Born, raise in Tijuana, MX. With a degree in Philosophy, have worked as janitor, sales person, pizza delivery boy, teacher, press operator, prepress, desktop Publisher, and for the last 19 years dev
Equal parts higher-ed IT, web dev and support; with a dash of freelance consulting thrown in for good measure. (Oct/19: Seeking change of pace. Not afraid to take a step back in order to move ahead!)
//nod// Save+load from cassette, hoping dearly that you started at the correct counter position and had the tape recorder volume loud enough (but not too loud), then wait...10 minutes...to play Wumpus!
...And there was also the cursed temperamental 16K RAM pack plugged into my ZX81 which would cause the computer to crash if you jostled the thing even slightly--like typing!!
You young whippersnapper! I was at school at a time when the school didn't have any computers. Its entire computing facility consisted of a single teletype terminal that could be connected via acoustic coupler to a mainframe across town. Paper tape was the local storage medium.
He/Him/His
I'm a Software Engineer and a teacher.
There's no feeling quite like the one you get when you watch someone's eyes light up learning something they didn't know.
He/Him/His
I'm a Software Engineer and a teacher.
There's no feeling quite like the one you get when you watch someone's eyes light up learning something they didn't know.
Professionally: the double margin float bug in Internet Explorer 6 and hoping for the demise of IE5.
Also, I was aware of IE5 for Mac (different bugs to regular IE5) but never had a Mac at the time to try it out. Now we have Edge for Mac, so what goes around comes around, I guess.
My first web experience: all elements in capital letters and no CSS. Yay for <FONT> and <CENTER> and of course <BLINK> and <MARQUEE>.
I'm a software engineer working as a full-stack developer using JavaScript, Node.js, and React. I write about my experiences in tech, tutorials, and share helpful hints.
I've been coding for over 20 years now! (WOAH, do I feel old)
I've touched just about every resource imaginable under the Sun (too bad they were bought out by Oracle)
When the "console", "terminal" or "command prompt" was really just this thing called "DOS"
And it had QBasic. And QBasic was a godsend for learning how the computer actually worked!
Speaking of learning how things worked... Drawing graphics in QBasic? You interacted directly with the video card. There were no drivers. You would have to manually setup which VGA mode you wanted, such as 320x240 pixel with 16 colors. And then very single dot had to be manually plotted on the screen! There were a few libraries for drawing primitives, but these literally did the same thing, CPU based drawing to a generic frame buffer.
It's pronounced Diane. I do data architecture, operations, and backend development. In my spare time I maintain Massive.js, a data mapper for Node.js and PostgreSQL.
I've been coding for over 20 years now! (WOAH, do I feel old)
I've touched just about every resource imaginable under the Sun (too bad they were bought out by Oracle)
I've been coding for over 20 years now! (WOAH, do I feel old)
I've touched just about every resource imaginable under the Sun (too bad they were bought out by Oracle)
MOSTLY YES! But there was also some odd-ball hardware that was 16-bit transfers instead of 8-bit. So to draw a single pixel, you had to read two bytes, replace one, then write two bytes back. HOWEVER though, this also meant that just raw performance of painting was twice as fast, as you could draw two pixels in a single operation, if you already knew what both were going to be! (like copying frame buffer for example)
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
I've been coding for over 20 years now! (WOAH, do I feel old)
I've touched just about every resource imaginable under the Sun (too bad they were bought out by Oracle)
Tortoise SVN is still a thing! And now we have Tortoise Git, which I use daily. I actually find it faster to do merge conflict resolution and file diffing with Tortoise compared to the command line. :)
I've been coding for over 20 years now! (WOAH, do I feel old)
I've touched just about every resource imaginable under the Sun (too bad they were bought out by Oracle)
Vivid memory of my boss putting a box of punched cards on top of his car to drive to a customer and forgetting to put them in the car. First turn cards flew off, still ribbed him about it for years
I work as CPO for a Swiss Telco/Messaging Platform Company.
My real passion is developing in Golang, Vue-Nuxt/ReactJs/Angular with Redis, Nsq/RabbitMQ, ArangoDB, MongoDB and Sql
Alex is an award-winning designer, Senior Front-End Dev @Healthx, and an avid sticker maker. He has worked for over 10 years as a web developer and designer.
Oh man, creating rounded edges on elements using a 9-slice grid and four separate rounded-corner-top-right.gif/left etc images was fun. Using DOS, I suppose. Jill of the Jungle!!
In the early days of the language, the creators of PHP used to hang out in the #php channel on efnet. They would answer Stack Overflow-type questions (I mean the "why am I getting this parse error" kind). I remember being amazed when Rasmus Lerdorf once talked about a calendar app he'd written on a flight across the country. How could you write something like that in a few hours?! I learned web development hanging out in that channel.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
32K?? Big spender. I remember when my dad brought home a tube of insect-looking memory-chips to install into our Apple ][ so it would finally have "enough" memory to run some of the more recent programs. Eventually maxed it out at like 48K?
I've done a bunch of assembly (x86, PPC and ARM professionally, 6502 and Z80 for the heck of it) and I'm not crazy enough to try raw Windows programming in it. My hat's off to you.
Does anyone remember spacer gifs? Invisible gifs used to get your layout just right back when positioning was a total pain. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacer_GIF
Yep, you always started out counting by tens, and hoped you never got to the point where you had to start renumbering due to needing to insert more than 9 lines. 😁
Experienced ASP.NET developer passionate about learning Software Engineering, being an effective team member, and carving out my own little niche in the world.
I enjoy working with jQuery, Angul...
It's pronounced Diane. I do data architecture, operations, and backend development. In my spare time I maintain Massive.js, a data mapper for Node.js and PostgreSQL.
Experienced ASP.NET developer passionate about learning Software Engineering, being an effective team member, and carving out my own little niche in the world.
I enjoy working with jQuery, Angul...
