How to describe myself? I used to describe myself by what I did for a living. Odd thing though considering that when I meet somebody I don't define them by what they do for money. It isn't something I ask. So, maybe I won't do that. I will say that I'm analytical, technically inclined, and have no problems reading the manual (RTFM).
When I was in trade school (wow! that's a very long time ago), my instructor's most used response was "look in the book" (where look and book sounded the same but rhyme with Luke.) Also, instructor is a bit of a strong term to use here because he was more of an overseer—he didn't exactly instruct because it was learn-at-your-own-pace computer based training which worked great for me—I finished the 6 month course in 4 months. When I got stuck, which didn't happen often, but when it did, look in the book or more colloquially, RTFM (Read The F**ing Manual), was the standard response. While it is indeed good advice to RTFM, because a lot can be learned independently, I wonder how much the overseer knew of the subject.
I'm also prone to story telling in the middle of what I'm trying to say which frequently leads to me forgetting what I was talking about. I had a group of friends that frequently referred to me as Rose (from Golden Girls) because of that.
So... About me. Well, I quit working at 50 which is quite young in terms of retirment, but definitely not young; so, defining myself by what I do for a living just doesn't make sense.
How do I spend my time? I play adventuring video games a lot. During the pandemic when toilet paper was scarce, I found myself picking up TP while playing Fallout 76 and even thinking "oh, I could use some." Then realising I was in game and it isn't really useful.
I like to cook, bake and garden. I have done some remarkably large baking projects. When my nephew got married, my sister and I made and decorated over 200 cupcakes for the reception. For many years, my mom, sister and I would make pies (from scratch and home grown fruits) for a fund raiser. We generally made somewhere around 20 pies but one year we really got into pie making mode and made 27. Transporting the baked goods is one of the hardest issues to solve. With pies it isn't too hard but cupcakes are a different matter because they're top-heavy and want to tip over.
I spent 30 years on a mainframe. When I started working at NAVCO as a production control clerk, we were using punch cards for some of the data entry--about an hour of data entry per day on punch cards. After a year, I moved to application programming. By then the punch cards were a thing of the past. The division that had been using punch cards was sold off to another company and the rest was sold to Crumm & Forster (a Xerox company.)
We moved to a new building in Earth City and when we got new terminals, I was thrilled to unpack and do set up for my fellow programmers. The old terminals were a single unit with a detached keyboard. They still had tubes (aside from the CRT) and we left them on constantly, but turning the brightness all the way down when leaving for the day. The theory was that the jolt of power to start them was too much for those aging tubes. The new terminals were a three piece unit: keyboard, VGA monitor, and logic unit. By the time I was a valued employee, I had a 17 or 20-inch monitor attached to my logic unit. But that is just the terminals.
The mainframe. Ah, the mainframe. In 1984 the mainframe was so large it wouldn't have fit on the first floor of my house. By the time I quit, it would fit in the fridge nook. But that was just the mainframe. There were also peripherals--all detached and all at least as big as the mainframe. So while the mainframe would fit, it would've required the basement and second floor to hold the printers, tape drives, disk drives, etc. After 30 years and multiple upgrades, we finished with a z890. The crazy thing was that the hardware management console (HMC) was actually an OS/2 PC. (OS/2 was an IBM and Microsoft joint venture on a windowed operating system which was mostly obsolete--I think IBM used it internally but otherwise it was dead.) We could install software and, in general, muck about with the OS. We were a bit out of date because of the pending shutdown. Several years earlier, IBM had updated the model to use a Linux based HMC with a closed system--that is, the user login was sandboxed (chrooted to its own directory) and we only had access to the HMC software interface.
So, why did I like the mainframe? Partly due to the grand size of the thing and I'm referring to the software (OS and all its components) rather than the hardware. It became even more grand as the size was reduced. I got involved with the hardware connections a few times but I never reseated a card or did a teardown. Every hardware upgrade required me to make changes to the I/O SubSystem configuration (sort of like a PC's BIOS) to identify the connected devices to the OS. Without the new definition, the OS wouldn't know that a tape drive, disk, printer, communications controller (like a router) were attached.
When I started using the mainframe we contracted out the cabling work as the cables were ½" twisted copper cables. As we moved more towards optical fiber cables, I was involved with the cabling because they were easy to move around or pull under the floor. All the computer rooms I used had a raised floor (18-28" above the actual floor.) The copper cables were laid on the floor but the fiber cables were generally hung from the floor supports so as not to get tangled or damaged by the copper cables. After the data center was moved, there was a guy that handled all of the cabling. The more I worked with him, the more cabling I got into but the rest of the group seemed to stay out of it.
So what made the mainframe so interesting to me. To start, ordering the proper collection of IBM software was a project in itself as it took several days to configure all of the software components that should be included in the order. Then the manuals arrived--about 15 boxes of manuals. It took a couple days just to organize the manuals and find the one that was the initial install guide. It was made significantly easier when IBM moved to soft-copy manuals, like PDFs, and the rows of bookshelves were a thing of the past.
It then took 5 days to get the point where I could IPL (boot up) the test system--it was that involved. But that first IPL didn't have any 3rd party software installed. (To compare that with a PC or mac, it would be like setting up a new hard drive with a fresh OS and then needing to install all of the software that wasn't shipped with the OS, such as, Microsoft office. I suppose that's a bad example as it turns out that quite a bit of software comes with Windows or macOS.) Installing the 3rd party software required more than just me. We had a team of 4 people to handle all the software. Generally, over 60% of the 3rd party software would need to be updated as well, so the project generally took a couple months just to get the system looking like it should.
Then we would start user testing. Somebody had to meet with the applications department to organize testing and when they were done, we'd bring in the end users to test. Due to business constraints, this usually required the work to be done on a Sunday and was generally performed over the course of a month. This became problematic when we moved to 24x7 customer service.
The upgrade was a grand project requiring planning, technical skills, people skills and significant scheduling. The larger the company got (and specifically after we merged with Integon which had an employee base over twice our size), the fewer of those things I was able to do because we had other groups that handled many of those tasks.