Let's say you can be plopped in any point in computer history and get to be pretty close to the action, what stands out as fascinating times to land in?
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Top comments (85)
I am glad to have my peak time today. I started back in 81 as a kid, made it to the 90ies as a hobbyist, had a little pause till the early 2000 and came right back professionally to the birth of the modern web. The browser has become the gateway to the world. And with the rise of the browser as the relevant platform operating systems became less of a thing. I have a Mac in the living room. My workplace is linux powered. I have a Windows machine (somewhere at least). As long as it has a browser, I can watch videos, listen to music, surfing the web. Chitchatting etc.
I am able to sit at my laptop listen to music, switch to my phone listening in my WLAN. When leaving the house my mobile switches to LTE and I am able to listen without big interruptions on my bike on my way to work. We have intelligent IDEs, great tooling, nice languages.
The web is a great learning ressource. And last but not least, we have
dev.to:]What greater time could there be?
I feel the same! So many resources to learn from, and still so much to be solved. Plus...it’s more friendly for women in tech so that a huge plus for me.
Well said
The Y2K era! It would be fun to see devs expecting a worldwide crash on systems and laugh about it when nothing happened. lol
Y2K was fun: I got $1000 just to be on available in case something blew up (and would have gotten double-time had they actually had to call me). Nothing blew up and I got to pocket the $1000 for doing nothing other than staying sober.
You can see that again in roughly 19 years. The issue caused by the rollover of the 32-bit UNIX time era will however probably not be something that just gets laughed off afterwards. Unlike Y2K, much of the affected code is running in places that quite simply can't be updated even if people wanted to fix them.
Loads of people did work to make sure it was ok too.
But yes. One washing machine turned off.I have a sticker somewhere.
just to be clear on that one, it wasn't that nothing happened, it was that a ton of IT staff all over the world (including my dad) had a mad rush to patch critical systems to prevent the bug
Desktop apps era (before smart phones).
It was just so much easier to write/ship desktop apps.
I didn't know the Desktop Apps era was over (not being sarcastic & don't mean anything bad by that statement). The majority of my favorite tools are still well maintained regular programs. I understand there's a large world of new languages and apps out there, but I will not convert to them until they can be fully automated. I mean FULLY. Good thing I no longer make a living with computers (well, I do make a little, but not my main income) and only as a hobby now. And even on my Android devices I try to do as much as I can with scripts and a terminal.
Most apps now are either web or mobile.
If you wanna make a living from developing desktop apps, you can only do so by joining big companies that dominated the market long ago like Adobe, AutoDesk... etc.
operating systems, developer tools, web browsers... are still also desktop apps :D
Be honest with yourself and think: can you make money on those?
Most dev tools are free.
OSs and desktop apps who make money are owned by the big companies that I mentioned before.
As an indie developer, it's just much harder to make money building desktop apps these days.
Oh 100%. I did not think about making money on those.
Tho. There is still room for innovative desktop software. For example I can imagine software development tools (that add some value on top of just being cool text editor), will be huge thing in couple of years. They are right now commercial IDEs but they don't do much more. When AI gets in, it will be huge deal. But yes, not easy.
Anything where you need low latency and high (but not supercomputer-like) performance and/or work offline is still good for desktop. Tho it may also change (even tho, it will most likely be desktop apps streaming, like we can see with games already).
I'd love to go to that event as a time-traveller. To just sit in the back and watch, preferably with popcorn.
Look at those weird old dudes partying 🎉
Yes, you never had to worry about how things got displayed on different screen size too.
I remember the first Touch Screen application I wrote.
It had to run on this old school CRT display, super high tech at the time.
It was strange to make the buttons so big that you could touch them with your fingers!! [weirdness]
Different screen sizes... ughh!
I know right. Let's start a movement.
Every should use the same screen!
:D
But much harder to fix bugs. You can't ship an update when your software is shrinkwrapped and sitting on a shelf at Circuit City.
Absolutely true... There was no dev ops thing on those days 😁
Early days of Apple. It'd be pretty cool to be a part of the rise of personal computers and to see all the people doubting Steve Jobs' vision knowing what the company is going to turn into down the line because of him.
I think being a fly on the wall while Woz was doing his best work would be something special.
I got a copy of the apple I schematics signed by wiz for my office. I’m pretty excited to get it up on the wall.
That was my first computer, woohoo!
I was six (no, six and a half) at the time!
I see.. You want to go back in time and buy Apple shares. 😁
Well yeah, of course.
Can we carry our current knowledge of history back in time with us?