Dozens of floppies to install a compiler (Hello Borland C)
VB (note lack of .Net)
Writing a DOS device driver so I could edit config.sys on bootup
Being at a dev conference where the presenter quickly wrote a C# program on the board "Oh, sorry, that's not C#, that's Java", changes the case of a few things "Now it's C#"
Turning on a computer with no storage and have it work (The Vic-20 and C-64 mentioned elsewhere here)
OS/2. Would've flunked college without this, I had neural nets running for weeks and could still write papers.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
Dozens of floppies to install a compiler (Hello Borland C)
Spending 20+ straight hours in the Sun lab to download Linux from MIT's TSX mirror ...then using rawrite to put it all on a stack of floppies. And, doing all that because the university's Sun lab was connected to NSFnet and its blazing 56Kbps "backbone".
I think I still have my SimEarth floppies somewhere.
I want to see someone join all the games together. Zoom into SimEarth, get SimCity. Zoom into SimCity, get SimTower or SimAnt depending on how built up the area was.
"Sim Ant" was a classic simulation game released by Maxis in 1991, allowing players to take control of an ant colony and guide it through various challenges and tasks. Back in the day, installing the game meant inserting floppy disks into your computer one by one until the installation process was complete. Each floppy disk contained a portion of the game's data, and you had to patiently swap them out as prompted by the installation wizard.
XML databases
386max etc memory managers (necessary for non-US keyboard drivers so we could run the real software)
DOS windowing systems
“Xxxxx 2000” as the Next Big Thing (eg WordPerfect 2000, Wordstar 2000)
Forth
Structured Programming
Novell Netware (and MHS) - So Many Floppy Disks
IPX
Btrieve
Token Ring
OS/2
Paradox
dBase
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
• Radio Shack TRS-80
• Apple II, IIe, III, etc
• My 386SX
• Graphics mode v. text mode
• The text editor called "Brief"
• FoxBase/FoxPro/dBase
• Booting the Mac 512e with a floppy disk
• IDL (Interactive Data Language, like Matlab)
• Emacs & Emacs Lisp, XEmacs
• Sun Sparcstation
• ftp.wustl.edu & others like it where you downloaded & compiled your open source stuff
• BBSs (bulletin board systems accessed via direct dial up)
• The first laser printer (at UCSD)
• Gould Modicon programmable controller
Ah, the good ol' days. Yep, I'm old, but not old enough to have ever had to use punch cards. :)
My first computer was an Intel 80386SX @25MHz, 2MB RAM, 10MB of Hard Drive, Floppy 5¼" (B drive) and 3½" (A drive). Along with a Hercule display and a 9-dot dot matric printer (offering 4 different fonts! Yeah... The font where available ON THE printer, with a button to select which one). We had MS-DOS 5.0, Wordperfect 5.1, dBase 3.0, Lotus123, a Fighting Jet game (don't remember the name, was actually in 3D, couldn't make the damn plane land). I was 10 years old, and when I was like 13 my mother bought a Pentium 120MHz (without MMX), so she gave me the 386. I went to a computer store to ask what to do with it in order to play Diablo. They laugh at me so hard!!!
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
I remember when the US DoD decreed that everything would now be written in Ada, and then every contractor started filing for exceptions. I remember printouts of project source code on fanfold paper hanging in binders on a rack in the terminal room. I remember disk drives the size of dishwashing machines and CPUs the size of refrigerators. Take that, all you youngsters talking about web-centric things -- Al Gore hadn't even invented the internet yet. 😉
The first Unix machine I worked on was a Gould Mini. It was two refrigerator sized cabinets. The 300MB HDD was in one of them and took three people to lift.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
Lead Developer: Adobe Experience Manager.
Father of one.
Minnesota.
Occasionally write here: ahmedmusallam.com and there: https://blogs.perficientdigital.com/author/amusallam/
Staring at a blank DOS prompt in wonder on my dad's 286 in 2nd grade.
Programming randomly-shaped stars in logo in 4th grade.
Accidentally activating the BIOS password on my first computer and not being able to boot it again for six months until my uncle suggested "amibios" which worked!
Learning HTML so that my internet chats would look more awesome. Learning how to make it look like I was logged in as any other user in the chatroom.
Hacking my high school's login screen with COM files to say mean things about my school.
Setting IRQs for my sound card so I could play King's Quest with sound.
My first real program was a SkiFree clone written in Pascal. I invented the concept of sprites about 6 years before I learned that they had been a thing all along.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
Accidentally activating the BIOS password on my first computer and not being able to boot it again for six months until my uncle suggested "amibios" which worked!
And back before there was anything like Google to tell you "pop the battery to reset it".
I didn't know about the battery trick! I really wish I had. And I didn't even have a modem at the time to connect to Usenet. Later I got access to the internet through the local college's T1 line, and basically felt like the coolest person ever.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
Yeah. It was an annoying way to do things. You'd pop the CMOS battery, and then you'd have to wait for the CMOS to discharge (usually took a half hour or so).
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
I remember my fellow students hyping the OpenMoko smartphones as THE place to be in terms of mobile development... Then Android and iOS came along.
I never made a Java applet, they were already hated quite much when I got onto the web, but I did some Flash cartoons. Saw many good people fall when Apple killed it, because they never learned code-based programming 😢
I learned C and Assembler on 8085 at school (went to an IT high-school) and Java on non-mobile devices 😂 at university, with enterprise beans, skelletons, stubs and what not 🤢
I remember Ruby on Rails being the hyped savior, like Elm a few years ago, and like Elm the well-know languages copied Rails' concepts and it simply became the new way of doing things.
I used components with ExtJS4 (called xtypes there) and VDOM like rendering with plain JS in 2011, so it felt totally naturally for me to switch to React later.
I didn't want to go into mobile development when I finished my degree in 2011, because I thought the hype was over, haha, started with it in 2017 and it's still a hot topic.
