Old Guys

[Welsh, Wesley]

Dear Conrad,

You are such a softie - you should have been at Georgia Tech in the early
70's

There was no submit your coding sheets -
	you waited your turn in line for the IBM 026 punch (no buffered
punch, as you keyed
	it punched - if you screwed up, you started the card over)

You began with FORTRAN - if you got good, you graduated to ALGOL 
	there was no COBOL compiler for the Burroughs B-5500 we had

Two day turnaround was a fluke - four to five days was the norm, unless -

	it was fall semester, when the athletic department (football) got
	priority.  You learned to avoid programming classes in the Fall!

Now I sit at my PC with magnitudes greater capacity and performance than the
multi-million dollar B-5500 and complain if a compile takes longer than a
few
seconds.  Haven't we come a long way!!!

Wesley Welsh
Greenville County Government
Greenville, SC
wwelsh@greenvillecounty.org