I'm going through https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript now, and I find that topic by topic discussion is not very useful for a newbie like me, even with programmer background.  I click a link and another, and pretty soon I get lost in cyclic sphegatti. As a newbie, I don't know what's important and what order I should learn.

Do you know a better "tutorial" site for Javascript?  Maybe a book?

Someone mentioned https://eloquentjavascript.net/ It's for someone who doesn't have programming background.  Way too wordy for me...

-- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain

mwilson--- via talk wrote on 2025-03-15 09:34:

I've got the O'Reilly book _Dynamic HTML_ by Danny Goodman. It covers the whole area of client-side scripting, and has a fat reference chapter describing JavaScript element-by element.

I'd advise against using this book.

Released December 2006

per https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/dynamic-html-the/0596527403/ Just the title shows how out-dated the material probably is: JS is for *much* more than "dynamic HTML" these days. That link to the book has these choice quotes:

including Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2

the latest standards-based technologies, including CSS Level 3, DOM Level 3, Web Forms 2.0, XMLHttpRequest for AJAX applications, JavaScript 1.7, and many more.

JS 1.7 gained support in Firefox in October 2006.

ECMAScript 5 standard, released in December 2009.

...

Ambitious work on the language continued for several years, culminating in an extensive collection of additions and refinements being formalized with the publication of ECMAScript 6 in 2015

...

The creation of Node.js in 2009 by Ryan Dahl sparked a significant increase in the usage of JavaScript outside of web browsers. Node combines the V8 engine, an event loop, and I/O APIs, thereby providing a stand-alone JavaScript runtime system.[29][30] As of 2018, Node had been used by millions of developers,[31] and npm had the most modules of any package manager in the world.[32]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript Beware learning modern language usage from parchments from the middle ages.

On Mon, 17 Mar 2025 at 10:30, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

Note: I don't do JS but I always assume that I could if I wanted to.

...

From: Ron via talk <talk@gtalug.org>

...

Beware learning modern language usage from parchments from the middle ages.

Yes, very good advice. I imagine especially since JS has had so much change forced by its success.

On the other hand, sometimes it is easier to learn core ideas of a system before it grew like topsy. That's a general comment and I would not recommend this particular book.

I think that I learned a lot about UNIX (and hence Linux) by starting with the 5th Edition (or maybe 4th) in 1975. I know the skeleton, which is hard to see with current versions.

The core idea of JS was: LISP, with more conventional syntax. Heavily influenced by Dave Ungar's SELF. Object orientation without classes. Radical stuff that was disguised so as not to scare the civilians.

Learning how to choose deal with enormous libraries and frameworks of dubious security must be a challenge. NPM is such a large and fluid collection and it apparently has ineffective gatekeepers.

It's been said before, but it's so important I'm going to repeat it: DON'T USE OLD BOOKS (or websites) for programming languages, especially Javascript. Javascript has changed hugely in the past two decades. And even if the body of the JavaScript language hasn't changed officially since the last ECMAScript release, JS's behaviour and common usage is massively influenced by other fluid standards - like CSS and HTML, and the widely used frameworks. So how it's used and taught is continuously shifting. Toronto Public Library has a lot of programming books, with the caveat that the recent ones tend to be popular and may require you to place a hold and wait for them. One book I spent some time with and liked was "Begin to Code: Building apps and games in the cloud" by Rob Miles. It's from 2023 and Microsoft Press - thus requesting the use of tools I didn't have access to and wasn't willing to install. Despite that, it starts at a very basic level with HTML-CSS-JS and builds upward. Be warned that its main target is getting software and a website running on a cloud server rather than specifically teaching you how to use Javascript. But if you can accept that, you'll get a decent grounding in JS and I found the book very well structured and easy to learn from. And some good news: there are ten copies of this book at TPL and half of them are on the shelf and available right now. And it's also available through TPL online through O'Reilly Learning. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com