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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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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Sloan the DEV Moderator -
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Michael Tharrington -
Latest comments (85)
1995 - 2002 was the good old time, everything was new and challenging. Also less spam and my favorite IRC lol :) I met ton of interesting people back then that would have been impossible to meet today. I started my journey as a video game publisher and later around 2000 did start one of the first mobile pocketpc / palmOS game publisher, those were exciting times!
Personally it has to be the 2160s when they invented time travel. Classic
My first experiences with computers was with the Apple ][+ so I almost got in on the ground floor. Still, I would have loved to have been in the Homebrew Computer Club back in the day when Woz introduced the Apple I.
Hackers by Steven Levy was an important book that I read as a kid, several times. Because I could relate.
I actually worked that night out our California datacenter. Had arrived a few days early as part of a trip to use the first weeks of January to train staff on (OS-level) clustering technology. Knowing the $1000 was "in the mail" made it a fun trip.
This one, technology is always getting better. The best time to be alive is objectively the present.
In the Svelte era :D
I'd love to go back to the computing of the 40s and 50s. As a female developer (and a young one at that), I would love to see the humble beginnings of the industry I love so much. It's the sort of thing you can only learn about through museums and pictures these days. Unlike how I came upon my first Atari, it's not the sort of tech you can pull out from under your dad's bed.
Plus, it was completely pivotal in the development of the computing industry. Not to mention the women that programmed them have all but been forgotten about. Jean Jennings Bartik; Grace Hopper. Feminist icons. I'd love to meet them all and just revel in their genius. Systems like ENIAC paved the way for modern coders and to see it face-to-face would personally make me feel the same way I did seeing the giant dinosaur skeleton in the foyer of the Natural History Museum.
The lover-of-space in me would have loved to have been a part of NASA's first space exploration missions. The maths, physics involved is insane.
Btw, NASA is on Github 👀
I think the most exciting time was the early 1990s. I wish I took part in it, or at least was more a part of it, and had learned more things sooner.
This was when the Internet was a thing and the Web wasn't. When spam and advertising were virtually synonymous. Usenet was the most interesting thing online (although Archie and IRC and some other things were also interesting). Usenet had a holographic quality to it, in that there was a copy of it in thousands of /usr/spool/news directories. That made it very hard to fake message traffic and impossible to erase it. Add to that the fact that there was no entity that could be identified as the owner of Usenet itself, and you have something the world had never before seen. I had seen talk radio, amateur radio, even BBS systems, but Usenet had multi-continent reach, effectively zero censorship, effectively zero advertising, ran on free software. It was obviously government subsidized, the Internet itself having been a DARPA project, and the bulk of Usenet traffic coming from .edu domains, so I had grave doubts about the magic of the Internet being able to survive privatization. In hindsight, I can only say my doubts were not nearly grave enough.
Probably the now era since it's the least racist time for the industry. But it's still pretty racist. PoC can't mess with time machines.
Also I'm fascinated by the idea of working with quantum computers so now is pretty good.
I would say that every time was fascinating if you were on the edge. And therefore I think that today is most fascinating as the progress is on always going forward.
It is easier and cheaper to develop ideas to products than ever before, there is bigger user pool for any kind of software or computer system than ever before, and things that were few years ago thought impossible are now possible.
And that thanks to all the previous generations of engineers and developers that were fascinated by what the can do and how they can improve the tools they had back then and become what we have now.
So I think for me the most fascinating is to be part of continuous effort to improve things for future generations (of others and ourselves).
I'm reading mythical man month right now and I think the 70s would be super cool. Lots of interesting stuff happened with systems engineering. It would be great to work at DEC or IBM figuring out how to make good software.
The dotcom crash area to invest and work in Google before it became big.
I've lived through all of the personal computer eras. They each had their moments. But I would have loved to be there back in the punch-card, mainframe days when man was launching themselves to the moon on "computers" barely as powerful as a simple calculator.
Regarding Y2K, I made serious money during that period of time. We were contracting 80 hours a week (I was paid hourly) for a hospital system, getting mileage for driving 2 hours each way per day and getting per deim for meals (which I banked because I rarely ate out). My boss even bought me a new car (stick-shift Honda CRV). I was in my 20's, so working that kind of hours wasn't a big deal.
I didn't think the world was going to end because of Y2K, but hospitals had a liability concern and had no other choice than to address the potential issue. So I don't feel bad about the money I made off of them during those couple of years.
Definitely when they built the Antikythera.