I wish I archived a website I made my freshman year at RPI (IN THE YEAR 2000). It had horizontal scrolling, an imagemap, hover effects. The user could hover over a fullscreen photograph of a scene in a diner in upstate NY and see a caption that offered an anecdotal story about the table and what the people were eating and price of the dishes. It was a school project to advertise a business. Would still probably hold up today as an excellent concept for a restaurant site. It will be lost forever.
My first software development memory is using toggle switches on the front of my friend's newly-assembled ALTAIR 8800 to enter individual machine opcodes into its 256 bytes of memory.
We had to hand-compile assembly code to get the opcodes.
It was exciting when we finally upgraded the memory and had Altair 4K BASIC (by "Micro-Soft") to write in a "high level language". Still had to hand-toggle the boot loader in before we could load the BASIC interpreter from cassette tape, though.
Flash intros
Tables for layout...with that single pixel gif column
Dynamic HTML
XML would save us
The “turbo” button on my pc
ISPs were local companies
Books were the only real way to learn new things
JavaScript had to be written to work in different browsers
FTP
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
All of my "old enough to remember" stuff is from childhood and early college:
When my dad brought home a series of TRS80s and, finally, an Apple ][
...and then transcribing games from hobbyist magazines and then having to save to and load from cassette.
The godsend that our first 8" floppy drive was (and the the 5 1/4", and finally, the hard plastic, 1.44MiB "floppy" that now only endures as the "save" button icon)
Buying tubes of memory chips for that Apple ][ to upgrade it to 32KiB (and seeing adverts for expensive 128K RAM boards in computer magazines)
A 40MiB hard drive that took up as much space as the PC it was connected to did
When my dad brought home a compiler for BASIC that made stuff so much faster
How much easier it was to get my code to compile when I disabled the (default) pedantic mode ...and how much harder it was to move my code from one UNIX flavor to another for having done so.
Having to learn assembler to make programs that were usably-fast
After investing time in learning "assembler", that each CPU I'd want to write for, I'd have to learn a different "assembler" implementation
First time I accidentally implemented a fork-bomb ...and the only reason I figured it out was that each time I invoked my program, the remote telnet connection would drop and the system's uptime, when I was finally able to restart my session, would display a value that pretty blatantly corresponded to when I'd invoked my program
How bad it can be to name a function exit ...and how useful it can be if your intents are less than nice.
Page-long conditional #Include blocks in multi-platform source-code.
When Sun made the decision to stop including cc in their OS ...and having to ask our labs' SAs to install gcc when the there were too many users of the FlexLM-governed add-on compiler for Sun
Making the transition from aout to elf
From some of the things in my background, you'd almost think that I was a Real Developer™, but, when time came to transition from hobbyist to professional, all the jobs that were available were sysadmin type jobs. Now, coding is mostly in service to automating infrastructure. :(
I'm a full stack web developer who has been freelancing for the last 20 years. I write about everything from development to production and also have video courses on my site!
1983 - Seeing my program load on the screen character by character from a cassette drive (VTech Creativision console)
1985 - pr#1 to print, pr#6 to access the diskette (Apple II)
1986 - writing BASIC programs to transfer data from CP/M-equipped Apple IIs to Tandy TRS-80s.
1990 - writing Occam II programs on a 4-node Transputer farm.
1991 - working with Watcom C++ and 386 DOS Extender
1992 - Microsoft C 7.0 and Windows SDK
Max is a startup software engineer. He seeks to use what he has learnt as a startup founder and tech community leader to solves hard problems with innovate products or services.
I remember learning to use Marquee for web development class while I was in trade school. Web 2.0 was all the rage before Sun Microsystems was brought by Oracle.
Have had many hats on in my life: Developer, Team Lead, Scrum Master, Architect and Product Owner. Now back to developer \o/ Interested in product discovery, quality assurance and language design.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
Not super long ago, but I started Android dev back when Eclipse was the only option. Fortunately, just a few months later Google released Android Studio and Gradle as the build tool, and life immediately got significantly better for Android devs everywhere.
Brian Rinaldi is a Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly with over 20 years experience as a developer for the web. Brian is active in the community running CFE.dev and Orlando Devs.
Professionally, I am old enough to remember when IE6 felt like a godsend. We kept dealing with issues in the latest Netscape 4.5 release, that code often had to have specific workarounds for bugs in specific Netscape versions. IE6 was just the better browser...long before it became the ball and chain of the internet.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
I did my first project in basic with the commodore 64 and it changed the colors of the background and the characters.
The first difficult project in basic was the air balloon. I failed. One year later I had to copy the code of another person(Stackoverflow did not exist a programmer nightmare). I was 11/12 :D
Serial podcast creator and .NET Core maniac.
Can often be found talking about everything and nothing on one of the many podcasts that he produces (only one of them is about .NET Core, honest)
Location
Leeds, UK
Education
Computer Science with Games Development - BSc
Work
.NET Development Contractor; Podcast host, producer and editor
Writing silly apps in BASIC for the family Amstrad 464 CPC when I should have been playing outside with friends
Creating a GeoCities website with images created using CoolText and PaintShopPro, when I should have been writing documents in my IT classes at school
Discovering an early version of OpenSuse in the store room at school and wanting to try it out (the packaging promised that you couldn't get viruses because of the way that Linux worked, and I wanted to know what that was)
trying to convince friends that the millennium bug was nothing to be worried about
Writing apps for a Motorola 68k in a similar configuration that the Mega Drive/Genesis had, at collge (I'm from the UK, so that means from the age of 16 to 18)
effing DOCTOR THADDEUS OZONE, photoshop-hero. First wave of skeumorphism when it still was cool. DHTML realness baby. Check all of his stuff out, please.
Started coding with a TI-57, then TI-59 (Texas Instrument). Continued with 8-bit computers, in Basic, of course, and assembly language (converted to hexa code by hand).
