On reflection, the thing I miss about web dev in the '90s is the low user expectations.
Because I was going to say I missed the simplicity of it all -- your front end was just HTML, no CSS (which didn't exist yet) and only sometimes a smidgen of Javascript for like light form validation; your back end was just a Perl script with CGI.pm running behind Apache that rendered that HTML.
No React, no flexbox, no REST API, no microservices, no Docker, no Kubernetes... but the reason it didn't need any of those things is because it had a terrible UI, didn't do all that much, and only needed to support trivial numbers of users whose modems were probably the main bottleneck anyway.
Trying to make modern users happy with '90s era tech would be impossible and deeply painful.
But it was nice, just for a while, to have a world where people were thrilled that even a super-basic web application was a thing that existed.
Yes, it was a simpler time :) There was a job position known as "webmaster" who was basically a god. User expectations were low because users didn't know what to expect. Everything was so new. Putting formerly locked-away resources like job databases and digital libraries online blew people's minds. And we imagined that we were building a utopia where everyone could publish, and information was free..
> Trying to make modern users happy with '90s era tech would be impossible and deeply painful.
Given my experience users can be delighted in 2019 by well-designed and lightweight UI built with just CSS and vanilla JS, instead of an overweight buggy SPA (usually built by engineers more interested by the code itself than solving the business problem in the leanest way). Source: I made that my business and I couldn’t be happier.
I still make websites this way because no-one told me to stop. They can be made responsive to things like smartphone browsers which incredibly minimal changes. No complaints so far.
With respect, I strongly disagree with your assertion that it’s the users demanding anything. Users are rarely asking for our bloated single-page apps; we just foist them on the public because we think JavaScript development is fun and cool. That’s not how we rationalize it to ourselves, of course, but it’s the truth. The majority of web sites (all newspapers, all magazines, many less trafficked social media sites, I could go on) would be served just fine with HTML, CSS, and minimal to no JavaScript.
True, but when I remember how we used 1x1px Java applet to allow reloading data without refreshing the page I would not call that simpler... And don't even get me started on Flash.
> no REST API
True, but when I remember fumbling about with SOAP I would hardly call that simpler...
> no microservices
True, but what we had instead -- monolithic PHP "applications" with insane hacks to integrate with other monolithic services, Microsoft' and Adobe's attempts to abstract the backend/frontend separation away and so on -- I would not call that simpler...
> no Docker, no Kubernetes
True, but when I remember the deployment mechanisms (upload via FTP), problems with scaling once our server became not enough (usual approach: set-up everything on a separate machine and then have a downtime until it was back up) and so on, I would certainly not call that simpler...
There are always trade-offs, and you continuously have to learn new technologies and unlearn others...
Interesting. There were two primary triggers for me creating https://alchemist.camp. One was that the Elixir screencasting I'd used site had very out-dated tutorials that often didn't compile or run on the post 1.0 versions of the language. The second was that I loathed the huge card-based design and the SPA the author moved to.
I just wanted information density and scannability, not hamburger buttons and pages and pages of responsive cards.
Similarly, I'm no fan of Reddit's redesign or the huge lag when loading IH and yet more and more content sites are going the same direction.
XP was a sane and useful thing before the sc(r)?umbags came along and shat in the Agile pool.
You could ctrl-u any web page, understand it, and do all the cool things you actually cared about yourself.
The web peaked before javascript f*cked it up completely.
Nobody played Matryoshka doll's with VM's and Containers, they did real work that mattered instead.
HTML and CSS standards and browser support for the standards were evolving semi-sensibly before M$ strangled it and the javascript "html5" spat on the grave.
Scheme/Lispy Lambda's just worked decades before these halfarsed modern languages came up with dozens of borked half- baked versions of it.
GUI's were an almighty colossal pain in the proverbial to write, so almost nobody did that and as a result were about 20 times more productive than they are today.
