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That's an incredible story. I always enjoy reading about how people have managed to stay active and learn new things well past the typical retirement age. What

That's an incredible story. I always enjoy reading about how people have managed to stay active and learn new things well past the typical retirement age. What does your dad work on exactly? When did he start programming? I hope I'm able to age so well; I'd love to get a law / medical degree at 65 and start a whole new career in my 70s :)

Insanity 6y ago
Perhaps a silly question, but why would you not want to retire? My grandparents keep mentally active (they are in their 80s) and pre-covid socially active. Plenty of books to read and things to learn, but they do so purely for fun. Why not just learn things for fun at that age?
- criddell 6y ago
  Not the person you are replying to, but maybe at that age they anticipate being financially secure and can apply their medicine or law degree to serve a needy community. That could be incredibly rewarding.
- commonturtle 6y ago
  I'm open to just learning things for fun too; although ideally would like to be able to apply them somewhere. What I fear is traditional retirement that I've seen some people choose: spending the rest of their days watching TV and grumbling about 'kids these days' :)
ojosilva 6y ago
I think my dad took an IBM training on mainframe programming when he was in college getting his business degree in the 60s. My earliest "tech memory" is from the huge Digital TSR-80 desk computer he bought in 1980. He did a lot of dBase II/III/IV and Clipper back then, bought a load of PC and Byte magazine and pirated a lot of diskettes. You could say he's a quintessential MIS hacker type. Today he's responsible for reporting the hell out of a telecom's database (Oracle DB for the most part) in a large IT department. He's an "expert", not a manager nor team leader. He does a lot of SQL wrapped in Java spit out by Tomcat (iirc) and uses a deeply customized Eclipse editor. He's also created several logistics sw on the side through out the years, launching a couple of startups in the 80s and 90s, mostly for automating shipping and manufacturing processes, and that's how he paid for my college degree in CS. I remember when he bought one of the first IBM RISC 6000 computers ever in 1990 (he was even featured in an IBM paid ad-article), loaded with AIX (IBM's Unix flavor). I wanted to help him out setting it up or just hack on it, I logged into the console and I asked "how do you edit a file in this thing?" (I was doing PC and DOS back then). He came over and said "I think it's called `vi`". He keyed in `e` or `i` and said "there, now type ESC + :wq to save the file". It blew my mind. I was 15.

Insanity 6y ago

Perhaps a silly question, but why would you not want to retire? My grandparents keep mentally active (they are in their 80s) and pre-covid socially active. Plenty of books to read and things to learn, but they do so purely for fun. Why not just learn things for fun at that age?

criddell 6y ago
Not the person you are replying to, but maybe at that age they anticipate being financially secure and can apply their medicine or law degree to serve a needy community. That could be incredibly rewarding.
commonturtle 6y ago
I'm open to just learning things for fun too; although ideally would like to be able to apply them somewhere. What I fear is traditional retirement that I've seen some people choose: spending the rest of their days watching TV and grumbling about 'kids these days' :)

ojosilva 6y ago

I think my dad took an IBM training on mainframe programming when he was in college getting his business degree in the 60s. My earliest "tech memory" is from the huge Digital TSR-80 desk computer he bought in 1980. He did a lot of dBase II/III/IV and Clipper back then, bought a load of PC and Byte magazine and pirated a lot of diskettes. You could say he's a quintessential MIS hacker type. Today he's responsible for reporting the hell out of a telecom's database (Oracle DB for the most part) in a large IT department. He's an "expert", not a manager nor team leader. He does a lot of SQL wrapped in Java spit out by Tomcat (iirc) and uses a deeply customized Eclipse editor. He's also created several logistics sw on the side through out the years, launching a couple of startups in the 80s and 90s, mostly for automating shipping and manufacturing processes, and that's how he paid for my college degree in CS. I remember when he bought one of the first IBM RISC 6000 computers ever in 1990 (he was even featured in an IBM paid ad-article), loaded with AIX (IBM's Unix flavor). I wanted to help him out setting it up or just hack on it, I logged into the console and I asked "how do you edit a file in this thing?" (I was doing PC and DOS back then). He came over and said "I think it's called `vi`". He keyed in `e` or `i` and said "there, now type ESC + :wq to save the file". It blew my mind. I was 15.