I did lot of real-time software on 8-bit processors (6800, 6809, 6502, etc.)
I bought Visual Studio 1.0. It was a box of several kilograms, because it had a dozen of books / manuals with the floppy disks.
Also I coded JavaScript at a time where the only debug tool was alert()... (later, I added lines to a div)
When my 386 was only really good for DOS and I used bash to write scripts/small interfaces to get around my system because Windows was hard to run
The Internet before GUIs. Lynx, IRC and a culture of safety and anonymity.
Modifying the school computers' autoexec.bat to prank/bork the boot up process.
When Google/Hotmail were brand new and Google wasn't evil.
Having my mind blown by Ubuntu 4.10 "Warty Warthog"
Using Dreamweaver 3.0 to create JavaScript enabled elements because JavaScript was optional and I didn't feel like learning it. To even use JS with a browser you had to get a 3rd party plugin to work.
When CSS was more work than it was worth.
Maybe not as cool as some of the real old guard, but I remember fondly.
In the Borland C Editor/compiler for DOS, there was a blurb in the help files for sound functions about how there was once a factory that produced a 7Hz noise near a chicken farm and apparently everyone found out that happened to be the resonant frequency of a chicken skull…
Upgrading from IBM Model 026 keypunches (which didn't print characters at the top of the card) to Model 029 (which did). No more reading cards by guess and by golly if you dropped them and there wasn't a sorter available (you did punch sequence numbers in each card, didn't you? You certainly did after you dropped a few boxes...)
Reading some experiences here make me realise how lucky we are now.
I remember using Jumper switches (I think that's what it was called back then) to manually set the Master & slave hard drives on my 800MHz Pentium 3 PC.
Building my first website on free servers.net.
Microsoft Publisher and the eureka moment of discovering 'br' tags after a week of trying.
The joys of 'Macromedia' Dreamweaver before Adobe bought it.
Wondering why I have to put line numbers in front if each statement in Basic.
Programmed Canon Canola calculators in 1977. Assorted platforms and languages ever since. Assisting with HOPL.info.
I am NOT looking for work -- I've got more than enough to do.
Location
Perth, WA Australia
Education
A few diplomas.
Work
Software Engineer at [Daisy Digital](https://daisydigital.com.au/)
canola is an emulator of the first thing I ever programmed: a Canon Canola calculator. I was in my second-last year of highschool. The year was 1977. I flowcharted with a stick in the sand of a nearby beach.
I remember writing Basic on my Sinclair Spectrum 128k (ram).
I remember how Turbo Pascal 7 was absolutely amazing when compared to Turbo Pascal 6.
I remember there being no Linux.
I remember windows 2.
I remember my dad's punch cards. I remember when every computer at the department stores already had basic installed as an OS. I remember when Bill Cosby and Texas Instruments finally came out with a cable so I could plug my TI99 into to my cassette player and store my inventions without having to write them all down in a notebook and type them back in whenever I wanted to show them off to my friends... and yes, that constant refactoring made me the programmer I am today. :)
I wrote some Basic as a kid (I think I was about 8-10 years old back than), but my first professional job was to write mobile websites using WAP and WML - protocols and languages that are long extinct...
Apart from some stuff mentioned in comments like marquee I've had the pleasure of working with MS ActiveX to write a whole application which was used to print cards using a printer on client side.
Sinclair Basic PEEK and POKE.
I had a TRS-80 and a dancing devil programme that. Played a tune on a specific shortwave frequency which was actually the RF interference generated by the computer for whatever background calculations were being carried out. Still can't imagine how you would debug the tune 😵
The local computer shop had an Apple IIe with an adventure game; when you fired your gun it would crash the read heads of the external disk drive (5 1/2 ") to make the shot sound. Can't have done the drive any good
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10 print "Hello World"
20 goto 10
My God thank you! I was reading these replies thinking "these people are all kids" lol
//nod// Save+load from cassette, hoping dearly that you started at the correct counter position and had the tape recorder volume loud enough (but not too loud), then wait...10 minutes...to play Wumpus!
...And there was also the cursed temperamental 16K RAM pack plugged into my ZX81 which would cause the computer to crash if you jostled the thing even slightly--like typing!!
For me it was a Commodore 64 or a Vic 20 which was what our first computer classes in grade 11 used.
I still remember the joy of walking up to a demo computer in a store and doing the 20 goto 10 thing :D
You young whippersnapper! I was at school at a time when the school didn't have any computers. Its entire computing facility consisted of a single teletype terminal that could be connected via acoustic coupler to a mainframe across town. Paper tape was the local storage medium.
It didn't matter. I was hooked.
I only recently joined this community and I'm happy to see more of us 'oldies' here
I'm old enough to remember Java applets 😄
Damn it
I have to write applet for exam today 😪
My first calculator was a Java applet!
One of the first projects I ever completed was a Java applet with physics simulation, and a bouncing ball.
My mother kicking me off AOL because she was expecting a phone call!
My friend coming round my house to play Habbo Hotel because her Dad put child restrictions on their AOL
OMG it was cat and mouse with us! I was finding workarounds to my parents' parental controls as fast as they could find new ones 😂
Professionally: the double margin float bug in Internet Explorer 6 and hoping for the demise of IE5.
Also, I was aware of IE5 for Mac (different bugs to regular IE5) but never had a Mac at the time to try it out. Now we have Edge for Mac, so what goes around comes around, I guess.
My first web experience: all elements in capital letters and no CSS. Yay for
<FONT>and<CENTER>and of course<BLINK>and<MARQUEE>.The marquee days... I still remember those websites were full of GIF ads 😂
This gif was a thing at those times:
So much of the web was under construction!
😂
FLAMINGTEXT! I miss hokey 00s web stuff!
cooltext.com 😀
FTPing into the server and making live edits. YOLO.
