What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2061

A systems programmer had to know about both. Once upon a time computer science meant one knew the basics of queues, deadlocks, filesystems, LRL grammers, memory management, parsers, symbol tables, resource management, operator precedence and code generators. Are any of these still taught in school? None have ever shown up in the books for an MCSE certification (isn't that the current equivalent of a sys prog 30 years ago?).

One recent event served to underline the lack of in depth knowledge so prevalent now. While working with a local phone company on setting up a five branch WAN network, the "senior engineer" explained to me that there was no difference between synchronous and asynchronous serial, except for the number of stop bits. Well, sure, but it's a crucial difference. I spent several hours on the phone explaining just what the differences were, and why his plan to directly connect async terminals to a sync 64Kbit serial WAN line was going to take more than "just set it to the same baud rate".

The "lead tech" I dealt with first thought synch serial was the same as ethernet. He could not explain why the connectors were different. Jack Peachicken