Day13 I'm computer-friendly

I was born at the right time in history. I am a computer-friendly person. I just get them.

My first exposure to computers was in a high school class called "Data Processing", if I remember correctly. It was about card punch machines and how to sort cards and how to copy a deck of cards, even moving columns around on the new "copy". Except for all geeks like me, no one even knows what those words mean. That was 1974. A few years later, I was in the US Army, working in tech supply. We had a computer for the supply stuff, housed in a couple trailers (like to be pulled by a tractor as an 18 wheeler). One of the card punch machines was down, and the other one developed a problem with the letter "Y", which was in our company id, so it was on every card. I understood how the letters on the cards worked and explained how we could work around the issue until the machine was repaired.

The records had long manila card stock, maybe 18" x 11" or something like that. I was one of the few people who were able to read the records, because they were all in codes and stuff like that. 

I can't explain how I was able to do that. It is not the job that I had been trained for. I just have a knack. I always have had.

I'm not a developer. I know how to read code and I can do little tweaks if it suits me, but it's not my niche. I know how computers work with each other.

Many years ago, I worked in a factory and I was doing mostly Excel reports development. The factory was run on VMS, our mainframes were some flavor of Unix (but I no longer remember which one), and our desktops were Windows. They asked me to automate some reports that were being prepared every day, spending something like 10 man hours on these reports every day. The biggest stumbling block was that no one had been able to figure out how to get the data from the Vax onto a Windows desktop. I went to the Unix admin and said, "I want a mount point on the Unix host that I can set up as a network drive on the Windows desktops. The source of the mount point will come from the Vax." He was able to set up a mount point, but he had no idea how to get the date from the Vax to appear on the mount point. Then I went to the Vax admin. I said, "I want to be able to access this directory on the Vax (I gave him the VMS path) from the Unix side. It should be world-readable and read only (no writing)." He looked puzzled and then he said, "You want me to export the directory?" I said, "Yes! I want you to export this directory and this is the Unix mount point for it."

In less than an hour, I was able to see data from the factory VMS system on my Windows desktop (so I could automate the Excel reports).

That was good fun to me! 

That's the kinda guy I am.