Editing HTML in Notepad!
Pro Version was Notepad++
Notepad++ was the first time I had syntax highlighting and it blew my mind.
I used Notepad2 and it changed my life.
Editing Java files for university coursework in Notepad was one of the reasons I still hold an irrational hatred for Java in my heart.
I stil do this
Table layout
Wait! We are not supposed to use that anymore??
We just call it “grid” now
Another couple of years and it'll be back.
If high-waisted jeans could make a comeback, surely table layouts can!
I mean, table elements are good for, well, laying out tables.
When the "console", "terminal" or "command prompt" was really just this thing called "DOS"
And it had QBasic. And QBasic was a godsend for learning how the computer actually worked!
Speaking of learning how things worked... Drawing graphics in QBasic? You interacted directly with the video card. There were no drivers. You would have to manually setup which VGA mode you wanted, such as 320x240 pixel with 16 colors. And then very single dot had to be manually plotted on the screen! There were a few libraries for drawing primitives, but these literally did the same thing, CPU based drawing to a generic frame buffer.
Having to choose between 640x480 with 16 colors or 320x200 with 256 was agonizing back in the day!
Color, or resolution... PICK ONE!
Color! Plus 320x200x256 was easy to address because every pixel was a byte in an array.
MOSTLY YES! But there was also some odd-ball hardware that was 16-bit transfers instead of 8-bit. So to draw a single pixel, you had to read two bytes, replace one, then write two bytes back. HOWEVER though, this also meant that just raw performance of painting was twice as fast, as you could draw two pixels in a single operation, if you already knew what both were going to be! (like copying frame buffer for example)
But damn the plaids were great. :p
Professionally, nothing.
Unprofessionally: Geocities. My sailor moon character had her own website and I loved it.
Geocities ❤️
My first public web project was on Geocities. Spent countless hours figuring out how to z-index over the adverts...
Love it.
I had a Metallica Fan site on Geocities
Red text on a black background in "Viner Hand ITC" font everywhere
Ah, good ol' red on black, like every goth and industrial website.
Had a Dragon Ball fan site on geocities, unfortunately, never found in any archive site :(
Man plenty more I'm sure - it crazy going down the memory lane :)
Tortoise SVN is still a thing! And now we have Tortoise Git, which I use daily. I actually find it faster to do merge conflict resolution and file diffing with Tortoise compared to the command line. :)
Yes indeed but back then it was the only thing. I think it had one off the best diff tools associated with it. I just can’t remember the name.
Tortoise Merge is their diff utility. And yeah, I absolutely love it. Still use it on pretty much every single commit just to verify file changes.
TortoiseHG is my life saviour.
YUI - OMG, someone else remembers that!
A shoebox of punch cards with my Fortran programs on them. The output was printed on paper with green and white bars. What do I win?
The epithets of "venerable" and "inscrutable", certainly.
don't drop the box (or at least configure the punch machine to print sequence numbers)
🤯
Vivid memory of my boss putting a box of punched cards on top of his car to drive to a customer and forgetting to put them in the car. First turn cards flew off, still ribbed him about it for years
have a look on my first ever page i did:
web.archive.org/web/19970124165936...
Imagemaps, IE3 Enhanced, 3D Buttons, Fireworks Shadows, FrameSets....
CGI-Scripts, Nervous animated Gifs
:-)
Today looks a bit better: fullstackjob.com
The entire layout for a website being a big ass table.
Haha. Ass table
xkcd.com/37/
Programming in Basic on a VIC 20 and playing video games on my friend's Commodore 64 that were on audio cassettes.
Also, programing in Logo in elementary school.
Old school. 💪
Side note: Years later at a job, I discovered that one of my peers, much older than me, helped build the Logo programming language. 🤯
I did some Logo back in primary school. Those were the days, just pushing the turtle around the screen and making sweet graphics.
That's kind of amazing you got to work with one of the creators!
It was such a fun way to program in elementary school. And of course, someone ported it to JS, because Atwood's Law.
I was a fan of Logo support on Heroku.
I'm technically a minor and I remember both Logo and BASIC from elementary school. And
<font>.Oh, man. Spacer gifs are the one I thought of when I saw this topic. And I remember what a miracle Firebug was when it was released.
This is what we do now, though, because jQuery is bloated and uncool. Time is a flat circle :)
Well, now we can use querySelectorAll and it does everything for us.
Oh man, creating rounded edges on elements using a 9-slice grid and four separate
rounded-corner-top-right.gif/left etc images was fun. Using DOS, I suppose. Jill of the Jungle!!I knowwwww.
The weird thing is that we were obsessed with doing it in the first place. Did we really need rounded corners that badly? 😵
Looking back, I think it was the challenge of the idea - an element that broke out of the square ✨⬜✨
Jill of the Jungle is free on gog.com an works perfectly in modern computers :D
😍😍😍😍😍
I got to know the Adobe suite much better than I wanted to.
In the early days of the language, the creators of PHP used to hang out in the #php channel on efnet. They would answer Stack Overflow-type questions (I mean the "why am I getting this parse error" kind). I remember being amazed when Rasmus Lerdorf once talked about a calendar app he'd written on a flight across the country. How could you write something like that in a few hours?! I learned web development hanging out in that channel.
Rubber keys with programming key words like "goto" and "poke" in red and yellow accessed via different key combinations.
Typing in code from magazines and then having to debug it because of printing errors.
Only having 32k of memory.
32K?? Big spender. I remember when my dad brought home a tube of insect-looking memory-chips to install into our Apple ][ so it would finally have "enough" memory to run some of the more recent programs. Eventually maxed it out at like 48K?
Writing keygens for software in Assembly language... found this code in my old folders (still wondering how I managed to write such lines 😂)
This was written on a Win XP machine 😆
I've done a bunch of assembly (x86, PPC and ARM professionally, 6502 and Z80 for the heck of it) and I'm not crazy enough to try raw Windows programming in it. My hat's off to you.
