Be Excellent To Each Other

Actually CGA was 4 colour, and the 1512 had a special Amstrad screen mode that allowed 16 colours. From memory in GEM you could indeed have all 16 colours. Indeed any software that had the correct drivers could do so.

I do journalism, me.

I just remembered GEM did have some sort of paint program that had a few more colours, I'd forgotten all about that. I don't remember anything else I had making use of anything other than white, magenta, cyan and.. err.. black though.

I really didn't use GEM very much other than booting it up a couple of times for a play. I didn't have any GEMish software for it other than the little tools and 'toy' apps it came with. Three floppies just to load it in? sod that, this desktop metaphor thing will never catch on. DOS FTW, etc etc.

I remember the day I got a hard drive for it... 20mb, such decadence.

I live in South Wales and don't want to move, the only wireless planning firms within reach are Orange, BAE Systems, Gamma Technologies, and a small firm called Keima in Cardiff. Orange are skanky to work for since they were taken over by the French and in any event rejected me when I applied there in 2001. BAE sponsored my PhD but presumably didn't like it much because they never offered me a job. Gamma went through a massive downsizing a few years back, we have at least three ex-members of their staff here with few good things to say. Keima are a startup who aren't looking for people at the moment.

So there isn't much telecoms really, unless you include a VOIP firm (Ubiquity) or the IPTV startup that a former colleague of mine works at (Quative). Mostly, though, a few days before my PhD funding stopped I entered Blind Panic Jobhunt Mode and accepted the first offer that turned up. I've been here 3.5 years now so it can't have been too bad a decision I guess. In terms of my personality and skillset, I'm more of a practical engineer than a researcher[1], so it's as odd as it looks that this is where I washed up.

[1] My PhD supervisor was the opposite, he did a maths degree and his own thesis was in combinatorial optimisation. Our conflicting approaches was quite hard work at times but, in hindsight, probably strengthened my thesis no end as he didn't hesitate to bring me up sharp when the thought my theory was lacking and I injected more practical stuff than he would have done.

I am molecular biologist who deals with robots.

I did a BEng Computer Science, discovered I didn't really like Computer Scientists, didn't really make any friends on my course, attended patchily and got a Desmond. I rocked the world of campus Amateur Operetta, though. I then floated around aimlessly for two years or so doing secretarial work (I audio type at 70+ WPM) before ending up on an IT Service Desk.

I now work on a small team coordinating technical teams during IT Emergencies - it perfectly suits my broad, shallow IT knowledge, my ability to build working mental models of things very quickly, and the fact that I work best under the cosh.

The shifts are bloody awful though, dealing with offshore teams with next to zero conversational English is probably one of the most frustrating things I've ever done, and when it's slow, it's sloooow.

I went from Accountancy to IT and back again.

Which probably makes me this :

I make computers do pictures.

You are Doctor Doom, and I claim my £5.

Ooh, who for?

Well, other than freelancing my ringpiece out to a few gaming sites, nobody at the moment. I'm actually copywriting. BUT! Once my MA is done, I'll be doing an NCTJ course in an attempt to get onto a paper.

That sounds like a lot of hard work, couldn't you just shag a footballer, be in Big Brother or murder someone instead?

Take heart; I wouldn't know a local area network from my arsehole.

It's specialised knowledge.

I recommend learning the difference - in case someone says "Can I see your Local Area Network?"

Hehe, I just wanted to emphasise my lack of qualification for IT jobs. I'm sure I could set up a LAN without breaking a sweat, kalmar.

"What seems to be the problem sir?"
"My network cable keeps falling out"

8.7/10

"What are you trying to connect to?"
"I'm trying to connect to the MAN."

"Have you Fingered it for user information?"

"It looks like you might be dropping some packets."

"Ever since you terminated that fat pipe."

I got an A level in Computing, which in 1994 was all about binary and so on. Can't remember a thing about it, which may be wy I work with mentals and that these days.

"Is that a token in your ring network, or are you just pleased to see me?"

Proper mentals? Sounds really exhausting. And difficult.

BTW, for the nerdy amongst us, there's The GUI Gallery for, err, old GUIs. Not really exhaustive though, and there might be better websites like it.

"My, you're getting a lot of gopher traffic in there."

GEM Paint. I've still got the floppies (my 1512 died years ago). Never used it though, because I followed the instructions that came with it and ended up wiping the boot disk.

I don't work in IT but I have some IT qualifications. Only basic ones though. NVQ stuff.

OK, that'll do, we have a winner Yet sadly, there will be people with valid "ICT" qualifications reading this very board who won't have got that. Scary isn't it?

Nerd +1010010010110001100111001

There's going to be a lot of people with DEGREES who won't get that!

