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If you've got a bunch of old computer languages under your belt, the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, Washington, wants you.
It's a job that's definitely not for the faint-hearted: as well as being able to handle old IBM, DEC, HP and Control Data Corporation languages, you'd be expected to help create and debug hardware interfaces to the vintage iron in Windows and Linux. You'd be expected to build and maintain the ancient operating systems, help out with hardware development, and because this is low-level stuff, be able to work out what's going on inside the boxes using logic analyzers and oscilloscopes. The duties include helping hunt out the arcana of the computing world, since not only does the job involve running and restoring the iron itself: the spec asks for people who can help locate the applications that used to run on the boxes.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 10 2014, @06:55PM
You know those HR SOBs, the hiring manager will ask for "fourty" years of DEC PDP-8 experience and then HR will complain about too many resumes and boost that to "sixty" years of PDP-8 experience so they don't have to work as hard, even though the GD thing was only released in '65. And then they'll complain that only lying crooks who made it past the criteria and logic puzzle interview process. So lets just hire the bosses cousin, which he wanted to do all along anyways...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 10 2014, @08:26PM
A PDP-5 man could push that back to '63.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday June 11 2014, @02:31AM
That's the problem I have always had with trying to get employment through an HR department.
Yes, I have a passing acquaintance with DEC PDP systems. Mostly at the assembler level and hardware interface. A lot of stuff I was trained on in University as well as my days working in geophysical data logging trucks in the petrochemical industry involved DEC hardware.
Since it was all memory-mapped I/O on the machine, it was a piece of cake to design hardware ports of whatever your imagination came up with. It was all TTL and bus-driver chips in those days. I still have cabinets full of old TTL parts.
However, the Motorola 68000 made the scene, and from what I could tell, it was very similar in power to the PDP and was a heckuva lot easier to implement because cardfuls of TTL were now neatly integrated into one 64 pin plastic DIP ( and later they actually had CMOS versions - the 68HC000, that I could easily run from flashlight cells! Not only that, I no longer had to boot the OS from DECTAPE; I could neatly put it in EPROMS. I still remember loading in the OS mechanically from paper tape on the early machines.).
These days, I am all Arduino. Not necessarily the boards, but the software environment. It supports the C++ I have fallen deeply in love with.
However, if I do not know anyone there. Getting past HR would be a huge issue to me. Geez, I am a senior citizen! Its also been my experience that one has to lie like a dog in order to get a HR-assisted job. I do not like to lie on employment stuff because they are apt to ask me to do what I said I could do, and this would only result in termination for non-performance. Could I do DEC stuff? I have not done it for 30 years, but then I have not fixed a vacuum tube TV in over 40 years... but I still have the tube manuals and feel I could if I had to. I still remember how those old things work.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]