The "Dumb Box"

I work for a small company. My boss does some of the programming. He has a dislike for new technology and even programs in machine code.

The company has a logic analyser that can be programmed to capture processor states. It works much like an ICE (In Circuit Emulator) in that you can watch a program execute live (or almost live). Well, my boss calls it the "Dumb Box", you see true programmers don't need an ICE they write bug free code the first time.

Going back a few years:

While going to school I worked for a Pen Windows company developing a Handwriting Word Processor. It was actually pretty cool you could hand-write a letter on a tablet PC and then reformat it to make it look really nice and pretty. Too bad it was a little before its time.

It was a small company, with just me and the owner writing software. The owner was a physicist turned programmer. He spent considerable time extolling his programming prowess and claiming that 90% of programmers weren't worth their salt.

I had to laugh, it was in the days of Windows 3.1 so we still had memory models (remember those?) and segments and all. He would copy and paste so much code that he would create functions that exceeded a segment in size. The compiler couldn't handle a 64k long function and would give the weirdest error message.

Anyway, another of his oddities was that he would brag about how he NEVER used a debugger. Of course with miles and miles of copy and paste code he would inevitably have a crash. He'd work for hours even days trying to find a crash in his code. He would break into tears and even resorted to prayer on occasion to find the bug. Finally after I could stand it no more I'd walk over to his desk press "F5" on his keyboard and the debugger would stop on the location of the crash, no fuss no tears.

He didn't learn from the experience, every time he had a crash I would say "just press F5" to which he would reply "I've never used a debugger, not even when I wrote my own operating system for the PDP-11, and I never will." Hours or days later a few rants about how Bill Gates has it out for his little company and a prayer or two. And the whole "F5" cycle would repeat itself.

My Boss' mentioning of the "Dumb Box" today reminded me of good times past.