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Interviews: You ask the questions. We forward the best ten. Interview: The Man Who Wrote the Payroll Code in 1974 Posted by Rotundo on Friday October 15, @12:10PM EDT from the back-then-we-had-to-use-two-digits dept. Last month you sent in questions for Walt Ferraday, the COBOL programmer who wrote the payroll system that is still running at a large Midwestern insurance company, and who came out of retirement this year to fix it. His answers are below. He typed them himself, on a terminal, in all capital letters. ( Read More... | 25 of 39 comments | 1035 bytes in body )

Features The Dashdot source code is out under the GPL. Look upon our Perl, ye mighty, and despair. More... Our interview with Walt Ferraday, the man who wrote the payroll code in 1974, in all capital letters. More... Is XML the answer to everything? Readers weigh in with well-formed opinions. More... Past Features Dashdot Login Dashdot Poll Where will you be when the clock strikes 2000? At a party, like a normal person In the server room, watching logs In a bunker with 400 cans of beans Asleep. It's just a number. Rebooting something Wherever CmdrGrits is [ Results | Polls ] Comments:482 | Votes:29377 Older Stuff Monday October 18 Y2K Bug Found in Smart Refrigerator Firmware (24) Intellon Ships 600MHz Pentode III (18) Orinoco.com Granted Patent on Clicking (22) Sunday October 17 Linix Kernel 2.3.22 Released; 2.4 'Real Soon Now' (48) Sego Daydream Sells 500,000 Units in Two Weeks (11) Ask Dashdot: How Do I Explain My Job to My Grandmother? (22) Secretive Startup Transmuta Updates Web Page (15) College Student's MP3 Swapping Program Takes Off (36) Online Retailers Brace for First 'E-Christmas' (24) Saturday October 16 GNUME 1.0.55 and KDX 1.1.2 Desktop Wars Continue (23) Mars Weather Probe Lost Over Feet-vs-Furlongs Mixup (35) DVD Encryption Cracked by Norwegian Teens (28) Petz.com IPO Soars Despite Losing Money on Every Sale (45) Leaked: Portals 2000 Requires 64MB and a 300MHz CPU (30) Older Articles Yesterday's Edition Book Reviews Can a book teach regular expressions to humans? We read Regular Expressions for Irregular People to find out. Coming soon: a review of Debugging the Year 2000, which is either a technical manual or a horror novel. Visit our Book Reviews Section for more. Quick Links Cool Sites: Orinoco.com (Buy a book. With one click.) Snapster (The labels will love this) CNM Interactive (Real news. Well, news.) Yowza! (Find stuff) AltaVisor (Find more stuff) Hamster Shuffle (Don't ask) Support Dashdot: Dashdot T-shirts (Clothe yourself in Dashdot) Advertise here (We have eyeballs) Freshbeat October grepmail 3.4 xsnow 1.40 gkrellm-ish 0.7.2 fetchpopmail 5.1.1 ToastTerm 0.3 libdashdot 0.0.1 y2kcheck 1.0 mp3blaster-lite 2.0 sockpuppetd 0.9 beanctl 1.2 More Beat... Ask Dashdot How Do I Explain My Job to My Grandmother? Should I Buy a Generator for Y2K? Why Do People Post 'First Post'? If you have a question for Ask Dashdot, submit it.

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