Does anyone remember spacer gifs? Invisible gifs used to get your layout just right back when positioning was a total pain. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacer_GIF
Then of course invisible GIFs became ad tracker GIFs :(
To insert lines in a basic program you create a line with an intermediate number.
to insert a line there you do
and use
RENUMto re-enumerate in tens again... and create more "interlines", it would fix all the goto references automatically... that was amazingYep, you always started out counting by tens, and hoped you never got to the point where you had to start renumbering due to needing to insert more than 9 lines. 😁
QBasic under DOS 5.
Learning QBasic, then opening gorilla.bas and being like "I'm not there yet" lol
Learning QBasic by opening gorilla.bas and tripling the explosion radius....
I was 6-7 then and it was awesome. My mom was like :O.
In no particular order:
Spending 20+ straight hours in the Sun lab to download Linux from MIT's TSX mirror ...then using
rawriteto put it all on a stack of floppies. And, doing all that because the university's Sun lab was connected to NSFnet and its blazing 56Kbps "backbone".My fav game back then, Sim Ant was installed from floppy!
I think I still have my SimEarth floppies somewhere.
I want to see someone join all the games together. Zoom into SimEarth, get SimCity. Zoom into SimCity, get SimTower or SimAnt depending on how built up the area was.
"Sim Ant" was a classic simulation game released by Maxis in 1991, allowing players to take control of an ant colony and guide it through various challenges and tasks. Back in the day, installing the game meant inserting floppy disks into your computer one by one until the installation process was complete. Each floppy disk contained a portion of the game's data, and you had to patiently swap them out as prompted by the installation wizard.
XML databases
386max etc memory managers (necessary for non-US keyboard drivers so we could run the real software)
DOS windowing systems
“Xxxxx 2000” as the Next Big Thing (eg WordPerfect 2000, Wordstar 2000)
Forth
Structured Programming
Novell Netware (and MHS) - So Many Floppy Disks
IPX
Btrieve
Token Ring
OS/2
Paradox
dBase
Thanks Ben, you’ve made me feel very old
No Banyan Vines? No Appletalk? None of the excruciating joy of making two or more of them work together?
Oh! And having to shut down an entire LAN to reset a stuck token!
Oh... And having to install Trumpet WinSock!
Also:
Compuserve
Dial up bulletin boards - eg FidoNet
Default passwords on Prime OS systems across the world
UKs JANET network
So much YES. That list brings back so many memories.
• Radio Shack TRS-80
• Apple II, IIe, III, etc
• My 386SX
• Graphics mode v. text mode
• The text editor called "Brief"
• FoxBase/FoxPro/dBase
• Booting the Mac 512e with a floppy disk
• IDL (Interactive Data Language, like Matlab)
• Emacs & Emacs Lisp, XEmacs
• Sun Sparcstation
• ftp.wustl.edu & others like it where you downloaded & compiled your open source stuff
• BBSs (bulletin board systems accessed via direct dial up)
• The first laser printer (at UCSD)
• Gould Modicon programmable controller
Ah, the good ol' days. Yep, I'm old, but not old enough to have ever had to use punch cards. :)
My first computer was an Intel 80386SX @25MHz, 2MB RAM, 10MB of Hard Drive, Floppy 5¼" (B drive) and 3½" (A drive). Along with a Hercule display and a 9-dot dot matric printer (offering 4 different fonts! Yeah... The font where available ON THE printer, with a button to select which one). We had MS-DOS 5.0, Wordperfect 5.1, dBase 3.0, Lotus123, a Fighting Jet game (don't remember the name, was actually in 3D, couldn't make the damn plane land). I was 10 years old, and when I was like 13 my mother bought a Pentium 120MHz (without MMX), so she gave me the 386. I went to a computer store to ask what to do with it in order to play Diablo. They laugh at me so hard!!!
Ah Brief. I still miss Brief. Also the version control plug-in for it called Sourcerer's Apprentice
EMACS. Killit with fire. Nothing like the first time you open EMACS and are left wondering, "how the hell do I exit this beast"?
VIM: "Hold my beer"
I’m old enough to remember when mysql_query wasn’t deprecated.
I’m old enough to have put W3C validator badges on at least 10 web sites.
I’m old enough to have used table layouts
I’m old enough to have made a website in MS Publisher
Never mind table layouts. Remember using multiple nested blockquotes for indentation?
I remember when the US DoD decreed that everything would now be written in Ada, and then every contractor started filing for exceptions. I remember printouts of project source code on fanfold paper hanging in binders on a rack in the terminal room. I remember disk drives the size of dishwashing machines and CPUs the size of refrigerators. Take that, all you youngsters talking about web-centric things -- Al Gore hadn't even invented the internet yet. 😉
The first Unix machine I worked on was a Gould Mini. It was two refrigerator sized cabinets. The 300MB HDD was in one of them and took three people to lift.
Hey: we called those project source printouts "backups" at one place I did time at.
Development Specific:
Other things:
PHP4 represent!
Using dreamweaver to edit HTML files over FTP.. in 2013..
I learned "web development" using Dreamweaver in University in 2010 🤷
Staring at a blank DOS prompt in wonder on my dad's 286 in 2nd grade.
Programming randomly-shaped stars in logo in 4th grade.
Accidentally activating the BIOS password on my first computer and not being able to boot it again for six months until my uncle suggested "amibios" which worked!
Learning HTML so that my internet chats would look more awesome. Learning how to make it look like I was logged in as any other user in the chatroom.
Hacking my high school's login screen with COM files to say mean things about my school.
Setting IRQs for my sound card so I could play King's Quest with sound.
My first real program was a SkiFree clone written in Pascal. I invented the concept of sprites about 6 years before I learned that they had been a thing all along.
