Remembering Y2K call-outs and the joy of the hourly contractor rate
There's a reason why some in IT remember the days of Y2K fondly. To quote a lyric from an erstwhile pop combo of the 80s, it really could be "Money for Nothing" for a lucky few. Welcome to The Register's reader recollections of the era.
"Ed" - his name for the purposes of this tale - had joined the exodus from the permie world that was happening back in the day. "I was a contractor doing Sybase, VB, and general stuff like that," he recalled, "for a US-based investment company."
These, of course were the glory days of Microsoft's Visual Basic 5 and 6. 1997's VB5 had gone full 32-bit, could compile to native code (sort of) and create all manner of ActiveX mayhem. There was still, however, a hard core of VB4 installs (which could spit out 16-bit code) lingering around corporates. The likes of C# had yet to grace a Microsoft IDE and Java was rapidly gaining fans.
