And another one bites the dust...

When I entered the IT field in 1976, I didn't give much thought to the work I was doing - good money, interesting work; that was it really. I didn't think of any kind of legacy. At some point I realized that in this job, I would leave nothing behind; systems I built or wrote were eventually (sometimes quickly) replaced by others.

At UNM, I'm still writing and designing systems, and I'm still aware that these achievements are ephemeral. In a few years at best, these systems will be replaced by others.

Between 1980 and 86, I helped design and implement a national banking system for Masraf Rafidain - the national (and only) bank in Iraq. (Humor for British readers - Masraf Rafidain literally means "Bank of the land between two rivers", or "Midland Bank" !!)

As part of this project, I actually wrote a full-screen editor for coding on the Honeywell-Bull hardware the bank had purchased - I just got tired of trying to code everything using a command line editor!

Well, today I heard that the Rafidain Bank has let a contract with Misys to replace the old banking system. And so it goes.