Threading implementations were borked, so nobody did that. They used processes and everything was much better. If you have any sense you will _still_ be using processes and not threads and your life still will be much better.
An, oh yes, pen plotters were fun to watch. Laser printers are absolutely wonderful.... but it's like the difference between a wood fire and panel heater... Which would you rather sit with a whisky in hand and just watch?
I might be an old curmudgeon, but I do have a very longer list of things that are much better than they were in the Bad Old Days if anyone cares.
I got to operate IBM 3800 printers in the 1980s. The sight of a laser printer running at printing-press speed hour after hour, going through a 2' tall box of continuous-form paper in less than 20 minutes, was just nuts.
you got the point there was no virtual machines, docker stuff, etc. there was no VM snapshots when you screw it, there was no turn back, backups were mostly on tape cassettes...but i certainly do not miss that... i'm happy those things are gone, haha.
From the 80s I miss the variety of computer systems at the consumer level. Apple ][, C64, Tandy Model 3/4 and the CoCo, OS/9 and more. When it became clear everything would converge to x86, that made me sad. The world is just that much more boring without variety.
I miss programming in assembly. Slapping together frameworks with some sample code from Stack Overflow just doesn't provide the same mental satisfaction.
I miss interviewing in the 90s. No white board algorithm puzzles or such nonsense. Just a conversation to see if your interests matched the role and you're hired.
(I guess I don't miss the low salaries which were on par with any office workers in non-tech fields, nothing like today. But the good side was that everyone was in tech for the sheer love of it, not to make a buck.)
But what I truly miss (nostalgia aside) is when Silicon Valley used to be about technology. The big names in Silicon Valley were all actual technology companies: Sun, SGI, HP (the good original HP, not the ink maker). The product was the technology and the culture reflected that. Engineers were in charge and the goal was to make better technology.
Today the product is advertising and the goal is just to drive more eyeballs. Engineers have become commoditized and micromanaged (agile) by PMs who are driven by advertising goals. (PMs as we know them today did not exist.) Except for Apple, none of the big names today (FAANG) are tech companies anymore.
> Today the product is advertising and the goal is just to drive more eyeballs. Engineers have become commoditized and micromanaged (agile) by PMs who are driven by advertising goals. (PMs as we know them today did not exist.) Except for Apple, none of the big names today (FAANG) are tech companies anymore.
Does anyone know any tech companies or industries that aren't like this in the US?
I've been considering saying goodbye to the American market and going to Europe for a few years and see how things are there first hand. The one thing that would make me stay is the discovery of an industry or large company that doesn't micromanage and commoditize programmers.
Developers being far less critical of other developers.
We were much more positive in the olden days. Back in the 90s you could post an idea in a developer-oriented usenet group or discussion forum and get pretty decent feedback. If you do that today there's good chance you're going to either get nothing back or you're going to be flamed for using an "anti-pattern". People are far too quick to dismiss things now.
It's probably a function of how everything gets marked with a score now and every post is social proof, but it's quite annoying regardless.
Speaking as someone who cut my teeth in the 80s and early 90s: I miss the elitism and exclusivity of it. Nowadays the internet has made it so any question can be answered within seconds, but back then you had to scrupulously acquire your information from magazines, Usenet discussions, and just plain experimenting with the code. As things currently stand, programming has become a commodity skill that anyone with a room temperature IQ can learn within a reasonably small time frame. Then, you get on StackExchange and start cobbling together your app from copypasta provided by other programmers.
Yeah. In the 90s I met almost no computer scientists. We all came from different backgrounds and got into programming because we were interested and liked it. Now we have a lot of people who chose it as a well-paying career. Nothing wrong with that but it's less fun.
Turbo Pascal came with reference manuals, but also with instructional books that taught you OO programming and Windows UI programming from scratch.
They must have been well-written; I didn't really have Internet access, so there was nowhere else to go if I got stuck. Though I was probably a much more determined learner back then.
