What was the "Next Big Thing" when you started programming?
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He had pebbles and dirt? The lucky, lucky, lucky b'stard. What i wouldn't have given to have pebbles and dirt!
We used to look up to people who had pebbles. They were posh.
"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith
As Braveheart once said, "You can take our freedom but you'll never take our Hobnobs!" - Martin Hughes.
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Inspired by this SO thread, What was "the next big thing" when you guys started programming? I remember a couple things in college: -Java was big. Write once, run anywhere...people believed it. -There was some interest in, and lots of articles about, Microsoft's new version of COM+, which they named DotNet. Oh, and some interest in the Java copycat they called C#. -I distinctly remember my college textbooks claiming "natural languages" would be the future of programming. -To prepare me for the future, my college taught us Fortran and C. The closest thing I've come to utilizing either of these is the rare piece of C++ code I have to deal with on contracting gigs.
Religiously blogging on the intarwebs since the early 21st century: Kineti L'Tziyon
Judah HimangoGetting a RAM pack for my spectrum! Oh, and hacking free willy programs. After that I left it alone for quite a few years, came back to it in the 90s. Java was geting serious hype back then. COM was also coming on scene. And seems to be going off scene pretty quick. What an absoloute waste of time COM is.
Morality is indistinguishable from social proscription
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Inspired by this SO thread, What was "the next big thing" when you guys started programming? I remember a couple things in college: -Java was big. Write once, run anywhere...people believed it. -There was some interest in, and lots of articles about, Microsoft's new version of COM+, which they named DotNet. Oh, and some interest in the Java copycat they called C#. -I distinctly remember my college textbooks claiming "natural languages" would be the future of programming. -To prepare me for the future, my college taught us Fortran and C. The closest thing I've come to utilizing either of these is the rare piece of C++ code I have to deal with on contracting gigs.
Religiously blogging on the intarwebs since the early 21st century: Kineti L'Tziyon
Judah HimangoCoding your own "Montezuma's Revenge" that was a pretty cool piece of code... My first application was made with Basic :) imagine how powerful I felt when I got to do something with Cobol (remember the turtle??)
I want to die like my grandfather- asleep, not like the passengers in his car, screaming!
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Cool. I've never heard of CGA.
Youngun :) There was CGA, then MCGA, EGA, VGA, SVGA... And you probably know the rest. I remember working with 16 colors, aptly numbered 0 to 15 (After that it looped through the first 16, but flashing).
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of Guardians of Xen (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novel) -
Inspired by this SO thread, What was "the next big thing" when you guys started programming? I remember a couple things in college: -Java was big. Write once, run anywhere...people believed it. -There was some interest in, and lots of articles about, Microsoft's new version of COM+, which they named DotNet. Oh, and some interest in the Java copycat they called C#. -I distinctly remember my college textbooks claiming "natural languages" would be the future of programming. -To prepare me for the future, my college taught us Fortran and C. The closest thing I've come to utilizing either of these is the rare piece of C++ code I have to deal with on contracting gigs.
Religiously blogging on the intarwebs since the early 21st century: Kineti L'Tziyon
Judah HimangoGreat post! I'm a mere pup in this industry, I don't think I've ever witnessed the 'Next Big Thing' so it's interesting to hear what some of the old guard come up with. If I'm honest I guess I consider C++ to be old-fashioned ;P - clearing memory up after yourself is so 'last Tuesday'.
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Inspired by this SO thread, What was "the next big thing" when you guys started programming? I remember a couple things in college: -Java was big. Write once, run anywhere...people believed it. -There was some interest in, and lots of articles about, Microsoft's new version of COM+, which they named DotNet. Oh, and some interest in the Java copycat they called C#. -I distinctly remember my college textbooks claiming "natural languages" would be the future of programming. -To prepare me for the future, my college taught us Fortran and C. The closest thing I've come to utilizing either of these is the rare piece of C++ code I have to deal with on contracting gigs.
