Equipped with that degree I was able to start my career stint as a Computer Science lecturer at the then (Indian) University of Durban-Westville in 1981. There for my sins I taught a first year B Com. course that required the students to do practical work that involved writing programs using the COBOL programming language. It was insane! The price I had to pay in order to teach B Sc. courses that involved programming using the Algol and subsequently the Pascal programming languages.
Returning to the B Com. students. The COBOL code was created by using batches of punched cards. One card per line of source code. The cards comprising the program were then batched and compiled/run on a Main Frame Computer. The output produced by the programs went to a line printer. Each students batch of cards was then returned enclosed (wrapped) within the corresponding print out and a rubber band. If the code contained errors, the print out would list them. If there were no errors, the code compiled was immediately run/executed and the printer would print the program's output. These printouts were then used to asses the students work.
Returning to the B SC. students. The Algol code was created using a Computer Terminal in a lab full of terminals that were connected to mini-computer (HP1000). The terminals were text based, 25 row by 80 columns of character positions. Once the student had logged into the system, s/he was presented with a command line prompt at which commands could be entered to create/edit files containing their program source code. The source code files were saved to a hard disk in a directory allocated to the students account. The students themselves would compile and run/debug their programs using the command line. The program's output was typically also written to a disk file that could be submitted via the system for assessment purposes.
In 1984 I joined the Computer Science Department on the Pietermaritzburg Campus of the University of Natal. I finally left at the end of the first Semester in 2011 having had a wonderful experience.
2024 - now I am tempted to say that given my journey through the latter day digital revolution, I cannot even begin to imagine where we might be headed.
What I do know is that some of the skills I acquired way back at the beginning of my journey, remain as relevant and as useful as when I first started using them.
The hammer and the chisel.
Yet having said that, I know that if I want to build a wooden desk in my workshop, I start with some measurements that get transferred to a plan of the desk I am envisaging. I also know that this is true for almost all of our endeavours, we plan, implement, test, modify and repeat!
In doing so in this day and age I would use power tools to get a lot of what needs to be achieved, done. However there will inevitably be times during that process when I will reach for the tools that have been around for ever, namely the hammer and the chisel. When I work on my computer I use editors, word processors, spread sheets, image manipulation tools and the ubiquitous web browser. However every now and again I reach for the Command Line.
So
Command Line, Command Line, wherefore art thou Command Line? As Heraclitus, a Greek Philosopher might have said some 2500 years ago: “The only thing that is permanent is the Command Line, while it will change, it will never disappear. Though the quote I hacked was said hundreds of centuries ago, it is the truth that is applicable today and will be relevant forever.
Below I have included three thumb nails of images that I am hoping will give you a better feel for what I am going on about. The first shows a mock up of a traditional computer terminal creen showing the 25 lines, each capable of displaying 80 characters. The text in the top left corner is the prompt for me to respond with a command that I want executed. It shows me who is logged in, robd (my userid) on a computer named, "fernhill". The colon (:) is followed by an indication of the directory within the computers file system that I am working in. The "$" terminates the prompt. I could now type, "edit test.txt" to start an editor that I could use to save whatever I type to a file name, "test.txt". Most other computer users would click on an editor icon to pop up a window in order to to the same thing.
Below this paragraph is a link to a PDF file that on its first line shows the BASH prompt followed by a command to create a copy of file. Awkwardly named mv for move. The second line contains the invocation of the ffmpeg command
ffmpeg output
What is produced when the ffmpeg command is invoked on the Command Line with a bunch of parameters in order to superimpose a soundtrack on top of an image file (2024LambsStill.jpg) in order to produce a video clip file (out.mp4) that is in effect an image that plays a sound track. Huh? The video clip file was subsequently renamed 2024Maaaing_JPEG.mp4.
Finally, all the software (Ubuntu Linux plus whatever) that runs on my PC (hardware) is FREE. FREE as in FREE BEER!, GRATIS, not LIBRE. Various other terms/meanings are used for FREE. Not too worry!
...,
and if you want to learn,
try teaching!!!
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Starred thumbnails have an accompanying comment that pops up and remains up, while the mouse pointer is over the thumb-nail.
