Yesterday I logged into TSO for the first time in more than 30 years. It is hard to believe but this was cutting edge tech in the 1970s. TSO stands for Time Sharing Option and it was a way for programmers to work on mainframe programs. This mainframes cost millions of dollars and had as much computing power as my wristwatch does today. We talk about Gigs of memory today but in 1980 I worked on a big machine that had 5 partitions, each with about 64K of memory. The thing had two processors and a total of 512k memory and it served hundreds of people on old fashioned terminals.

In another 30 years we will think that PC’s and Tablets are quaint devices used by a few nostalgic hobbyists who are living a slow and boring past. What will replace them? I am a little frightened to think about it.

My job now is to replace the old green screen COBOL programs with Java. It is not trivial. It gives me a certain nostalgia for these dinosaurs. Things were simpler in those days, if not easier.