Last month at Tam’s place people were commenting things we had which were old. It was sort of “back when I was a young’n…” story telling time.

I visited my parents last Saturday and picked up my contribution to the discussion:

I brought it in to work today and asked my office mate if she knew what it was.

Her eyes got big and she said, “Oh my! Is this a punched card? I have never seen one of these before!”

I told her that it was more than that. “This”, I told her, “Is proof I was writing software before you were born.”

I took Engr 131 fall semester 1973 at the University of Idaho. Punched cards is a tough way to program a computer. There is no back space or delete and retype. There is no “white out”. If you make a mistake on a card you get to type a new one (there were rare exceptions but that is beyond the scope of this discussion).

We would leave our card deck on a table in the hall and come back three DAYS later to read the print-out result of the submission to the IBM 360. Usually it was something like ten pages of paper that boiled down to something like “Syntax error on card five, column 17.” Or “Program error. Core dump follows.”

The next year using a line editor on a teletype that looked like an IBM Selectric typewriter with a box of paper in back was such a thrill. You could get the compile and run results in a minute or two instead of days. And “editing” was just AWESOME compared to punching cards.

In the early 80’s I started programming on a CRT. It was still a line editor but listing lines 120-140 only took a couple of silent seconds instead of 30 seconds of clattering with the teletype. I started hearing rumors of something called a “visual editor” about the time son James was born in ’84. I couldn’t imagine what the fuss was about. “Visual editor?” What is that about? How much better than Edline could an editor be? I didn’t bother to check it out for several months.

Even then I would tell people about programming the microprocessor system I had build on a plug-board. I had typed in hand assembled hex codes into a PROM programmer. Then I plugging the PROM into a socket and powered up the system trying to debug it from the deciphering the way the LEDs blinked. Now that was a tough way to program.

Yeah, it’s old news. But I’m liking it on my computer at work so I’m about to install it at home. Get it here.

At a meeting this morning we were discussing a possible name for a new product. It was suggested that since we already have SkyDrive and SkyMarket (with rumors of SkyLine and SkyBox), maybe we should name the project SkyNet. The consensus was there were probably names less threatening to the warm and fuzzies.

Because my officemate, I, (and a few others) won an award for working some long hours last year and delivering on time we spent the money by taking a few others and going kayaking on Lake Union this afternoon. I updated my Twitter account several times and was wardriving with my cell phone while kayaking. Here are the twitter updates:

• http://twitter.com/JoeHuffman/statuses/899833135
  
• http://twitter.com/JoeHuffman/statuses/899858649
  
• http://twitter.com/JoeHuffman/statuses/899876994
  
• http://twitter.com/JoeHuffman/statuses/899900654
  
• http://twitter.com/JoeHuffman/statuses/899931397

My boss took some pictures and updated his Facebook account with them while still on the water. Ry (who wasn’t even there) tagged some of the pictures with names before we made it back to work and dropped people off.

Last December I made two posts about how busy I was at work:

• Running on empty
• Running on empty makes the news

About 10 days ago while I was in Louisville our Corporate VP held a meeting for all the people under him. I missed out on the big meeting but I’ve watched part of the video of it since then. One of the topics at the meeting was awards for various people. My officemate, Sapna, mentioned in one the previous posts, our PM, our test/system integration guy and I got one of the awards. Here is a screen capture from that video:

I told Barb about this and she thought it was pretty cool… until I told her what we had done. We designed/wrote/tested some of the website code that puts ads on mobile phones (like what you see here depending on what country you are in) for our mobile websites.

Barb’s response was basically “ads are evil”. But ads are the reason so much of the Internet is “free” just like most television programs and radio. For example Hotmail requires dozens of servers with massive amounts of storage and bandwidth. Ads pay for those resources. There haven’t been many ads on a lot of mobile phones for various reasons but that is changing and my little team (above) helped change that.

I find the diversity of our team interesting. Sapna is from India and on Monday participated in a folk-life event at the Seattle Center attended by some large number of people. She and about a dozen others put on several dances from India. I showed up and took a bunch of pictures. At 5′ 3″ and 110 pounds she doesn’t look like a software geek: 

Taqi is from Pakistan (don’t India and Pakistan lob expolsives and high speed pieces of metal at each other on a regular basis? Odd–they get alone so well here.) and when he visits “home” I sometimes ask him about what “training camps” he spent time in. He takes it quite well and tells me stories from his time, years ago, in the military–which he makes of point of telling me was the secular military. He is about to finish his master’s degree from the U of W in physics.

Zane is of Asian descent and a Canadian citizen who loves to play basketball. Snowboarding is also up there on his list of things to do.

All of them are great people and I’m proud to work with them. However, I’m sometimes intimidated here at Microsoft. If you open your mouth about something you should know what you are talking about because I suspect the average I.Q. in our section of the building is probably about 150. Damn, these guys are smart.