Religiously blogging on the intarwebs since the early 21st century: Kineti L'Tziyon
Judah Himango -
The 16Kb RAM expansion pack for the ZX81 :D
and don't forget their awesome tape drives... never knew for SURE if that program was gonna load back in. and heaven help you if you bumped that ram pack - bzzt - reboot. It taught me Z80, though. (and i never used it again) then c64=>amiga(msdos@school)=>macClassic(big step back)=>win95,me(rats),xp Almost time for 7 :)
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The 16Kb RAM expansion pack for the ZX81 :D
You bad! I remember those at school.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. or "Drink. Get drunk. Fall over." - P O'H
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Inspired by this SO thread, What was "the next big thing" when you guys started programming? I remember a couple things in college: -Java was big. Write once, run anywhere...people believed it. -There was some interest in, and lots of articles about, Microsoft's new version of COM+, which they named DotNet. Oh, and some interest in the Java copycat they called C#. -I distinctly remember my college textbooks claiming "natural languages" would be the future of programming. -To prepare me for the future, my college taught us Fortran and C. The closest thing I've come to utilizing either of these is the rare piece of C++ code I have to deal with on contracting gigs.
Religiously blogging on the intarwebs since the early 21st century: Kineti L'Tziyon
Judah HimangoPunch cards was just a rumor when I started programming...
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001 -
Getting a RAM pack for my spectrum! Oh, and hacking free willy programs. After that I left it alone for quite a few years, came back to it in the 90s. Java was geting serious hype back then. COM was also coming on scene. And seems to be going off scene pretty quick. What an absoloute waste of time COM is.
Morality is indistinguishable from social proscription
fat_boy wrote:
hacking free willy programs
I've got a blitz basic port of Manic Miner and I have just, like in the last couple of days, started looking at re-writing it using a different platform - maybe even J2ME to run on my phone.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. or "Drink. Get drunk. Fall over." - P O'H
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Inspired by this SO thread, What was "the next big thing" when you guys started programming? I remember a couple things in college: -Java was big. Write once, run anywhere...people believed it. -There was some interest in, and lots of articles about, Microsoft's new version of COM+, which they named DotNet. Oh, and some interest in the Java copycat they called C#. -I distinctly remember my college textbooks claiming "natural languages" would be the future of programming. -To prepare me for the future, my college taught us Fortran and C. The closest thing I've come to utilizing either of these is the rare piece of C++ code I have to deal with on contracting gigs.
Religiously blogging on the intarwebs since the early 21st century: Kineti L'Tziyon
Judah Himango -
We used to look up to people who had pebbles. They were posh.
"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith
As Braveheart once said, "You can take our freedom but you'll never take our Hobnobs!" - Martin Hughes.
We'll we called them pebbles, but they were really just little grains of sand. But they were pubbles to us! We was reet proud in those days.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. or "Drink. Get drunk. Fall over." - P O'H
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Inspired by this SO thread, What was "the next big thing" when you guys started programming? I remember a couple things in college: -Java was big. Write once, run anywhere...people believed it. -There was some interest in, and lots of articles about, Microsoft's new version of COM+, which they named DotNet. Oh, and some interest in the Java copycat they called C#. -I distinctly remember my college textbooks claiming "natural languages" would be the future of programming. -To prepare me for the future, my college taught us Fortran and C. The closest thing I've come to utilizing either of these is the rare piece of C++ code I have to deal with on contracting gigs.
