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Up Hill Both Ways with my VMS Manual

So ComputerWorld posted The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills (via Michael DeHaan)

I love these - It’s the tech geek equivalent of your granddad and the bucket of books up hill both ways in the snow.

My report card.

  1. I’m so incredibly happy I never touched cobol or fortran. I came into Computer Science when they taught the concepts in Pascal. I avoided fortran by taking the Numerical Methods course in the summer when the Grad student teacher chose C
  2. I did do the dBase thing taking some business apps course in High School - thankfully that was the only non-RDBMS I used
  3. I’m actually quite thankful I dealt with AppleTalk, IPX, and DECnet - I think it gives a networking perspective I would have never had in a TCP/IP-only world
  4. Thankfully no cc:Mail - I did have to use Notes for a while, and a few mid-range versions of Groupwise. And Microsoft Mail on the Macintosh (hey, the server ran on a quite plucky little SE). All of those were enough
  5. ColdFusion. Never did it, never will. Some peers on my campus don’t know that it’s dead yet though.
  6. C is dead huh? I agree with Michael - obviously the ComputerWorld authors don’t hang out with OS developers.
  7. PowerBuilder - I missed out on this one. And I don’t regret that at all
  8. I actually was a CNE. I went to work for CompuCom out of college (huge mistake) - and CompuCom was big into the whole “certs” thing - I got my MSCE through a training course (dude, I was running NT 4.0 on a toshiba laptop - I totally avoided Windows 95) - and then I read the CNE study manuals the night before the exams and got the CNE that way. It was ridiculous. That whole certification thing - at least the CNE tests for NetWare 4 - was a complete joke. I’m actually a little prouder of my RHCE - because I actually had to troubleshoot things to pass that. But I only did that to force myself to make sure I learned what I needed in the Red Hat course. I’m not a big fan of the certification thing. I think it’s good for the guys and gals that actually know their stuff and work with things and want some recognition for it (and the courses/tests can sometimes add to the actual experience - not the other way around though)- and work in industries that give credit for that - but that’s about it.
  9. What the heck is a PC network administrator?
  10. OS/2 - thankfully I missed out on that too. I understand it multitasked DOS sessions like nobody’s business though