And back before there was anything like Google to tell you "pop the battery to reset it".
Of course, back before Google, we had Usenet.
I didn't know about the battery trick! I really wish I had. And I didn't even have a modem at the time to connect to Usenet. Later I got access to the internet through the local college's T1 line, and basically felt like the coolest person ever.
Yeah. It was an annoying way to do things. You'd pop the CMOS battery, and then you'd have to wait for the CMOS to discharge (usually took a half hour or so).
Nothing quite like waiting two days for the kernel to re-compile only to discover that you left the
sddriver out.The move away from the monolithic kernel was such a vast improvement in maintainability.
In no order but random memories
I used Basic on the C64. 😂
I remember my fellow students hyping the OpenMoko smartphones as THE place to be in terms of mobile development... Then Android and iOS came along.
I never made a Java applet, they were already hated quite much when I got onto the web, but I did some Flash cartoons. Saw many good people fall when Apple killed it, because they never learned code-based programming 😢
I learned C and Assembler on 8085 at school (went to an IT high-school) and Java on non-mobile devices 😂 at university, with enterprise beans, skelletons, stubs and what not 🤢
I remember Ruby on Rails being the hyped savior, like Elm a few years ago, and like Elm the well-know languages copied Rails' concepts and it simply became the new way of doing things.
I used components with ExtJS4 (called xtypes there) and VDOM like rendering with plain JS in 2011, so it felt totally naturally for me to switch to React later.
I didn't want to go into mobile development when I finished my degree in 2011, because I thought the hype was over, haha, started with it in 2017 and it's still a hot topic.
I’m sure there are many of the same memories here.
There are more, but know I’m feeling old, 😂- thanks for the thread @ben
So many good memories in this thread. Few of mine:
Embedding a webring on the bottom of my geocities page.
Here is a weird school project from a net art class in 2002. It's really broken (no images). I used the slice tool in Photoshop when that was a relatively new thing.
I wish I archived a website I made my freshman year at RPI (IN THE YEAR 2000). It had horizontal scrolling, an imagemap, hover effects. The user could hover over a fullscreen photograph of a scene in a diner in upstate NY and see a caption that offered an anecdotal story about the table and what the people were eating and price of the dishes. It was a school project to advertise a business. Would still probably hold up today as an excellent concept for a restaurant site. It will be lost forever.
NeoPets Personal Pages.
A single html file. Way too many
<marquee>sAlso...
Any idea why NeoPets is excluded from the Wayback Machine:
I feel absolutely ancient reading these replies.
My first software development memory is using toggle switches on the front of my friend's newly-assembled ALTAIR 8800 to enter individual machine opcodes into its 256 bytes of memory.
We had to hand-compile assembly code to get the opcodes.
It was exciting when we finally upgraded the memory and had Altair 4K BASIC (by "Micro-Soft") to write in a "high level language". Still had to hand-toggle the boot loader in before we could load the BASIC interpreter from cassette tape, though.
Flash intros
Tables for layout...with that single pixel gif column
Dynamic HTML
XML would save us
The “turbo” button on my pc
ISPs were local companies
Books were the only real way to learn new things
JavaScript had to be written to work in different browsers
FTP
"XML will save us". We're so much wiser now. Now we know that "Blockchain will save us"
Internet Explorer 5 Macintosh Edition..
All of my "old enough to remember" stuff is from childhood and early college:
exit...and how useful it can be if your intents are less than nice.#Includeblocks in multi-platform source-code.ccin their OS ...and having to ask our labs' SAs to installgccwhen the there were too many users of the FlexLM-governed add-on compiler for SunFrom some of the things in my background, you'd almost think that I was a Real Developer™, but, when time came to transition from hobbyist to professional, all the jobs that were available were sysadmin type jobs. Now, coding is mostly in service to automating infrastructure. :(
<marquee>tags1983 - Seeing my program load on the screen character by character from a cassette drive (VTech Creativision console)
1985 - pr#1 to print, pr#6 to access the diskette (Apple II)
1986 - writing BASIC programs to transfer data from CP/M-equipped Apple IIs to Tandy TRS-80s.
1990 - writing Occam II programs on a 4-node Transputer farm.
1991 - working with Watcom C++ and 386 DOS Extender
1992 - Microsoft C 7.0 and Windows SDK
Dang, I'm old.
I remember learning to use Marquee for web development class while I was in trade school. Web 2.0 was all the rage before Sun Microsystems was brought by Oracle.
My first websites were all about the marquee!
Yeah right Ben, your "first" websites?
We've all seen your personal site now. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
I remember when the word "burnout" was used mostly in car racing. Now it's a thing I personally experienced more than once.
Also, WinAPI. It still gives me shivers.
I experienced the switch from X11 to Xorg... and writing the configs for both was the biiiiiigest pita in computer history
Remember LILO?
But did you ever burn a mark into your monitor's phosphors when the config file your wrote was close to correct, but just not quite right?
oh, what beautiful times were those...
Not super long ago, but I started Android dev back when Eclipse was the only option. Fortunately, just a few months later Google released Android Studio and Gradle as the build tool, and life immediately got significantly better for Android devs everywhere.
Professionally, I am old enough to remember when IE6 felt like a godsend. We kept dealing with issues in the latest Netscape 4.5 release, that code often had to have specific workarounds for bugs in specific Netscape versions. IE6 was just the better browser...long before it became the ball and chain of the internet.
Unless you were someone that used multiple computers throughout the course of a day. I was so pissed when Roaming Profiles died.
I did my first project in basic with the commodore 64 and it changed the colors of the background and the characters.
The first difficult project in basic was the air balloon. I failed. One year later I had to copy the code of another person(Stackoverflow did not exist a programmer nightmare). I was 11/12 :D
Using 8" floppy disks to boot a CP/M machine with a 12" wide 10 MB hard drive. The hard drive alone weighed 20+lb, 10+Kg.
