Jobs You Held That Are Now Obsolete

[geist1223]

For a couple years I hand moved Irrigation Pipe in Sweet Corn fields. We would not detassell the Corn but we would top the corn when it got too tall. It was a tractor with 4 lawn mower like blades mounted about 7 feet above the ground on the front. Several farmers shared the machine. Had to brake slowly and carefully so as not to tip the tractor unto its front end. I had the pleasure (?) of driving it from Falls City (in the Hills west of Monmouth Oregon) to Fields just across the Willamette River from Independence Oregon. It was only about 15 miles. Had to take all the small back roads to avoid most traffic. Though there were some hairy situation when I had to move over as much as possible to avoid on coming traffic. The trip took about 4 hours. After completing the trip I understood why the Farmer did not want to make the trip.

 

[Brett]

Due to legacy systems in some industries or large corporations and the lack of new talent learning them, programmers of certain languages can still command large salaries. From what I understand COBOL programmers in particular can still do quite well for themselves.

And Fortran programmers!
But many of the "legacy" computer programmers worked at NASA and other government agencies so they're probably gone now.

 

[DrQ]

And Fortran programmers!

A determined engineer can write a FORTRAN program in any programming language.

In college, I could not afford the card reader for my HP41C ($250), but I scraped together the $125 for the optical wand reader. I wrote an assembler for the HP41C that could take a calculator program listing and convert it into bar code to be plotted out that could be read by the wand. All written in FORTRAN.

 

[DrQ]

But many of the "legacy" computer programmers worked at NASA and other government agencies so they're probably gone now.

I know that NASTRAN has been largely replaced with turnkey Finite Element Analysis programs built in to PTC Pro/ENGINEER which evolved into Creo Parametric. But has fluid dynamic analysis undergone the same commercialization as structural dynamic analysis?

I think that MSC Adams (Automated Dynamic Analysis of Mechanical Systems) is still built around FORTRAN.

 

[Brett]

I know that NASTRAN has been largely replaced with turnkey Finite Element Analysis programs built in to PTC Pro/ENGINEER which evolved into Creo Parametric. But has fluid dynamic analysis undergone the same commercialization as structural dynamic analysis?

I think that MSC Adams (Automated Dynamic Analysis of Mechanical Systems) is still built around FORTRAN.

A determined engineer can write a FORTRAN program in any programming language.

In college, I could not afford the card reader for my HP41C ($250), but I scraped together the $125 for the optical wand reader. I wrote an assembler for the HP41C that could take a calculator program listing and convert it into bar code to be plotted out that could be read by the wand. All written in FORTRAN.

OK, if you say so. The last time I programmed in Fortran was --- more than a half-century ago

 

[DrQ]

OK, if you say so. The last time I programmed in Fortran was --- more than a century ago

There are things that are suited for batch oriented "big iron", Control Data Corp and IBM. Finance (not using FORTRAN), Finite Element Analysis, FEA, and Finite Difference Method, FDM. Previously, the highly iterative process of FEA and FDM would bring most computers to their knees. But with the advent of cloud computing, it is possible to create a massive parallel computing environment, but I would suspect that they just forklifted the programming from IBM FORTRAN G or whatever and are using FORTRAN that comes with the Linux distro in the cloud.

The underlying solver programs for FEA and FDM have been validated for decades written in FORTRAN. I doubt if they would go and rewrite them in a new language.