I’m an ancient geek and not ashamed. I was the only girl (I’m pretty sure, anyway) in my high school to take the first computer programming class there in the 70s. We learned FORTRAN IV on card decks the instructor had to run over to a mainframe somewhere in batch mode. When our green printouts came back, we had to make changes, and he would run over again… I loved it. When I went to college, I had to learned COBOL. Ugh. I hated COBOL. My Advanced COBOL textbook was written by Ed Yourdon. I will never forget it: Learning to Program in Structured COBOL. As a matter of fact, my 4.0 in Computer Science got me a job offer at Bell Labs. If I had accepted the offer, I might have been a rocket scientist by now.
Recently, when I saw Ed Yourdon’s name in the blogswarm on Enterprise 2.0, I was curious. So, I checked it out. Yourdon has taken the trouble to build a mind-map that explains web 2.0: its societal and technological implications. He’s interviewing web 2.0 companies.
Ed Yourdon is my new hero. I forgive him for Structured COBOL. His blog says he’ll be at the New New Internet conference. I’m hoping to shake his hand. I hope blogger Mike Stevens (and his readers) will come who is of the opinion that Enterprise 2.0 is a vaporware category. I don’t blame Mike for thinking this, as I have a bit of advertising background myself. Enterprise 2.0 is an emerging market, not really a category yet. Companies and knowlege workers are getting interested in it, investors are putting money into it, and products are being developed for it every day.
Yes, it’s true. I spend my time helping companies with marketing strategy now, and I can’t even figure out how to make my blog work properly. Nonetheless, at heart and by DNA, I’m a geek. Not a hype merchant. Not a card-carrying marketeer. You’ll know it’s true when I meet Ed Yourdon and blush.
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My first programming language was BASIC on an Apple IIe, so I’m a fairly ancient geek too. Then on to Pascal, C, C++, by the time Java hit I wasn’t coding any more but you can’t take the geek out of me.
I’m totally with you on Enterprise 2.0. It’s a new way of looking at things, a new way of doing things.
So great to find you, Susan, I’m writing you an email about the podcasts right now (multitasking may not be efficient, but it sure is fun).
Women in tech rock. It’s time to fill the stadium and raise the roof. (Pass it on!)
[...] about COBOL in public myself from time to time (though “ancient geek” Susan Scrupski forgives me for having written a book on Structured COBOL), for which I have been severely chastised by those [...]