Wait, What

[afuna]

Spent the afternoon in the car with my mom running various errands and we got to talking. It turns out that mom was a systems programmer way back in the day of mainframes, and knows COBOL and assembly. And dad taught himself C in order to build a rudimentary inventory system (on a microcomputer? is that the thing?) -- this was for their first company, so late 80s/very early 90s.

I am floored. I was vaguely aware that she'd had a job involving computers and banks, but I did not realize the extent. Why did they not tell me this earlier? D:

(Note: Dad never taught me C; mom never taught me assembly. I wonder what would have happened if they had, though? I suspect murder and mayhem!)

Anyway, I found myself promising to teach her how to master excel -- or at least work it enough to run totals for her job. I suspect murder and mayhem! Whoo!

Comments

[pauamma]

Also, "systems programmer" in IBM parlance (at least as applied to their mainframe architectures) is actually closer to what's generally meant by sysadmin today than to programming strictly speaking (although sysadminning generally entails some of that too). It so happens that configuring a large part of IBM system and network stuff was done using assembly syntax and assembly macros to generate the actual binary configuration data. (Which isn't to say your mom wasn't both a sysadmin and an application developer either at the same time or at different times.)

[afuna]

*nods* She didn't give me much details, just something about tables and flow and macros. I'm not really up with the terminology involving mainframes though, so I'm not sure what role she played, exactly.

[pauamma]

*nod*