So much this. It ties in with my other comment, to some degree.
Someone here mentioned StackOverflow, but really, a handful of manuals, maybe a good book or two, and some persistence, /usually/ gave you all you needed to figure out a problem, and do something magical.
Now, those resources (if they're available) will likely only help you understand a very small subsystem.
I appreciated that the behavior of that system was fixed for a certain period of time. That word processor would work the same for all eternity (warts and all) if you didn’t intentionally get a version upgrade.
Worked in SW since early 90s. Back then you didn't have to think much about security and you could push things to the limit.
Also things were not as "professional". When I started out my boss told me to figure something out and I would report back weeks or months later. I had the time to make mistakes and learn from them. Today the young devs are often very micromanaged and have no freedom.
On the other hand we can do a lot of cool stuff today and it's amazing how much info is out there. But I think the 90s were more creative. Stuff like StackOverflow is great. Documentation was MUCH better in the 90s.
Despite this being an obvious honeypot to out the old people on HN, I'll bite. There's not much to miss about development
practices of yore, except for the way better emphasis on documentation. I find most software developers today can't write
worth a damn in their development practice. Requirements, specs, code comments, end user documentation, you name it. Really terrible bar. Perversely enough though, software developers today who blog can write amazing documentation on how to code. Go figure.
OTOH, to view development in the 70's to the 00's from an emotional lens, what I miss the most was really living through the hockey
stick of Moore's law. Everything was new and exciting until it got replaced 18 months later with a newer and more exciting
thing. And back then, you were a sucker to bet against Moore's law. All it took to get a front row seat to this action was to code.
I was tempted to write "computers were so slow and lacking in resources that you were forced to write efficient code". Because efficient code is good, right?
But I lived through that era and being forced to write efficient code is a god-damn nightmare. There were so many ideas flying around that you simply couldn't do because the computing power just didn't exist.
Today people revere things like "vi" but when you were forced to use such basic utilities because your human/machine interface was a 300 baud modem, or even a paper teletype, life wasn't so good.
I hope I don't qualify as "old", but I guess I've been programming since the early 00s...I miss the days when LAMP (+ XAMPP for local development) was more-or-less state-of-the-art for a website. PHP, despite its numerous deep flaws, really is a very pleasant way to write frontend code. I think what the web dev world needs is a modernized version of LAMP which:
* Is trivial to bootstrap
* Is totally serverless/scalable
* Can be run effectively for free with low levels of traffic, like an S3 static website
* Uses a non-broken PHP-like templating language (maybe jinja?)
* Uses Postgres instead of MySQL (ideally without infrastructure to manage, a la Aurora Serverless)
* Somehow intelligently figures out how to split between server-side and client-side rendering - ergo, you write templates like PHP and it seamlessly figures out bits that can be AJAX-ified to avoid full page-loads
If someone could just, like, make that, web development could be as fun as it was in the days of yore!
Late 90's here.
There are two things I miss:
1. Going to the book store and looking through the (mostly) O'Reilly books to see what there is to learn or what new technologies are coming out.
2. Having a huge pile of 3.5" floppies (or even CDs) you are using to load the latest version of Visual studio or whatever and just imagining how much knowledge is contained in those. I think my copy of VC++ was something like 21 floppies.
Elegant, tight, and efficient code mattered back in the days when a machine with a 20 MHz processor and 8 MB of RAM was considered a high-end workstation. You really had to understand what your hardware, your OS, and your compiler was doing in order to produce decent software.
Nowadays, such esoterica is relegated to the tiny niches of systems and embedded development.
Main thing I miss is the lesser degree of abstraction in doing anything. If you wanted to build a simple app which just took one input and did a calculation and returned a result, there were multiple languages, but you didn't need a huge number of libraries, infrastructure, etc. to deploy it -- you just built the code, compiled it, and distributed a binary (and source, with a makefile). There was complexity crossplatform (even across unixes), but there was a period of time in the mid-90s/early 00s where "some form of linux or a BSD" was all I had to care about, and it was pretty easy.
