4 ms·

Things like this are great to remind ourselves of some of the rationale for the ways things are. When I worked at a company which used a lot of Fortran, I kept

by jzwinck 10y ago

Things like this are great to remind ourselves of some of the rationale for the ways things are. When I worked at a company which used a lot of Fortran, I kept a punch card at my desk. Among other things this made it easier to explain to new people why there was a column limit for code. Eventually an HR person came around and told me to remove the card because the top management was coming to visit soon. Among other things this made it easier to understand the role of HR in a large company.

scrollaway 10y ago
> Eventually an HR person came around and told me to remove the card because the top management was coming to visit soon. Among other things this made it easier to understand the role of HR in a large company. What on earth?
- ptasci67 10y ago
  Yeah I am with you here. Why would you not want management to know you have an educational punch card?
  - MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
    Maybe just to make the desks look clean? But yeah, HR... everyone's favourite department, it seems.
    - iainmerrick 10y ago
      HR's function at a large company is to defend the company against you.
      - hoorayimhelping 10y ago
        Oooooh and also, if you're not paying for the product, you -are- the product. Leave these glib platitudes at Reddit.
        pjkundert 10y ago
        Actually, it's a testable hypothesis. This is the inverse of what you believe, I presume? It seems trivial to find a counter example to your claim... It seems difficult to support even the weaker claim, that there exists an HR department at a large company that defends your interests against that company. I wonder why you seem so convinced of your position?
      - Girlang 10y ago
        And to provide jobs for Women. Usually the only female "executive" job is running HR.
- raldi 10y ago
  Around that time, the same HR department decreed that nothing in anyone's cubicle could protrude higher than the inter-cubicle divider wall, about nine inches. One employee had to take down a little American flag (this was two years after 9/11) and another, a trophy the company had given him.
  - acqq 10y ago
    Now I know why Catbert the HR is colored devil red.
raldi 10y ago
What prop did you use to explain pekludge_()?
- coldpie 10y ago
  Wow, this is an obscure reference. Nothing at all turns up on DDG, and two results on google: One Slashdot comment from seventeen years ago, and two undocumented lines in an attachment from the Eclipse IDE bugzilla: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9569&cid=1418091 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9569&cid=1418091 https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/attachment.cgi?bugid=436478&action=viewall https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/attachment.cgi?bugid=436478&ac... This may be the most obscure reference to a thing that clearly exists that I've ever seen. Well done.
  - raldi 10y ago
    Can't be too obscure; I've got 15 upvotes already. :) But here's the story: In 2003, jzwinck and I were desk neighbors at a company everyone here has heard of whose original technology was written in the 1980s on computers made by Perkin-Elmer, a big government contractor most famous for screwing up the Hubble telescope's mirror. Instead of pids, processes had names. You could send a command to them like this: "SEND MYPROG EXIT" and then, if you wrote your program to accept an EXIT command, it would run your subroutine. This was also used for interprocess communication. Then PE stopped making computers, and the company switched to Unix, but didn't want to rewrite all its IPC code. So it wrote a Fortran function called PEKLUDGE that took a string parameter representing the program name and stored it somewhere so that it could be used to receive IPCs later. The first thing every program did from that point on was call this function with the first arg from the command line, which was supposed to be the program name plus maybe a number if the machine needed to have multiple copies running. Then they switched from Fortran to C for all new programs, and the way to call old Fortran functions in C was to lowercase the name and add an underscore. And that's the story of why every program at this company starts with a call to pekludge_(argv[1])

by jzwinck 10y ago

scrollaway 10y ago

> Eventually an HR person came around and told me to remove the card because the top management was coming to visit soon. Among other things this made it easier to understand the role of HR in a large company. What on earth?

ptasci67 10y ago
Yeah I am with you here. Why would you not want management to know you have an educational punch card?
- MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
  Maybe just to make the desks look clean? But yeah, HR... everyone's favourite department, it seems.
  - iainmerrick 10y ago
    HR's function at a large company is to defend the company against you.
    - hoorayimhelping 10y ago
      Oooooh and also, if you're not paying for the product, you -are- the product. Leave these glib platitudes at Reddit.
      - pjkundert 10y ago
        Actually, it's a testable hypothesis. This is the inverse of what you believe, I presume? It seems trivial to find a counter example to your claim... It seems difficult to support even the weaker claim, that there exists an HR department at a large company that defends your interests against that company. I wonder why you seem so convinced of your position?
    - Girlang 10y ago
      And to provide jobs for Women. Usually the only female "executive" job is running HR.
raldi 10y ago
Around that time, the same HR department decreed that nothing in anyone's cubicle could protrude higher than the inter-cubicle divider wall, about nine inches. One employee had to take down a little American flag (this was two years after 9/11) and another, a trophy the company had given him.
- acqq 10y ago
  Now I know why Catbert the HR is colored devil red.

raldi 10y ago

What prop did you use to explain pekludge_()?

coldpie 10y ago
Wow, this is an obscure reference. Nothing at all turns up on DDG, and two results on google: One Slashdot comment from seventeen years ago, and two undocumented lines in an attachment from the Eclipse IDE bugzilla: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9569&cid=1418091 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9569&cid=1418091 https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/attachment.cgi?bugid=436478&action=viewall https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/attachment.cgi?bugid=436478&ac... This may be the most obscure reference to a thing that clearly exists that I've ever seen. Well done.
- raldi 10y ago
  Can't be too obscure; I've got 15 upvotes already. :) But here's the story: In 2003, jzwinck and I were desk neighbors at a company everyone here has heard of whose original technology was written in the 1980s on computers made by Perkin-Elmer, a big government contractor most famous for screwing up the Hubble telescope's mirror. Instead of pids, processes had names. You could send a command to them like this: "SEND MYPROG EXIT" and then, if you wrote your program to accept an EXIT command, it would run your subroutine. This was also used for interprocess communication. Then PE stopped making computers, and the company switched to Unix, but didn't want to rewrite all its IPC code. So it wrote a Fortran function called PEKLUDGE that took a string parameter representing the program name and stored it somewhere so that it could be used to receive IPCs later. The first thing every program did from that point on was call this function with the first arg from the command line, which was supposed to be the program name plus maybe a number if the machine needed to have multiple copies running. Then they switched from Fortran to C for all new programs, and the way to call old Fortran functions in C was to lowercase the name and add an underscore. And that's the story of why every program at this company starts with a call to pekludge_(argv[1])