I'm 42, been fiddling with computers, both personally and professionally since 1982. I've been employed in the same IT dept for a NHS hospital in the UK for 17 years (possibly a record in IT?)
Nah. I haven't had the privilege of staying anywhere that long because I've failed axe dodging a couple of times, but I've known a fair number of people at various workplaces who have been at the same company and doing IT work for 30+ years. But I've worked at shops which had a long history with UNIVAC (now Unisys) mainframes.
When I worked at NWA, I had a teammate who came over from UAL in 1989 or so who had worked with their UNIMATIC system since they started writing it back in 1967 (a mix of SLEUTH and ASM assembler and a FORTRAN 66 variant called FIELDATA FORTRAN V). Well, he stayed at NWA and worked on our copy of UNIMATIC (dubbed WorldFlight) until he retired sometime around 1999 or thereabouts. He spent almost 32 years working in the same software environment, and I think he spent almost all of that time in the Weight and Balance application!
Oh, since I've revived an old thread, I should probably say I'm 46 now, and my previous poll answer is now wrong.
(46 would be 56 in octal, or 06566 in the octal representation of FIELDATA)
I'm (I always have to subtract first) 62; we don't have presidents here, but I'm living through my third king.
Remember those PDP-8 and -11 cabinets (in the 70-s)?
CP/M ? The first DOS PC with the 8086 processor at a few MHz?
When RAM was at most 64 Kb (kilobytes)?
And then, at the time of the 16 bit 80386 (EDIT: 32 bit, but most software was still 16 bit), around 1990, came the first ARM (Acorn Risc Machine), a 32 bit RISC processor at 8 (or was it 12) MHz, about as fast as a 16 MHz 80386.
And the Acorn Archimedes ARM-powered computer with RISC OS, a windowing OS with cooperative multitasking, way ahead of Microsoft !
RISC OS allowed dynamic loading of system modules.
Much of RISC OS was written in assembler, so it was fast.
As was the case with many of the applications.
The assembler was well structured, with all instructions 32 bit long and capable of conditional execution, and hence easy to program in.
( RISC OS is still going strong; there are (a bit expensive) computers, and there is an emulator for PCs which is supposed to be rather fast. )
Now, some 15 years later, we have ARMs running at x00 MHz in our tablets, as well as in most(?) handhelds.