Also, being able to trivially modify almost anything I used (because it was largely open source, and simple).
Lots of things were worse, but less abstraction was pretty nice.
I miss "the front panel" where I could single-step my program and read the octal / hex off the front panel lights.
I miss debugging my program with a plastic block and a wire to hand-punch patches into the binary paper tape.
I miss the "user manual" that had circuit diagrams as part of the documentation.
I miss doing "machine vision" on boxes of punched-card images.
I miss sitting "at the console" of an auditorium-sized "machine room" with a sea of DASD, watching the PSW flicker as the program counter changed.
I miss analog computers.
I miss coordinating 24 IBM Selectric consoles all "typing out" classical music (each one tapped out an orchestra instrument). Beethoven's fifth on selectrics....
I miss playing music by holding my radio next to the mainframe while my program was running, adjusting the program so it played a song.
I miss hand-designing a 16x16 multiply chip in MOS.
I miss programming plated-wire memory in binary switches to drive a Unimate robot.
I miss "scoring a complete copy" of the listing of Lisp 1.5 and reading the source code.
I miss running "the Hadoop algorithm" on a room full of punched card equipment (Google didn't invent it).
I miss "real programmers" who could solder. And could replace a failing memory address chip on your core memory board.
Good times.
But now I'm proving a computer algebra system correct. So it's all still good.
The TTL chip computer was fun. The hardest part was fixing bugs in the wire-wrapping. You could have a wire buried 3 wraps deep that needed to be changed... oh, wait. You probably don't know about wire-wrapping. The memory wire-wrap was symmetric and pretty but the CPU/ALU was a nightmare.
> I miss building my own computer out of TTL chips.
That sounds like an interesting project! Can you expand on it? When was this? How many TTL chips did it take? What other components did you use? What did you do with the end result?
Just the sense that we were on the cusp of some magical, new, civilization changing thing.
I don't get the same sense that stringing lines of code together can change the world, largely because, where it could, it mostly already has (I am not a believer in the latest wave of AI hype).
What we did used to be magic and was met with gasps and now, it's mostly just expected and complained about if it breaks :/
Whippersnappers these days are so gosh darn polite.
Writing C code on a SPARCstation and Green Hills compiler/debugger as an undergrad in 1989, I got used to step-forward, and step-back, in a GUI environment.
I had no idea that I'd never see that magic "step-back" button again, in C, C++, MFC, Java, Scala, or a litany of scripting languages and development environments.
Other people have touched on it, but you could be proficient in literally all the programming languages back then. There were less than 20. The later explosion of languages and techniques in common use can be overwhelming, but has stretched the spectrum available to our craft.
I miss the wonder and awe and naivety that all of this programming is leading to something better socially/politically or for lifestyle. In many ways it did. It also may have created more problems than it solved.
Also, I miss the joy of learning all the deep features and idiosyncrasies of a computer - its instruction set, I/O routines, timing and interrupt tricks, etc. These days I am focused more on Big Hairy Goals and complex systems. Fun of a different sort.
There were very few ready-made frameworks and libraries to get things done, so it was fun writing those meta libraries that runs your business. Of course, purely from a business point of view, this is not ideal and is extremely wasteful. At the same time, it really helped me understand the systems that we use. Maybe that's why people survived without Stackoverflow :)
In comparison, modern software development is almost all about composing or stitching together a bunch of different services. There are other complexities around orchestration and breadth of the systems involved, but very rarely one goes deep into a particular technical problem.
After a really long time, I'm getting a kick out of working on a highly technical problem: an open source search engine from scratch (https://github.com/typesense/typesense). It has been deeply rewarding and definitely something that's missing in a typical web oriented software development career today.
