From the writings of John Myrna-
One of my technical mentors was bent out of shape by Celsius.
I used to shake my head at his apparent Luddite attitude. After all, one of America’s great embarrassments is its inability to join the rest of the world in utilizing the metric system. (Multinational companies do it. The military does it. Why not the rest of American society?)
From the writings of John Myrna
For over twenty years I had a love affair with APL, the world’s most productive computer programming language. APL is elegant, concise, and powerful. When embedded in the most responsive IBM mainframe timesharing system of the era, it enabled our company to literally do magic.
Using our APL*Plus System, we could walk into a prospect’s office and blow them away. The prospect would say “You’re the third salesman to tell me how you could solve our problems, how are you different?” “Well,” we would say as we plugged in our “portable” 50-pound terminal and slid the telephone handset into an acoustic coupler. “We’re going to write a program to solve your problem right in front of you.”
And we did!
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From the writings of John Myrna
Many years ago I sat down with one of my employees and asked why he hadn’t made progress on his assignment. “I haven’t had the time to work on it,” he told me. I asked him what he had been working on. His answer was both informative, instructive, and insidious.
”By the time I’ve finished reading Computer World, InformationWeek, Datamation, and the other IT journals, there just isn’t that much time left in the day,” he said. Since he was busy all day, he assumed that he was earning his pay. I asked who told him to read all those journals. “No one, I just assumed it was part of my job.”