If so, then I would go back to 1998/99'ish, just before the dot-com craze: Invest every penny I have, accumulate great wealth, pull my money out before the industry crashes in 2000, and then retire young! :)
I'd have taken the position AOL offered rather than the one SGI offered (January of 1997 was a busy month). The employee stock options AOL was offering turned out to be worth so much more than either the salary-differential or "day to day job-interest" were.
It depends on the individual but the next. The very next era.
It's going to be the best, most crazy, most fun yet.
Broadband arrival was fun. SEO was fun. Win arrival too.
Stuff older than that was mostly not as cool as it now appears, polished for decades but there was no internet for most people (prior to 2000 ish), 99% didn't know what was going on. Downloading an MP3 was an achievement. Lots of rose colored glasses. It wasn't immersive for almost everyone.
Hold tight @peter & check my last tweet at Ben.
The signallers & fakes are about to experience a washout.
I strongly suggest you all start doing some provable, public good. Nobody wants a tarnished resume next. Talking about safe spaces & being great while this goes on around you is a bad look (or on wrong side).
How many lawyers read this?
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-72277...
Notice the named people in the title. This is a hint.
So 30m devs should learn how to be a better human, but avoid any serious problems in tech, is that a joke or gaslight?
If you think I came for the dev chat, badges or likes, you are not paying attention.
I only write stuff I can refer to later.
Mid-80's into the 90's.
I'd love to have been a part of that era.
I envision a lot of "problems" were solved by using hardware/physical solutions or calculations that implicitly relied on these fundamentals.
It'd be cool to be part of the movement of trying to figure out what we could do with computers.
You haven't had real fun until you've waited several days for your system's OS to re-compile (for a new driver), only to boot up the freshly-built kernel and have the hardware flip you the bird because something wasn't quite right in that newly-compiled kernel.
:) I remember when I took the family desktop computer over to my friends house for a Windows OS upgrade. While we waited we played starcraft and we played many a games until it was done.
I can only imagine the frustration and elation of waiting multiple days for a recompile and it failing but then ultimately succeeding.
I would suppose in the early days of computer there were many victories like this and high fives all around.
While a lot of the earlier problems with respect to hardware and computing are now not a common concern, I feel a sense of nostalgia and a want of appreciation through experiencing the "fun".
I was born in the 80's and my family did not have resources to get a computer until the late 90's (which was used for our writing assignments in school) and I at times play this exact "what if" scenario of either being born earlier, or time traveling back with the resources I have now to just explore the computing world.
:)
I watched my grandmother work remotely in the early 80s. That wasn't thrilling. I watched my mom deploy images of windows back when it was still called ghosting. That was kinda cool to hear about.
I had a tiny computer as a kid and my friend had compuserve. Those were fun and safe.
Right now seems infinitely more exciting than all of that though.
I really believe we're treading through the digital marketing wild west right now.
It was only called "Ghosting" if you were using Symantec's "Ghost" utility to push your OS images out. There were several other options that people used. That was early days in Windows build-automation. UNIX systems had had a number of options for automated OS-deployments for a couple decades prior to that.
During that era, UNIX systems also had serial console access so you could be in a different timezone from the host you were imaging. Whereas you had to pay $400-$700 to add a third-party remote-console solution if you were stuck managing Windows servers (though, eventually HP/Compaq and Dell started offering RIBs and DRAC, respectively, on their server-systems). Was always so glad to be a Unix SA whenever a system needed to be provisioned or went belly up. Never had to huck down to a datacenter just "get on console" like my Windows Ops peers did.
I think Windows' servers started to be competitive since the releases of 2003.
They started to use automated tools to analyze the code and find antipatterns that use to trigger security flaws.
I guess they focused first in office and other apps, the most visible part the desktop, and the reason why people bought computers.
Thank you! I really wish I had paid closer attention when my mom was telling me things like that
Early 90s PC video game scene. A lot of new and exciting things happened there. One example is the story of id software as documented in Masters of Doom. But there were also the likes of Lucas Arts, Origin, Bullfrog, etc.
I remember how incredible it was when doom first came out while I was in college. It seriously dented my GPA.
The late 70s early 80s, the 'hobbyist' era, the birth of the personal computer (Apple, PC and a host of others) and its surrounding nascent software "industry", the early internet scene (Whole Earth 'lectronic link anyone?), the innovations coming out of XEROX PARC (ethernet, the mouse, windowed OS, etc.), BYTE magazine, the 1st golden age of gaming consoles, etc.
So much stuff happening back then.
Was there. It wasn't great. Token ring? AUI intefaces? Thick-net and vampire taps? Having to dick with gateway systems and encapsulation snafus because some systems spoke TCP, some spoke SNA, others spoke yet more protocols? Having to deal with SLIP connections? I would never go back to that. Ugh.
Only good part about that time was if you were a prankster. Security was pretty much non-existent.