Dead Tech

This week I attended the Spectrum International MultiValue Conference in Cincinnati. Basically, this conference is for a technology that is dead and should be gone. It's a database format (if you can call it that) based in technology from the 70s/80s that uses green screens. Green screens. Why am I attending a conference in 2005 about a database with a green screen interface? Because my new employer's accounting system is based on it. That's fine and all, use what works, don't fix what isn't broken.

I don't get how IT professionals can sit around for 20 years and say "this is all I know, and it's all I will ever work in". It's like FoxPro. DIE ALREADY. Since I've started in IT I've had to progress from HTML to Cold Fusion to ASP/VBScript to Visual Basic to C#.Net, and that's just programming languages. I've also had to pickup knowledge of packet routing, security, hardware troubleshooting, and systems/database administration. The fact that these grey-bearded, beer bellied guys have conferences for themselves annually to tout 20 year old technology baffles me. I walked away from the conference with only one valuable nugget of information: two vendors put out a .NET data connector to connect to their horrid "databases" since they are neither industry standard OLE DB or ODBC compliant. Praise Jesus! I don't have to learn their archaic "TCL language" to utilize their data. The IT God's have truly smiled upon me.