I almost don’t have any words

Oh man, the roads were terrible this morning but I was determined to make it over to Cubelandia so I faaaarrred up the Frog Hopper and (slowly and carefully) slodged my way over there. I would not have missed being at Cubelandia today for anything.

When the LSCHP interviewed me over 11 years ago, he was excited that I actually knew FORTRAN because they were actually still using it over there even though it was pretty much a “dead” language by that time. They were still using it because in order to provide services to our customers, “we” had a developed a labyrinth of customized one-off programs. I quote “we” because I was not involved in any of that. You’d have to ask W1.5, who retaaarrred a couple years ago.

I never did do any FORTRAN programming at Cubelandia nor did I ever log in to the legacy system. A lot of other folks haven’t either, including many who have been there YEARS before I started working there. I came along as a New Kid and I have spent my entire career there working on the effort to get everything over to an internet environment.

We turned off our “legacy” system a few weeks ago. I don’t think it was as sad as Opportunity signing off. Today we celebrated with a catered BBQ lunch, cake, champagne, and some [briefly] noisy stuff that sent The Bear and I into a retreat to the far corners of the room. Confetti Cannon and party poppers. Strange bedfellows, The Bear and I…

I never saw the actual musheen that powered the early days of our online banking system. As far as I know, that musheen was gone by the time I started working there. I did web work and there were “emulators” running the system. I do not know how that worked. I never did totally understand what we call “legacy-speak” and now I do not have to learn it.

So this excellent cake must have been made from photos of the old musheen and I think the baker did a pretty darn good job plus it tasted good!

If anything, it might’ve been nice for people like the LSCHP to have been there because he steered us through our ultimately successful move from legacy to web. But today was also a War Room for our latest release so we really can’t invite anyone from outside into the building during something like that. It’s okay. He landed on his feet. We did drag Farmer John and Mr.Bisco in there since they used to be part of our team and still work in the building.

Cheers!

One Response to “I almost don’t have any words”

  1. Margaret Says:

    My engineer friends (who were numerous at UW when I was a college student) used FORTRAN a lot, but I could barely get the main frame to work for a geography project I had to do. If I was one space or one period off…It was a LONG time ago, but I still have bad memories of that punch card being spit back out at me over and over again. Grrrr. Glad you made it to work over those roads. Is your weather supposed to improve? Our forecasters are saying maybe more snow, or maybe not, or maybe up north, or maybe rain/snow mix, or maybe a couple of inches. Welcome to Western WA! 🙂