Characters
Old Man Hardware # [1]
Character Profile
Name: Graybeard McGee
Age: 64 years old
Role: Senior Systems Architect (counting down to retirement)
Background
Graybeard’s been coding since before most developers were born—starting with assembly on PDP-11 systems in the late 1970s. He still has his original DEC VT100 terminal in the garage and actually uses it occasionally. His collection of vintage computing gear would make a museum curator jealous.
Tech Stack
- Loves: C, Assembly, FORTRAN, Perl (the “real” scripting language)
- Hardware: Sun SPARCstations, DEC VAX, vintage IBM mainframes
- Editor: Vi (not Vim—“Vim’s for kids who need training wheels”)
- Version Control: CVS ( reluctantly moved to Git [2], complains about it daily)
Personality
- Grumpy but surprisingly helpful when you prove you’re not “another JavaScript framework cowboy”
- Believes “if it was good enough in 1985, it’s good enough now”
- His office smells like old electronics and coffee
- Has strong opini...