It’s a new start then, today I had the telephone interview and some time next week I’ll have the face to face. The job is a little bit secret squirrel as I have not to report to anyone locally, I have to report to someone in France – this sounds a little familiar . I worked at this location in the late 90’s and there were more than 4,500 users, now there are only 40 now that’s down sizing for you.
I have been told that there are still some of the systems there that I worked on in the 90’s and that some of the software is still the same version, this operation was outsourced while I was there and it hasn’t been upgraded since then. This has to inspire you with confidence, don’t you think? I will be boning up on a few bits and pieces over the next few days, just to be ready for any techie questions that I’m asked while I’m there. The job is basically an other data centre closure, this will work out at one every three years for me. It seems to be the main reason for my existence now, given that the first twenty years of my career was putting them in – it looks like the last twenty years will be taking them out.
It does seem to be a little ironic, that I’m doing this now – I was always someone who thought that the IT boom would last much longer than it did. Like many other people I had little idea of how much this business would change, I’m writing this on a laptop that is probably as powerful as the dual node ICL 2988 that I worked on 30+ years ago, still that seems to be the way the business goes. I have several virtual machines running now on my laptop, which has a four core i7 running at 3.06Ghz with 16Gb RAM and 6.5Tb of disk – ON A LAPTOP WTF! Even 10 years ago people were dreaming of having this much power in a laptop, my sons gaming system is more than three times as powerful – and it’s only used for playing games or sometimes he goes on facebook with it!
To have had something as powerful as that in the early 80’s, the bill would have been three to five million. Most of the systems used CDC SMD 80 disks, at 80Mb a time – the biggest disks that I came across then were 640Mb winchesters and they were the size of a filing cabinet . How much has it changed, I couldn’t say really – to give you a clue. My first job as a field service engineer was a memory upgrade, I worked for Olivetti at the time and it was an upgrade from 2Kb to 4Kb of memory, just for reference I could hardly lift the additional 2Kb of memory. Just let me say that Ferrite core memory was heavy and you had to be nice to it or it didn’t work when you got there.
Still other news comprises, I was at Merchiston school in Edinburgh to hear my daughter sing with NYCOS. This actually went quite well, she has completed the recording of her original tracks for her EP and they are being processed by the sound engineer now. And just as an aside that I know I have mentioned before, she is trying to raise funds to go to Peru to help street children. So if you are going to buy anything from iTunes or Amazon then clicking through her site will earn her some of the funds that she requires to complete the trip. So visit her site and click through on the Amazon and iTunes links to help her.
Of course you can click through from this site as I’ve told her that I’ll help, she only has to have her friends buy 240,000 iTunes to get her there……………………. There is always the possibility that I’ll be paying for this lot you know.