Ben Halpern

Posted on May 23, 2019

What are you "old enough to remember" in software development?

#discuss

Oldest comments (371)

Ben Halpern • May 23 '19

I'm old enough to remember Java applets 😄

Ben Lovy • May 23 '19

My first calculator was a Java applet!

Bhupesh Varshney 👾 • May 23 '19

Damn it
I have to write applet for exam today 😪

Forest Hoffman • May 24 '19

One of the first projects I ever completed was a Java applet with physics simulation, and a bouncing ball.

Nick Taylor • May 23 '19 • Edited

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. 🤯

Phil Nash • May 23 '19

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!

Nick Taylor • May 23 '19

It was such a fun way to program in elementary school. And of course, someone ported it to JS, because Atwood's Law.

Phil Nash • May 23 '19

I was a fan of Logo support on Heroku.

Shreyas Minocha • Jun 6 '19

I'm technically a minor and I remember both Logo and BASIC from elementary school. And <font>.

Ali Spittel • May 23 '19

The one that keeps coming up this week for some reason is that I was writing React back in the createClass days!

Ben Halpern • May 23 '19

Oh, that’s a good one 😄

Yaser Al-Najjar • May 23 '19 • Edited

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 😆

Robert Myers • May 23 '19

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.

Phil Nash • May 23 '19

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>.

Yaser Al-Najjar • May 23 '19

The marquee days... I still remember those websites were full of GIF ads 😂

This gif was a thing at those times:

Phil Nash • May 23 '19

So much of the web was under construction!

Ben Halpern • May 23 '19

😂

Andy Haskell • May 23 '19

FLAMINGTEXT! I miss hokey 00s web stuff!

Victor Aremu • May 23 '19

cooltext.com 😀

Daryn St. Pierre • May 23 '19

I had the (dis)pleasure of using IE on a Mac once. If you thought the bugs were bad on IE for Windows... holy crap. That browser was so half-baked.

I still remember DHTML menus and all that stuff.

Cécile Lebleu • May 23 '19

That sounds horrible!

David Cantrell • May 23 '19

IE on Solaris was quite a lot better, mostly because they didn’t even try to implement half of it.

Thomas H Jones II • Jun 3 '19

Yeah. It was great, alright. Especially when you worked for a company that was Windows based but the only thing on your desktop was a Solaris box because you were in Unix Operations. "You need to do a daily timecard ...but the timecard system only works under IE" (and the IE for Solaris didn't quiiiiiiiiiiite render the page correctly).

Josh • May 23 '19

Entire site layout done in tables.

Thomas H Jones II • Jun 3 '19

Nested tables

...with some CSS thown in that rendered completely differentely in IE than in Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.

Phil Nash • Jun 3 '19

Styling MySpace pages! Which were just nested tables with no class names or ids. So all the CSS had to look like

table table table table p { ... }

maxon3 • May 23 '19

Old enough to say that my first program was in Pascal.

Cully Larson • May 23 '19

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.

Max Ong Zong Bao • May 23 '19 • Edited

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.

Ben Halpern • May 23 '19

My first websites were all about the marquee!

Alan Hylands • May 23 '19

Yeah right Ben, your "first" websites?

We've all seen your personal site now. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Vincent Milum Jr • May 23 '19

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.

Dian Fay • May 23 '19

Having to choose between 640x480 with 16 colors or 320x200 with 256 was agonizing back in the day!

Vincent Milum Jr • May 23 '19

Color, or resolution... PICK ONE!

Erik Pischel • May 23 '19

Color! Plus 320x200x256 was easy to address because every pixel was a byte in an array.

Vincent Milum Jr • May 23 '19

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)

Phil Ashby • May 26 '19

For those who get a kick out of wrangling old hardware to do things it was never designed to.. this back in 2015 blew me away when I found it: int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-102...

Thomas H Jones II • Jun 3 '19

But damn the plaids were great. :p

Thomas H Jones II • Jun 3 '19

But did you ever have to engage int he joy that was "shape tables"?

Andy Haskell • May 23 '19

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

Ben Halpern • May 23 '19

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 😂

Yechiel Kalmenson • May 23 '19

My mother kicking me off AOL because she was expecting a phone call!

Danielle • May 23 '19

My friend coming round my house to play Habbo Hotel because her Dad put child restrictions on their AOL

Yechiel Kalmenson • May 23 '19 • Edited

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 😂

John Best • May 23 '19

QBasic under DOS 5.

Andre Goncalves • May 23 '19

Learning QBasic, then opening gorilla.bas and being like "I'm not there yet" lol

John Best • May 23 '19

I was 6-7 then and it was awesome. My mom was like :O.

Dian Fay • May 23 '19

Learning QBasic by opening gorilla.bas and tripling the explosion radius....

Marc Grabanski 🏙💻 • May 23 '19 • Edited

First wrote code on a TI83 calculator
Table layouts and spacer gifs — no one coded CSS
"DHTML" was a term for JS + HTML
Wrote things like getElementsByClassName with walking DOM nodes because jQuery didn't exist yet
Firebug changed everything
Coding pixel perfect layouts IE6 was HARD
XMLHttpRequest — original Ajax blew my mind
Flash intros 😂