Tom's Tall Tale: The Old Programmer and the SeaThomas Caldwell ends this year with a tall tale from the high seas of an ancient mariner who could be the last, or the first, of his kind. During a recent attempt to escape the rat race of the Kanto Plain, I spent a couple of nights in Tokyo Bay on a friend's sailboat. Having to live amidst technology more than most people, and then write about it, I take full advantage of every opportunity to get away from it all. No computers? Count me in! Although it is one of the busiest seaports on the planet, the Bay can be a rather peaceful place, especially after sunset. There were no phones, PCs, or modems. Except for the occasional squawk from our marine radio, it was just the waves, the stars and, off at a safe distance, the city lights. Late one evening, after we had tied up for the night, a smaller sailboat came up alongside. Its master was an older gentleman who sported a beard, old captain's hat, and a much-worn pipe. Sitting up on deck was a large, golden retriever that seemed as at home on a boat as he was. "Ahoy," he called out from the dark. "I'm in need of some fresh water. I've been out all day and have very little left. Have any to spare?" We had been sailing all day too, but were more interested in beer at that moment. After we secured the line he tossed us, we gladly gave him a few bottles of spring water. He tipped his hat and disappeared below. A few minutes later, while my friends and I were making small talk and purposely avoiding the subject of computers and technology, the most heinous of sounds emanated from below the deck of our neighbor's vessel. It was the Microsoft Windows start-up jingle. Curious, we paid a visit to our guest and discovered the old salty dog had the latest Pentium system onboard, one that any self-respecting nerd would love to get his hooks in. You guessed it. Our host was a programmer who lived on his boat and sailed from port-to-port, servicing everything from PCs to mainframes. He had been a programmer most of his life and had begun his career when punch cards were the cutting edge of information technology. Although my shipmates and I had vowed to keep our weekend low-tech and unplugged, I couldn't resist a good story. I had to know more about this seafaring techie. After probing his background a bit and sensing a deep thoughtfulness, I asked him for his views on the state of the industry today. "People are spoilt," he said. "Used to be 8K was a lot of memory, now 32MB ain't nearly enough." It seems, he said, that the relatively cheap prices of computers, memory, and storage devices has taken the craftsmanship out of programming. There was no incentive for application development teams to go on "byte-hunts" any more, to make a program more efficient and less of a memory hog. To make up for their lack of programming skills, developers recommend faster computers. The greatest abomination, he lamented, was that these days the customers effectively do the beta testing. That sort of thing was unthinkable at one time, he said, in the way old men always talk of an earlier, more civilized age. Inevitably, the impeding Y2K problem crept into out discussions. "Oh, COBOL. Yea, I was there when we started using it," he said as his dog curled up at his feet. "I was also one of the first in my company to point out the problem we were gonna have, but none of my supervisors listened." He told of EDP managers who didn't care about the millennium problem lurking in their systems, because most of them didn't intend to be with the company that long anyway. When he saw that there was no hope of reasoning with the people that ran the company, and having no desire to be around when things hit the fan, he quit his job and pulled up stakes. He now travels the world as a programmer for hire -- alone with his dog, the waves, the stars, and, a high-speed Pentium. The next morning, he rose early and immediately prepared to depart. Some of the outlying Japanese islands, he told us, were ideal places to work on corporate payroll systems without any disturbances. We took him at his word. Before he cast off, he told me that the underlying reason why so many computer systems, especially Japanese ones, will probably not survive the year 2000 was because of sheer arrogance on the part of the companies that put more faith in the computers than the people who are responsible for running them. "You tell your readers that arrogance and technology don't come to any good when you put 'em together," he said as he prepared to set sail to another project deadline. "The last time somebody tried that on a grand scale, they called her Titanic." With that, he backed-up his hard drive, raised sail and headed into the sun.
 |