Everything Else

WHat do we all do (occupation)? - Page 5

As was mentioned in another thread in the IBM section I write systems software in assembler for IBM mainframes. Yeah they still exist, they still work great, they still cost tons of money and we still do everything in assembler. But business is getting tight, like everything else. I've worked on this platform all my career and I still love it.

_________________
Paint It Blue
The last 25+ years as hardware designer in the embedded world, system design, schematic and FPGA design.
Avoided MS pretty well much thanks to Ericsson. VMS, Sun and now lately Linux for some tools.

And Emacs ofcourse on all platforms :)

_________________
--
No Microsoft product was used in any way to write or send this text.
If you use a Microsoft product to read it, you're doing so at your own
risk.
Default fictional answer is usually "I'm a vibrator tuner" .. which I imagine to be a stimulating and deeply rewarding career.

Less glorified response is a dev with some admin duties for the dev/build boxes.

_________________
Al Boyanich
adb -w -P "world> " -k /dev/meta/galaxy/ksyms /dev/god/brain
Data Center Operations manager. Which means I really don't have much useful technical knowledge but I'm great at wasting people's time with silly questions and requests along with the ability to never give a straight answer when ask a question.

_________________
5/11/11 12:58:19 AM gfxCardStatus[268] AMD Radeon HD 6750M in use. Bummer! Less battery life for you.
5/11/11 12:58:20 AM gfxCardStatus[268] Intel HD Graphics 3000 in use. Sweet deal! More battery life.
MacBook Pro 17inch 2011
Mac Mini 2010
Since college I've worked mostly in MS shops... either C# or VB.net (heh..)

First job was working on this guy http://www.chemringdetectionsystems.com ... ion/JBPDS/

Lots of great people working there... Only real regret is I didn't get to work on any of the other projects they had in the oven while I was there.

I just got another job with a company that makes large scale sorting machines doing a variety of work... I recently visited one of the installations in the field also. I must say very cool and very large machines :) Its predominately database driven software as well as interfacing with industrial controls. I may end up designing controller boards for some of their newer designs at some point as well which all is pretty rewarding IMO.

Oh before I forget.... I'm here for anything Sun Microsystems related :D a friend introdueced me to them in college so I started collecting them and seeing what all I can run on them. Currently I'm having a go at updating Gentoo/Sparc32 to run on my sparcstations http://gh0stwriter.net/getoo/ . If you try it out ... beware the dragons :twisted: notably you have to use ld.gold rather than ld.bfd otherwise gcc compiles crash... and my livecd uses an older kernel so the toolchain I have is gcc 4.5.3 + binutils 2.20 so I'll get around to building with a newer kernel at some point.
cb88 wrote: ...Currently I'm having a go at updating Gentoo/Sparc32 to run on my sparcstations http://gh0stwriter.net/getoo/ .

Dude, you typoed that link, you meant http://gh0stwriter.net/gentoo/ , sheesh! ;)

For what it's worth I own a sparc too, a Blade 2500, but I've been through a bunch of them at work, starting with an Ultra 60 which I got after they took my Indy2 away (reverse evolution). My sparc runs Solaris 10 though, since, as we say on the Slackware forums, gentoo is an African word meaning "Slackware is too hard for me." :lol:
Project:
Temporarily lost at sea...
Plan:
World domination! Or something...
Getting started (again) as a System Engineer at a local HPC cluster solution & cloud hosting company.
Fellow Emeritus for EMC Corp. Retired at 53 after 26 years. Work mostly on Symmetrix/DMX/VMX the last 5 years. HW design, System Architect, Chip/board designer, 48 patents. Even got my picture in the lobby, heh!

I liked the ASIC design stuff the best. I did the first ASIC for Symmetrix, a Dual port BUS and TAG controller. My favorite design was a 3 ASIC chipset that totally 256 chips on the largest sized system. It was a fault tolerant shared memory controller for 1st gen synch DRAM with chip kill. Although the basic control logic and datapath wasn't that complicated, trying to design chip level systems with a 'pair and spare' architecture with 'totally self checking' check logic, using logic synthesis and a layout tool with logic resynthesis that loved to remove all the redundancy was a lotta fun. I never worked on a chip 'as a team'. I did everything soup to nutz. As long as they threw everyone else on simulation I was happy.

