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Running all over the city fixing crap in an educational environment AND you have to drive your own car? Who in their right mind thought this was a good idea?

I'm sure they desperately want a diversity hire, but how many niggers are vaxen?

Running all over the city fixing crap in an educational environment AND you have to drive your own car? Who in their right mind thought this was a good idea? I'm sure they desperately want a diversity hire, but how many niggers are vaxen?

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[–] • 1 pt

It's a school, so it's even worse.

Probably anyone with some experience could do the desktop portion, but finding someone with minicomputer experience is the fun part. I doubt many actually know what the term "minicomputer" means these days.

[–] • 1 pt (edited )

I had to look up VAXen. I didn't know it referred to the DEC VAX. I have fond memories of many hours pounding out a lot of cool code using my custom version of the EVE (Extensible VAX Editor). That really was a great text editor.

[–] • 1 pt

The VAX was the last mini that DEC made, following the PDP-11 series. Some of the machines I used talked to a VAX as their head end, or even emulated one, but I never had the chance to see the machine(s) in the flesh.

[–] • 1 pt

An exceptional high school buddy of mine became the engineering manager of a DEC facility making the DEC VAX at 25yrs old in the early 1980s, just as the PC began to overtake their market niche.

Because of the VAX, I had never really used a PC until 1994. Then I had a project dumped on me to create a system that converted radiation hardness device test data into beautiful spreadsheets, charts and graphs for the Mil/Aero customers in an electronic format that could be written to a CD and the customer could easily read and view on a PC. At that time the data coming off the VAX was ascii text printed raw data on reams and reams of tractor feed paper. Like sending a 4000 page omnibus for each product!

I had to learn the PC, learn excel, learn VB, learn VC, write the necessary code on the VAX to transfer the data files to the PC, write the Visual code to prescreen the file allowing the tech options to predetermine which parameters within the data to chart and graph, then hit one custom icon in the header bar of excel tocreate and populate excel spreadsheets for each of those selected test parameters X 3 temperatures X 5 radiation levels, create the charts and graphs. To verify the devices had sufficient gamma ray exposure I had to calculate thosr exposure times by determining the strength of the gamma cell since its last calibration using the decay rate for cobalt-60. Then I had to write the user documentation and train the techs how to use it. There was more to it but THAT was a FUN project I'll never forget! I pulled all that off in 3 months. Talk about a crash course in PCs!