At my work there is a guy that has designed out database for our IBM mainframe. (I don't quite mean the tables and such.. I mean the actual database software itself)
He worked for the government for a long time. Basicly him and a few other people were in charge of making sure that the US's governments payrole and informaiton systems stayed fully functional. They accomplished this by using multiple reduntant and geographically dispersed labs using mainframes and advanced (for the time) networking technology.
Basicly it was their to make sure that in event of a failure, such as from a military attack, that any site anywere in the country can pick up the slack from any other site in any other part of the country in and have everything fully functional in under 10 minutes. They designed and put together this system.
BTW this was around the late 60's/70's era in computing technology. The guy is in his 70's now.
I also met another person, who was a technition for IBM, who specialized in a now-obsolete network technology that was commonly used in banks a long time ago. In this era of bank consolidation occasionally these companies will still run into this propriatory networking technology.. All documentation is long gone, nobody makes parts for it, nobody has machines to work on it. The company that designed and built it used extremely propriatory technology and kept it secret... and then went out of business a couple decades ago. Occasionally they still run into this stuff when a large corporate bank buys some crusty old country or regional bank that still uses this stuff. This network is the only way to get the banking information off of these machines.
I forgot what the actual network stuff was called...
He trained his replacement for 2-3 years in this stuff before he retired. A few months after he retired the person he trained immediately left the company for a huge raise from somewere else. IBM brought him back out of retirement, while still paying him BIG retirement (he got a special deal for leaving a couple years early) benifits he gets 100%+ of his former salary plus he only works 2-3 days a week when he decides too. He can build the networking devices that these banks need from used and broken down spare parts _from memory_. There is only a handfull of people in the world that can even work with this stuff. I think he is getting up into his 70's now, too.
Now that's job security.
Some very old guys are completley computer geniuses of the highest order. They got into it, developed it, made it work back when the average person was awed by a mechanical calculator.
Just because your old, doesn't mean that it gives you a right to be a moron. A person that was in business even back in '69 should know enough by now to at least STFU when he wants to talk about something that he has no idea about... Especially when it comes to getting courts involved into software developement.
That's the last thing anybody needs...
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