It’s amazing how the impact of a term is lost in translation. Somehow the term ‘pouring garbage’ when said in English doesn’t evoke the same kind of ideas, emotions or images as it does when ‘kuppai kottaradhu’ is said in Tamil.
Yet, as on today, I have successfully done that for 20 years in the software industry. Or whatever is the equivalent of crumpling up papers with rough designed ideas and throwing them away in the waste-paper basket.
I had never shutdown or switched off a computer before I landed in the Siemens office on 1st July 1996 – in IISc we had always just logged off and left – along with 4 other classmates and 15 other campus recruits from other colleges. We had each a large 133 MHz desktop machine sitting under our desks and a monstrous CRT monitor on it.
The Internet was a toddler at best, if not in its infancy. Web-crawler and Lycos were our search engines and Altavista joined in later. For configuration management we were actually beta testers for Clearcase!
Windows 3.11 and MSDev were such infuriating things for someone who had only worked on UNIX and Xenix machines on RS6000 workstations and being an expert user of the ‘VI editor’. Especially maddening when it used to say ‘Unknown Error’. Hmm, Windows probably hasn’t changed much!
After that? Lots of adventure. Programming using MFC – though I used to have a less flattering expansion for it, foray into Object Oriented Databases, DICOM, HL7, IHE, tech leadership roles, requirement engineering roles, learning project management, getting audited hundreds of times, moving to quality management and …
… here we are. 20 down, 20 more to go. At least nowadays dry kuppai can be recycled!