Or, writing 6502 machine code by hand on a VIC-20.
Or, using Uniflex on a SWTPC 6800
The one that keeps coming up this week for some reason is that I was writing React back in the
createClassdays!Oh, that’s a good one 😄
developing web pages to support both
<div>and<layer>effing DOCTOR THADDEUS OZONE, photoshop-hero. First wave of skeumorphism when it still was cool. DHTML realness baby. Check all of his stuff out, please.
Flash being "the cool thing" (it's where I started coding with my best friend and in my opinion never stopped being cool!)
jQuery dominating the web ecosystem
I stayed away from flash because I never had a decent internet connection back then. I was always drawn towards plain HTML for the better 😂
Started coding with a TI-57, then TI-59 (Texas Instrument). Continued with 8-bit computers, in Basic, of course, and assembly language (converted to hexa code by hand).
I did lot of real-time software on 8-bit processors (6800, 6809, 6502, etc.)
I bought Visual Studio 1.0. It was a box of several kilograms, because it had a dozen of books / manuals with the floppy disks.
Also I coded JavaScript at a time where the only debug tool was alert()... (later, I added lines to a div)
Maybe not as cool as some of the real old guard, but I remember fondly.
Custom MySpace layouts made by jamming CSS into the bottom of the bio text input
In the Borland C Editor/compiler for DOS, there was a blurb in the help files for sound functions about how there was once a factory that produced a 7Hz noise near a chicken farm and apparently everyone found out that happened to be the resonant frequency of a chicken skull…
trying to create an app for windows 3.1
Studying fortran at university and pascal at high school and logo with thomson MO5 at school
-Trying to programm three body app on Amstrad CPC in basic and finishing with a stack overflow (too much recursion to solve differential equation)
Upgrading from IBM Model 026 keypunches (which didn't print characters at the top of the card) to Model 029 (which did). No more reading cards by guess and by golly if you dropped them and there wasn't a sorter available (you did punch sequence numbers in each card, didn't you? You certainly did after you dropped a few boxes...)
Reading some experiences here make me realise how lucky we are now.
I remember using Jumper switches (I think that's what it was called back then) to manually set the Master & slave hard drives on my 800MHz Pentium 3 PC.
Building my first website on free servers.net.
Microsoft Publisher and the eureka moment of discovering 'br' tags after a week of trying.
The joys of 'Macromedia' Dreamweaver before Adobe bought it.
Wondering why I have to put line numbers in front if each statement in Basic.
Pheew
Not specifically dev (or me) but a few from Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle of [random] tech.
Pre
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
youtube.com/watch?v=wC3E2qTCIY8
youtube.com/watch?v=OIRZebE8O84
Post
es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q
youtube.com/watch?v=J33pVRdxWbw
youtube.com/watch?v=Udi0rk3jZYM
youtube.com/watch?v=Kh0tMOmlIys
youtube.com/watch?v=nG7hquyHncU
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia
w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1-961217
spacejam.com/archive/spacejam/movi...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
ASL
youtube.com/watch?v=lEyrivrjAuU
youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_grail_(...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Shockwave
youtube.com/watch?v=hw4wzwYeZ0Y
youtube.com/watch?v=n9kgZqbCJiM
encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?...
flashkit.com
sitepoint.com (@sitepointdotcom )
wordpress.org/news/2004/01/wordpre...
komar.org/christmas/hoax/
twitter.com/fwa/status/95824963451...
seroundtable.com/archives/000470.html
anildash.com/2004/06/04/nigritude_...
web.archive.org/web/20050217094837...
youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw
youtube.com/watch?v=eUHBPuHS-7s
youtube.com/watch?v=MnrJzXM7a6o
youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
cultofmac.com/491792/app-store-vir...
bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
coinmarketcap.com
Right now?
dev.to
repl.it
unity.com
unrealengine.com
🤣
Old enough to say that my first program was in Pascal.
canola is an emulator of the first thing I ever programmed: a Canon Canola calculator. I was in my second-last year of highschool. The year was 1977. I flowcharted with a stick in the sand of a nearby beach.
Cycling through 16 colours.
Layout with tables.
Creating a web page in Microsoft Word, and uploading it by FTP.
Editing a configuration file in text-mode to set-up the graphical mode on my computer.
I remember writing Basic on my Sinclair Spectrum 128k (ram).
I remember how Turbo Pascal 7 was absolutely amazing when compared to Turbo Pascal 6.
I remember there being no Linux.
I remember windows 2.
Printing the CSS1 specification on paper and studying it, thinking "I don't know if it will ever be useful, but it's cool!"
Buying a HUGE book about SVG and thinking "I'm sure that coding an image by hand will be surely useful"
Mandrake Linux! And after that Slackware because I was feeling a pro.
I remember my dad's punch cards. I remember when every computer at the department stores already had basic installed as an OS. I remember when Bill Cosby and Texas Instruments finally came out with a cable so I could plug my TI99 into to my cassette player and store my inventions without having to write them all down in a notebook and type them back in whenever I wanted to show them off to my friends... and yes, that constant refactoring made me the programmer I am today. :)
I wrote some Basic as a kid (I think I was about 8-10 years old back than), but my first professional job was to write mobile websites using WAP and WML - protocols and languages that are long extinct...
Apart from some stuff mentioned in comments like marquee I've had the pleasure of working with MS ActiveX to write a whole application which was used to print cards using a printer on client side.
Oh what a joy ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Sinclair Basic PEEK and POKE.
I had a TRS-80 and a dancing devil programme that. Played a tune on a specific shortwave frequency which was actually the RF interference generated by the computer for whatever background calculations were being carried out. Still can't imagine how you would debug the tune 😵
The local computer shop had an Apple IIe with an adventure game; when you fired your gun it would crash the read heads of the external disk drive (5 1/2 ") to make the shot sound. Can't have done the drive any good