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