First things first, we're going back to the latter half of the 90's here; and I've mentioned Don before in one of my older posts, skidding into hero mode.
Don was a programmer, he was kept in a little plexiglass bubble of his own and spent all day in what looked like vi (certainly a terminal based text environment) writing what I think was C for the NCR minicomputer running Sco Unix I mentioned before.
Whether this is actually true, I don't really know, for he spent a lot of time sitting with his hands crossed over his head waiting; at the time I didn't know what he was waiting for, at home I had a Pentium 100Mhz rocking 16mb of RAM and running Borland Turbo C++ for DOS I had a lovely little progress window showing me it was compiling; I had not met the glory of GNU yet.
So Don would stare at a massive (like 19 inch) monitor, he had a Wyse VT100 next to him too, and he would not stare at that very often. He would also make copious notes on paper and seemed to program very deliberately, looking and reading through the information at hand.
He did this, almost without interacting with anyone else for the whole year I worked with him; looking back on it I wished I had been more proactive and just asked him more about it, as he was clearly programming C around a Unix system, which is a) uber cool and b) uber cool.
It always struck me quite how long he thought about and maybe designed anything before acting. You could say this was because he was mulling and considering the problem, he was being a good engineer, with forethought and wanted to get things right?
No, see I think he was really just in fear of how long the compile would take...
Just like me with the project I'm working on twenty five years later.
No comments:
Post a Comment