"Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)" <lyndon@orthanc.ca> wrote:
> Oh come on Rob, you should know that for anyone over the age of 50,
> the moment you see 'dd' your brain automatically switches to JCL
> mode.
I am (considerably) over 50, but was fortunate enough to never have
to have used JCL. After a two year hiatus for religious studies,
I returned to my university for my senior year and encountered
Unix (IS/1 on a PDP-11/70), C, and Software Tools. It was sooooo far
ahead of everything else that I knew then that's where I wanted
to spend my career.
In the liberal arts world where my background is, IBMs were not a sure thing. My alma mater was a DEC shop top to bottom starting in the early '70s. The psychology department had a PDP-12, I believe the natural and computer sciences had a few 8s and 11s (and CS later an 11/750), and I know that the "computing center" (mostly administrativa) got an 11/780 pretty much as soon as they could. When I got there everything was still all DEC, VMS for the computing center (a 6620 clustered with some smaller boxes, also serving email and news) and mostly Ultrix on MIPS for the sciences.
-Henry