Joe wrote: > There was a time when 'software' and 'applications' were two different > and distinct things, when applications were user programs and software > was the set of programs that made the computer work, today called system > software. A computer as delivered contained both hardware and software, > and it was up to the owner to write the applications. OK, that's going > back a bit...
Once upon a time there were programmers. Frequently they had to build the hardware that they programmed -- indeed, it was a bit of a luxury to only be a programmer, and not also have responsibility for hardware maintenance (or design). Then there were systems programmers and application programmers. Systems programmers wrote operating systems and utilities for them. Applications programmers wrote applications. There was a lot of crossover. Then there were operators, systems programmers and application programmers. Operator was a junior position that did physical things (mount tapes, plug in cables) and ran commands to do things on the systems. They usually moved up to being -- Systems administrators, who did some programming in service to the systems, but not too much. The more senior a sysadmin was, the more time they spent programming and the less time they spent doing physical things, unless they wanted to do that. Sysadmins started to specialize. People who configured switches and routers and talked to telephone companies became "network engineers". People who spent time working on firewalls and security policies and thinking about that became "security engineers". Junior people who read scripts to end users became the helpdesk. And so forth. Then we noticed that a bunch of people were doing things manually when they should be automated. This was especially bad in places where there were no senior sysadmins or systems programmers. But we did have the internet, and senior sysadmins got together and started writing tools to make their lives easier: infrastructure automation. Current tools for that include chef, puppet, ansible, salt... (all of this is largely quoting myself circa April 2016) -dsr-
