Author: steeleweed

Interview Test

WarStories No Comments

    When I worked for SIAC, the IT subsidiary of NYSE/AMEX, we used to keep an MVT Abend Dump around to use when interviewing prospective programmers and Systems Programmers.

    We’d hand the dump to prospects and wait for their reaction. The guys who said, “The program bombed”, without looking deeper were immediately crossed off our list. We finally interviewed a guy who spent 10 minutes examining the code and scratching his head before admitting, “I can’t figure it out. It’s impossible. That failure couldn’t have been caused by that instruction”.
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Songs

Music Poetry No Comments

Songs

Somebody calls and you never really know who,
hidden in the night wind blowing over you.
Teach yourself to kiss a dream going by
and grab the earth and a little bit of sky.
  Stand or fall, it doesn’t matter much.
  The blossom is too fragile for your touch.
Now and then when you find you’re growing old,
wear the Past to keep away the Cold.
Learn the name of every passing minute
and try to live the happiness that’s in it.
  Hang on or let go, it’s all the same.
  Love be soon or late, it’s just a name.
Scream for Sun! Cry rhapsodies of phantom pain,
to recompense the Rainbow for the glory-rain.
Turn your deaf ears in for second-hand
and settle it all for the price of a wedding band.
  Love what you hope is him, what you think is her,
  for what-you-feel is more than you know-for-sure.
Somewhere in the darkness that will never dawn
you’ll look back down the road you traveled lonely on.
At every fork in the road, you made your choice,
but, babe, don’t hold your breath til you hear your voice.
  You’ll walk the road by the charm of blood and bone.
  It’s up to you if you walk the road alone. Continue reading →

Mainframe Software

WarStories No Comments

  I spent about 50 years working on IBM mainframes and I wish the Wintel world were as easy to master as the mainframe world. Today’s CISC mainframes have a much larger instruction set than Intel systems. This means there’s a lot more to learn but it also allows the code to be much cleaner, elegant and coherent and by reducing the number of instructions, reduces the logical complexity of programs and thus reduces errors. Coding in Assembler does require a knowledge of the hardware as well as the principles of programming and logic. I’d venture to say that if all the people coding high-level or scripting languages had to understand their hardware at the instruction level, most would be doing something else for a living.
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SteeleWeed

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