I miss job interviews (from both sides!) where a few people read the candidates' resumes, asked them deep and intelligent questions about what they had worked on in the past, and then made a hiring decision, without further quizzes, take-home projects, or probationary work-to-hire contracts.
All my recent job interviews have been like that. Although they've all been for software and data analysis jobs at non-software engineering firms. In my experience companies used to interviewing not-software engineers have much more sane interviewing practices since they know that a chemical or structural engineer with 10 years of experience won't put up with that sort of thing.
I agree. My first interviews were like "You have no clue about C but you are good at FORTRAN and you are smart. No problem. You'll pick it up in a second. Read this book before you start.".
[+] [-] mkozlows|6 years ago|reply
Because I was going to say I missed the simplicity of it all -- your front end was just HTML, no CSS (which didn't exist yet) and only sometimes a smidgen of Javascript for like light form validation; your back end was just a Perl script with CGI.pm running behind Apache that rendered that HTML.
No React, no flexbox, no REST API, no microservices, no Docker, no Kubernetes... but the reason it didn't need any of those things is because it had a terrible UI, didn't do all that much, and only needed to support trivial numbers of users whose modems were probably the main bottleneck anyway.
Trying to make modern users happy with '90s era tech would be impossible and deeply painful.
But it was nice, just for a while, to have a world where people were thrilled that even a super-basic web application was a thing that existed.
[+] [-] dpau|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tarsinge|6 years ago|reply
Given my experience users can be delighted in 2019 by well-designed and lightweight UI built with just CSS and vanilla JS, instead of an overweight buggy SPA (usually built by engineers more interested by the code itself than solving the business problem in the leanest way). Source: I made that my business and I couldn’t be happier.
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] projectileboy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BerislavLopac|6 years ago|reply
> No React
True, but when I remember how we used 1x1px Java applet to allow reloading data without refreshing the page I would not call that simpler... And don't even get me started on Flash.
> no REST API
True, but when I remember fumbling about with SOAP I would hardly call that simpler...
> no microservices
True, but what we had instead -- monolithic PHP "applications" with insane hacks to integrate with other monolithic services, Microsoft' and Adobe's attempts to abstract the backend/frontend separation away and so on -- I would not call that simpler...
> no Docker, no Kubernetes
True, but when I remember the deployment mechanisms (upload via FTP), problems with scaling once our server became not enough (usual approach: set-up everything on a separate machine and then have a downtime until it was back up) and so on, I would certainly not call that simpler...
There are always trade-offs, and you continuously have to learn new technologies and unlearn others...
[+] [-] AlchemistCamp|6 years ago|reply
I just wanted information density and scannability, not hamburger buttons and pages and pages of responsive cards.
Similarly, I'm no fan of Reddit's redesign or the huge lag when loading IH and yet more and more content sites are going the same direction.
[+] [-] gHosts|6 years ago|reply
XP was a sane and useful thing before the sc(r)?umbags came along and shat in the Agile pool.
You could ctrl-u any web page, understand it, and do all the cool things you actually cared about yourself.
The web peaked before javascript f*cked it up completely.
Nobody played Matryoshka doll's with VM's and Containers, they did real work that mattered instead.
HTML and CSS standards and browser support for the standards were evolving semi-sensibly before M$ strangled it and the javascript "html5" spat on the grave.
Scheme/Lispy Lambda's just worked decades before these halfarsed modern languages came up with dozens of borked half- baked versions of it.
GUI's were an almighty colossal pain in the proverbial to write, so almost nobody did that and as a result were about 20 times more productive than they are today.
Threading implementations were borked, so nobody did that. They used processes and everything was much better. If you have any sense you will _still_ be using processes and not threads and your life still will be much better.
An, oh yes, pen plotters were fun to watch. Laser printers are absolutely wonderful.... but it's like the difference between a wood fire and panel heater... Which would you rather sit with a whisky in hand and just watch?
I might be an old curmudgeon, but I do have a very longer list of things that are much better than they were in the Bad Old Days if anyone cares.