I dunno, gopher's pretty goddamn obsolete; I'm not sure I'd think less of someone for not having heard of it. I have, but then I've also handled magnetic core memory, examined a X/25 board taken from a PDP/11, and regularly use (through work) Viewdata, which is still the primary selling channel for travel agents in the UK and, horiffically, is actually Presetel i.e. two-way Teletext. This may be a good candidate for World's Most Obviously Hideously Outdated Technology Still In Comercial Use For No Real Good Goddamned Reason. I can understand, say, ancient factory control systems running on DEC minicomputers or whatnot on the "ain't-broke-not-messing-with-it" basis but in terms of two-way client-server rich information presentation systems we have this new thing called the World Wide Web now and it is going to be just awesome.

Hmm. That went a bit ranty there, didn't it?

Oh, neither would I, I just meant scary in that you suddenly realise you're OLD when you realise a once familiar thing has been completely obsoleted and not mentioned at all anywhere for a good 10 years.



Haha, prestel? My first modem was a scavenged prestel modem, 1200/75 baud, connected to a BBC B. Let's just say I didn't upload much to BBSs.

I love completely obsolete tech that people are inexplicably still using.

Seriously, this is on a par with the people here discussing the differences between US ketchup and UK ketchup here, right now.

I've always wondered what that horrific text monstrosity that travel agents use is. It must takes ages before you can actually work out whats going on with it.

It is either Viewdata or Travelcat, which amusingly is one of our products (First Choice desktops all run Travelcat, for instance). Travelcat is run in a VT420 session into a VMS or Solaris host and is written (no fooling) in Dibol, a proprietary Cobol flavour. It's old enough that all these things were actually a good idea when it was written. It also has an awful lot of extremely capable backoffice financial things that somewhat offset the terrible user interface.

Ranty joking aside, the major problem with replacing these systems is muscle memory and familiarity. Most experienced agents can literally tear through them, hammering the data entry in much much quicker than anyone has ever managed a web-based system to offer. Admittedly training new staff is a problem and it tends to make the staff less interchangable cogs and more skilled professionals, so the companies are generally less keen on it than the agents. You'll not see this sort of product used in call centes, which probably tells you something about the level of product knowledge you are going to get in store compared to on the phone. Put it this way, I'd pretty much always book package holidays in a shop, after three years working on ecommerce travel websites.

This gives rise to amusing hybrids like Viewdata Plus, which is the standard Viewdata screen (which typically presents three hotels on a page) with a little web page alongside it on the screen with pics etc of the three hotels so they can show the customer what it looks like. I'm informed that keeping the two things synced was a bastard to write.

The only IT 'quals' I have is/are CLAIT. At the moment I rub oil onto naked bodies for a living, hoping to change that very soon though!

Ironically, I never completed my degree, scraped through colleges, have only 2 non-shit GCSEs yet know what gopher is. Which proves something about something.

Malicious Afterthought, you have the geekiest job of all of us.

Fuck you buddy
\

So that's what Perkoise looks like....

That's going back a bit. Was fascinated reading about comms, as it was called then, in computer magazines. Didn't get my first taste of it until my dad borrowed a 9.6 modem from work, and connected it to my trusty Amiga 1200 (with whopping 80Mb hard disc).

Interesting that, as I suspected, the travel agents software is a prestel variant.

Even today, for a lot of package holidays sold off a modern ecommerce website like ThomasCook.com, an awful lot of the operators take their bookings through backend systems consisting of automated screen scraping scripts that talk to the Viewdata hosts. So when you click "book", we package that data up and hand it off to a software layer we maintain that goes onto Viewdata (which is just Prestel, still, albeit over IP now) and literally spits out keypresses and parses the incoming screens with regexps and column matches and suchlike to place the actual booking. This leads to very interesting bugs sometimes, like when the price field only had four characters in so a £11,199 luxury cruise for four could be booked for £1199. Good, eh?

God, I hate screen-scrapes. I work for A Big Insurance/Pensions/Investments Company, and various aggregators use screen-scrapes to acquire quotes from our e-commerce products (quite often ignoring the XML solutions we provide, but we bend over forwards to please them anyway).

All it takes is one tiny cosmetic change on a landing page (which, as it's cosmetic, hasn't gone through change control) and the tab order has been subtly altered, naffing up the screen scrape for god knows how many aggregators and losing tonnes of business.

In conclusion:

I spent a year writing apps that screen-scraped and screen-dropped onto CICS sessions for BT. Nightmare stuff.

God that's a beatiful vision of the future. (as predicted in the late 70s)

We do this. Scraping Viewdata is pretty easy, actually, as it hardly ever changes and has almost no presentation code anyway, as I'm sure you can imagine. But we also scrape the low cost airlines' websites so we can offer their stock through our systems (none of them, yet, have given us an XML interface, though they are starting to move in that direction) and it's bloody hard work.