I didn't want to retire late in life with my hearing and vision impaired. I planned on working on music and astronomy in my retirement. At 53, I'm in pretty good shape for that :-)
:Skywriter:

DECUS Member 368596
skywriter wrote: Fellow Emeritus for EMC Corp. Retired at 53 after 26 years. Work mostly on Symmetrix/DMX/VMX the last 5 years. HW design, System Architect, Chip/board designer, 48 patents. Even got my picture in the lobby, heh!

I liked the ASIC design stuff the best. I did the first ASIC for Symmetrix, a Dual port BUS and TAG controller. My favorite design was a 3 ASIC chipset that totally 256 chips on the largest sized system. It was a fault tolerant shared memory controller for 1st gen synch DRAM with chip kill. Although the basic control logic and datapath wasn't that complicated, trying to design chip level systems with a 'pair and spare' architecture with 'totally self checking' check logic, using logic synthesis and a layout tool with logic resynthesis that loved to remove all the redundancy was a lotta fun. I never worked on a chip 'as a team'. I did everything soup to nutz. As long as they threw everyone else on simulation I was happy.

I didn't want to retire late in life with my hearing and vision impaired. I planned on working on music and astronomy in my retirement. At 53, I'm in pretty good shape for that :-)


Very impressive list of accomplishments, and well played on the retirement timing, sir! Hope you enjoy the next 3-5 decades and more in good health and high spirits.
--
:Octane2: :O2: :O2: :Indigo: :Indigo: :Indigo: :Fuel: :Indy: :Indy: :Indy: :Indigo2: :Indigo2IMP:
skywriter wrote: Fellow Emeritus for EMC Corp. Retired at 53 after 26 years. Work mostly on Symmetrix/DMX/VMX the last 5 years. HW design, System Architect, Chip/board designer, 48 patents. Even got my picture in the lobby, heh!

I liked the ASIC design stuff the best. I did the first ASIC for Symmetrix, a Dual port BUS and TAG controller. My favorite design was a 3 ASIC chipset that totally 256 chips on the largest sized system. It was a fault tolerant shared memory controller for 1st gen synch DRAM with chip kill. Although the basic control logic and datapath wasn't that complicated, trying to design chip level systems with a 'pair and spare' architecture with 'totally self checking' check logic, using logic synthesis and a layout tool with logic resynthesis that loved to remove all the redundancy was a lotta fun. I never worked on a chip 'as a team'. I did everything soup to nutz. As long as they threw everyone else on simulation I was happy.

I didn't want to retire late in life with my hearing and vision impaired. I planned on working on music and astronomy in my retirement. At 53, I'm in pretty good shape for that :-)

Some heavy duty stuff there :-) Did you worry you might eventually miss working on complex stuff like that... the challenges?
@sgifanatic, you bet I will! :-)

kramlq wrote: Some heavy duty stuff there :-) Did you worry you might eventually miss working on complex stuff like that... the challenges?


So, well.... no. Maybe it's just me, but anything gets old after a while. I went right into computer engieering and manufacturing right out of highschool; got a job at DEC in 79 working on DECsystem-10's and 20's - test and debug in mfg, then engineering with VAX. I worked at DEC for 6 years, then a couple of years or undergraduate work on a Physics degree at WPI, then joined EMC in 88. So I've spent nearly all of my working years working on the largest systems* short of the top500 class size. Made it to the lofty heights of engineering (no management for me) where the only really complicated stuff left is the interdepartmental politics. Which I had no stomach for. So, I'm done with it. Now it's 'me and my family' time :-)

*- Reverse engineering IBM 3090 memory systems for a plug compatible memory system product(s) was fun :-)
:Skywriter:

DECUS Member 368596