True Tales of Stupid Fucking Teachers (Part 2)

From 1990 through about 1994 I attended Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC for short) trying to earn a two-year degree in Data Processing. In my defense, let me say that they expected me to learn arcane system calls on antique mainframes at 8:00am three days a week. Those who know me well know that the only time I’m awake at 8:00am is if I’m still up from the previous night.

In addition to learning IBM 370 Assembler Language and an OS called DOS/VSE/SP that was considered thoroughly horrendous even in 1968, I was also learning COBOL. No self-respecting programmer will ever admit to knowing COBOL, but I have no self-respect, so what the hell. I didn’t like COBOL, but a programming job, any programming job, sounded better than being a cook, and COBOL was the only thing they really taught locally. I was a great programmer, having already written code (just for fun, mind you) for 10 years prior to that. Me and two other guys, one of whom would later become my brother-in-law, were the best in the class, and there was a pretty good gap in talent between us and the next guy on the list. Despite this, not one of us graduated.

I can’t speak for the other two-thirds of we who called ourselves Foobar Hacking, but the reasons for my dropping out were varied. Mostly it was because I saw COBOL and mainframes as being a dying branch of computer evolution. “Everybody knows this is nowhere” was a phrase often in my head. I knew that a job doing COBOL would take me through fixing the Y2K bug and then pretty much dump me. No new code was being written in COBOL, and therefore the bulk of my work would be maintaining code somebody else had written. Having seen the code that the majority of my classmates shit out, I knew what I was in for wasn’t pretty. I had also taught myself C++, which I considered to be a real language. Right about the time I dropped out, I discovered the internet, and I thought that was probably going to be something big. Of course there was nowhere official to learn that stuff, especially not on what a 24-year-old fry cook could pay.

And despite my loathing of COBOL and DOS/VSE/SP, none of the teachers in the DMACC Data Processing program were stupid fucking teachers. One of them I truly respected, and I showed this by being a constant pain in his ass. He didn’t care for my rowdy friends and I, but he did respect my programming skills.

Anyway in 1994, I dropped out of the Data Processing program and decided to study something with a future. The immediate future, I decided, was PC networking. At the time Microsoft still didn’t have its networking shit together, so I studied Novell Netware, again at DMACC.

Towards the beginning of the first semester, the teacher handed out a sheet with a flow chart showing the various Novell “tracks” one could take. You could choose to be a Certified Netware Associate, a Certified Netware Engineer and a few other things I don’t remember. But one of them was for something called UnixWare. I had been screwing around with the internet in all my free time, and for a geek like me who likes to get his hands good and dirty, that meant screwing around with Unix. I thought then, as I do now, that Unix was cool. The teacher went over the flow charts and explained what the various Novell tracks entailed and what classes you needed for each certification. But he never said a thing about UnixWare.

So I approached him after class. Our conversation went like this.

Me: You didn’t mention this UnixWare thing, what’s that?
SFT: That’s Novell’s version of Unix.
Me: Well, what do I have to do to get that certification?
SFT: You don’t want that certification.
Me: But…the internet runs on Unix.
SFT: The internet is a toy.

Now this was a long time ago, so I can’t say that the conversation was word-for-word like I have it above, but the last two lines are, I swear, exactly as they were spoken. Let me say that last one again: “The internet is a toy.”

Now it’s true that in 1994 the internet pretty much was a toy, an electronic playground for geeks. There are times I wish it still was that way. However, every one of those geeks saw the potential. We knew what the internet was destined to become, and in fact, we were instrumental in helping it fulfill that destiny.

But my Novell teacher didn’t see it coming. Novell didn’t see it coming either. It wasn’t long after I’d dropped the Novell classes (which wasn’t long after the “toy” comment) that I heard they had sold UnixWare to a company that would become The Santa Cruz Operation, which then released SCO UnixWare.

Five years later I got myself a job as a web developer, and I was unfortunate enough to have to work with SCO Unix. In a way, the stupid fucking teacher was right. If this was any indication of what Novell UnixWare had been like, I really didn’t want that certification.