Now GET OFF MY LAWN!
[+] [-] DrScump|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pulketo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjav|6 years ago|reply
I miss programming in assembly. Slapping together frameworks with some sample code from Stack Overflow just doesn't provide the same mental satisfaction.
I miss interviewing in the 90s. No white board algorithm puzzles or such nonsense. Just a conversation to see if your interests matched the role and you're hired.
(I guess I don't miss the low salaries which were on par with any office workers in non-tech fields, nothing like today. But the good side was that everyone was in tech for the sheer love of it, not to make a buck.)
But what I truly miss (nostalgia aside) is when Silicon Valley used to be about technology. The big names in Silicon Valley were all actual technology companies: Sun, SGI, HP (the good original HP, not the ink maker). The product was the technology and the culture reflected that. Engineers were in charge and the goal was to make better technology.
Today the product is advertising and the goal is just to drive more eyeballs. Engineers have become commoditized and micromanaged (agile) by PMs who are driven by advertising goals. (PMs as we know them today did not exist.) Except for Apple, none of the big names today (FAANG) are tech companies anymore.
[+] [-] ScottFree|6 years ago|reply
Does anyone know any tech companies or industries that aren't like this in the US?
I've been considering saying goodbye to the American market and going to Europe for a few years and see how things are there first hand. The one thing that would make me stay is the discovery of an industry or large company that doesn't micromanage and commoditize programmers.
[+] [-] onion2k|6 years ago|reply
We were much more positive in the olden days. Back in the 90s you could post an idea in a developer-oriented usenet group or discussion forum and get pretty decent feedback. If you do that today there's good chance you're going to either get nothing back or you're going to be flamed for using an "anti-pattern". People are far too quick to dismiss things now.
It's probably a function of how everything gets marked with a score now and every post is social proof, but it's quite annoying regardless.
[+] [-] mkozlows|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mingmecca|6 years ago|reply
Things have been dumbed down considerably.
[+] [-] DrScump|6 years ago|reply
In the Usenet days, you'd find a FAQ with answers curated by the combined reviews of dozens of participants over time.
[+] [-] maxxxxx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostmsu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fwip|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrDonkey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cakoose|6 years ago|reply
They must have been well-written; I didn't really have Internet access, so there was nowhere else to go if I got stuck. Though I was probably a much more determined learner back then.
[+] [-] tonteldoos|6 years ago|reply
Someone here mentioned StackOverflow, but really, a handful of manuals, maybe a good book or two, and some persistence, /usually/ gave you all you needed to figure out a problem, and do something magical.
Now, those resources (if they're available) will likely only help you understand a very small subsystem.
[+] [-] falcolas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxxxxx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxxxxx|6 years ago|reply
Also things were not as "professional". When I started out my boss told me to figure something out and I would report back weeks or months later. I had the time to make mistakes and learn from them. Today the young devs are often very micromanaged and have no freedom.
On the other hand we can do a lot of cool stuff today and it's amazing how much info is out there. But I think the 90s were more creative. Stuff like StackOverflow is great. Documentation was MUCH better in the 90s.
[+] [-] chkaloon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kickingvegas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|6 years ago|reply
But I lived through that era and being forced to write efficient code is a god-damn nightmare. There were so many ideas flying around that you simply couldn't do because the computing power just didn't exist.
Today people revere things like "vi" but when you were forced to use such basic utilities because your human/machine interface was a 300 baud modem, or even a paper teletype, life wasn't so good.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
[+] [-] not_kurt_godel|6 years ago|reply
* Is trivial to bootstrap
* Is totally serverless/scalable
* Can be run effectively for free with low levels of traffic, like an S3 static website
* Uses a non-broken PHP-like templating language (maybe jinja?)
