polyfiversaries
While many more momentous anniversaries are being observed, this month marks some personal-professional milestones:
30 years ago: Back in my college days, started programming in APL, on a pre-PC IBM desktop, with 64K RAM, peripheral floppy drive, & a switch up front to choose between APL and something called 'BASIC', never used the latter, though I did become adept on the firm's Wang word processor, and they later got the IBM-PC equipped with STSC APL; it wasn't all cutting-edge technology back then, though, as my first task was to drive-and-deliver a '35 Dodge pick-up (top speed 45mph) to my new boss in Washington DC, which he had found in Oblong, IL (looks just like it sounds);
25 years ago: Began making models & apps for Merrill Lynch's Debt Strategy Group, as a consultant (later an employee), finding out that my self-taught APL was wizardly, and now I got to do it on a mainframe (IBM 370, VM/CMS) while teaching myself, then others, financial analytics;
20 years ago: Moved back to New York to stay, courtesy of Morgan Stanley's Fixed Income Research;
10 years ago: Became a financial market risk consultant at UBS, 'programmer' dropped from job description.
None of this was a matter of planning or foresight, more of contingency and serendipity.
Non-professionally, lit-blogging will resume once lit-reading does.
30 years ago: Back in my college days, started programming in APL, on a pre-PC IBM desktop, with 64K RAM, peripheral floppy drive, & a switch up front to choose between APL and something called 'BASIC', never used the latter, though I did become adept on the firm's Wang word processor, and they later got the IBM-PC equipped with STSC APL; it wasn't all cutting-edge technology back then, though, as my first task was to drive-and-deliver a '35 Dodge pick-up (top speed 45mph) to my new boss in Washington DC, which he had found in Oblong, IL (looks just like it sounds);
25 years ago: Began making models & apps for Merrill Lynch's Debt Strategy Group, as a consultant (later an employee), finding out that my self-taught APL was wizardly, and now I got to do it on a mainframe (IBM 370, VM/CMS) while teaching myself, then others, financial analytics;
20 years ago: Moved back to New York to stay, courtesy of Morgan Stanley's Fixed Income Research;
10 years ago: Became a financial market risk consultant at UBS, 'programmer' dropped from job description.
None of this was a matter of planning or foresight, more of contingency and serendipity.
Non-professionally, lit-blogging will resume once lit-reading does.
posted by nnyhav | 00:20
1 Comments:
It's funny bcause back in 1980 I had a job with the New England Press Association as a co-op job through Northeastern that was then called data entry which was lining up punch cards.It was the end of empire for that cutting edge technology and one of our frat brothers was telling us all about these computer programs with all sorts of odd names that took forever to input but that brother went on into Microsoft in it's early days and is still there.We thought he was off the deepend so to speak and were proven so wrong that we still have to work for a living.
Post a Comment
<< Home