And you are here why?

So, way back in the days of yore, memory didn’t come in handy-dandy chips that just plugged in . Memory was an actual thing, with wires and magnets and whatnot. Big and bulky (compared to what we see these days of course!) it was a technological tour-de-force for the time. For a long long period (mid-50s through the mid-70s), one of the predominant memory types was   Core   memory, which used little magnetic rings (or   cores ) as the individual bits. In particular,  Core RAM   used ferrite cores as the bits , with the wires used to magnetize the cores in opposing directions. Depending on the direction that you sent current through the wires, you could set them to be clockwise ( 1 ), or counterclockwise ( 0 ). In fact, one of the first computers I worked on was a   PDP-10 , which used CORE RAM. The thing is, these ferrite cores were brittle, and would would frequently break and fall. The sysadmin would sweep up the broken ones, and throw ’e...

/via http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2018/06/22/are-you-any-good-at-it/ I still remember discovering perl back in 1991. I was one of two Unix Guys at Notre Dame back then, and we were responsible for managing a metric ton of SPARCstations, AFS, remote booting, and all sorts of weird-ass s**t that, luckily, most of us just don’t have to worry about anymore. And yeah,  so  much of everything was run using a cobbled together collection of  csh  ( bash wasn’t huge back then). Perl was a godsend, simplifying  so  much of the nasty text processing that was intrinsic to the sysadmin stuff we used to do back then. Mind you, most of this was because it beat the pants off of  csh , and that was good enough for us! Years went by, and perl just became a core part of my toolkit — to the point that we pretty much ran a telco for over 10 years with most of the management/automation (what we’d call DevOps these days!) done in perl,  and it worked . In...