* Uses Postgres instead of MySQL (ideally without infrastructure to manage, a la Aurora Serverless)
* Somehow intelligently figures out how to split between server-side and client-side rendering - ergo, you write templates like PHP and it seamlessly figures out bits that can be AJAX-ified to avoid full page-loads
If someone could just, like, make that, web development could be as fun as it was in the days of yore!
[+] [-] pacifika|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scottcha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GrumpyYoungMan|6 years ago|reply
Nowadays, such esoterica is relegated to the tiny niches of systems and embedded development.
[+] [-] mynegation|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gHosts|6 years ago|reply
I was pro-closed source in Turbo Pascal days.... once the licences turned to complete shit I went pure opensource.
[+] [-] codewritinfool|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdl|6 years ago|reply
Also, being able to trivially modify almost anything I used (because it was largely open source, and simple).
Lots of things were worse, but less abstraction was pretty nice.
[+] [-] daly|6 years ago|reply
I miss "the front panel" where I could single-step my program and read the octal / hex off the front panel lights.
I miss debugging my program with a plastic block and a wire to hand-punch patches into the binary paper tape.
I miss the "user manual" that had circuit diagrams as part of the documentation.
I miss doing "machine vision" on boxes of punched-card images.
I miss sitting "at the console" of an auditorium-sized "machine room" with a sea of DASD, watching the PSW flicker as the program counter changed.
I miss analog computers.
I miss coordinating 24 IBM Selectric consoles all "typing out" classical music (each one tapped out an orchestra instrument). Beethoven's fifth on selectrics....
I miss playing music by holding my radio next to the mainframe while my program was running, adjusting the program so it played a song.
I miss hand-designing a 16x16 multiply chip in MOS.
I miss programming plated-wire memory in binary switches to drive a Unimate robot.
I miss "scoring a complete copy" of the listing of Lisp 1.5 and reading the source code.
I miss running "the Hadoop algorithm" on a room full of punched card equipment (Google didn't invent it).
I miss "real programmers" who could solder. And could replace a failing memory address chip on your core memory board.
Good times.
But now I'm proving a computer algebra system correct. So it's all still good.
Rock on....
[+] [-] daly|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwallace|6 years ago|reply
That sounds like an interesting project! Can you expand on it? When was this? How many TTL chips did it take? What other components did you use? What did you do with the end result?
[+] [-] crdoconnor|6 years ago|reply
I don't get the same sense that stringing lines of code together can change the world, largely because, where it could, it mostly already has (I am not a believer in the latest wave of AI hype).
What we did used to be magic and was met with gasps and now, it's mostly just expected and complained about if it breaks :/
[+] [-] mceachen|6 years ago|reply
Whippersnappers these days are so gosh darn polite.
Writing C code on a SPARCstation and Green Hills compiler/debugger as an undergrad in 1989, I got used to step-forward, and step-back, in a GUI environment.
I had no idea that I'd never see that magic "step-back" button again, in C, C++, MFC, Java, Scala, or a litany of scripting languages and development environments.
Other people have touched on it, but you could be proficient in literally all the programming languages back then. There were less than 20. The later explosion of languages and techniques in common use can be overwhelming, but has stretched the spectrum available to our craft.
[+] [-] parasubvert|6 years ago|reply
Also, I miss the joy of learning all the deep features and idiosyncrasies of a computer - its instruction set, I/O routines, timing and interrupt tricks, etc. These days I am focused more on Big Hairy Goals and complex systems. Fun of a different sort.
[+] [-] gHosts|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karterk|6 years ago|reply
In comparison, modern software development is almost all about composing or stitching together a bunch of different services. There are other complexities around orchestration and breadth of the systems involved, but very rarely one goes deep into a particular technical problem.
After a really long time, I'm getting a kick out of working on a highly technical problem: an open source search engine from scratch (https://github.com/typesense/typesense). It has been deeply rewarding and definitely something that's missing in a typical web oriented software development career today.
[+] [-] 7402|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dagw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxxxxx|6 years ago|reply