Religiously blogging on the intarwebs since the early 21st century: Kineti L'Tziyon
Judah HimangoI started programming in high school (1983). So the IBM PC was out, but no one I knew had one. Therefore I wasn't aware of any buzz about "the next big thing" -- I'm sure that people working in the industry knew what was going on, and may have been buzzed about the advent of the Macintosh X|. In high school and my first college we used DEC systems (PDP and VAX) so, again, not much buzz about "the next big thing" -- maybe the biggest was getting Whitesmith's C on the VAX, but the teachers didn't know how to compile it! X| My second college had VAXen and 386s, and there was significant buzz -- about OS2! Ooh, you shoulda heard the idiots going on about how great OS2 was gonna be and how it was gonna kill DOS! :rolleyes: Turbo Pascal v5.0 and Turbo C++ v1.0 were released while I was in college; I jumped right on them. Another important "next big thing" for me in those days was the Alpha chip (1992). After that, really only C# qualifies, I got real excited when I read the first spec (1999), and was disappointed to learn that Microsoft wouldn't release a compiler until "the next version of Visual Studio"! X| (2002! :wtf: ) Generally, the bigger the hype, the bigger the flop -- don't pay attention to hype, don't be an early adopter.
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Inspired by this SO thread, What was "the next big thing" when you guys started programming? I remember a couple things in college: -Java was big. Write once, run anywhere...people believed it. -There was some interest in, and lots of articles about, Microsoft's new version of COM+, which they named DotNet. Oh, and some interest in the Java copycat they called C#. -I distinctly remember my college textbooks claiming "natural languages" would be the future of programming. -To prepare me for the future, my college taught us Fortran and C. The closest thing I've come to utilizing either of these is the rare piece of C++ code I have to deal with on contracting gigs.
Religiously blogging on the intarwebs since the early 21st century: Kineti L'Tziyon
Judah HimangoColour was the next big thing when I started programming although a lot of people couldn't really see the point in it :~ When I started programming commercially we were really into COM+, it was the answer to everything, apparently (it wasn't so much like .net as like remoting). What it really did for us was to add another point of failure and an extra layer of network bottleneck between the clients and so created applications that were much harder to debug than the Client Server they replaced. We also had Thin clients when NT4 Terminal Services edition came out, soon to be replaced by rich clients when .Net took over. There was XML, nothing makes an application run so badly as something that takes some data from a database creates an enormous xml document transforms that document repeatedly into other documents and then spouts out some xhtml at the end (but hey we only need 2 stored procs now) There's OOP for websites where we used to create massive hierarchies of objects so we could make one method call and then dispose of the objects only to create them again when the user clicked submit.
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Inspired by this SO thread, What was "the next big thing" when you guys started programming? I remember a couple things in college: -Java was big. Write once, run anywhere...people believed it. -There was some interest in, and lots of articles about, Microsoft's new version of COM+, which they named DotNet. Oh, and some interest in the Java copycat they called C#. -I distinctly remember my college textbooks claiming "natural languages" would be the future of programming. -To prepare me for the future, my college taught us Fortran and C. The closest thing I've come to utilizing either of these is the rare piece of C++ code I have to deal with on contracting gigs.
Religiously blogging on the intarwebs since the early 21st century: Kineti L'Tziyon
Judah HimangoI remember when we got our first CRT terminal and didn't have to use punch cards anymore. :jig:
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit It's against my relationship to have a religion. Me blog, You read
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Inspired by this SO thread, What was "the next big thing" when you guys started programming? I remember a couple things in college: -Java was big. Write once, run anywhere...people believed it. -There was some interest in, and lots of articles about, Microsoft's new version of COM+, which they named DotNet. Oh, and some interest in the Java copycat they called C#. -I distinctly remember my college textbooks claiming "natural languages" would be the future of programming. -To prepare me for the future, my college taught us Fortran and C. The closest thing I've come to utilizing either of these is the rare piece of C++ code I have to deal with on contracting gigs.
Religiously blogging on the intarwebs since the early 21st century: Kineti L'Tziyon
Judah HimangoThey were something out of Dick Tracy. The very idea that computers were small enough and affordable enough for home and desk was incredibly futuristic. And, of course, I wanted in. My first computer was a Commodore 64. I loved the thing: the 6510 processor had an versatile and easy to learn assembly code, and its sound chips, built-in sprite graphics capability and RS-232 ports made it an amazing hobby computer. I wrote games, a voice synthesizer and even a programmable robotic arm for that thing. And it plugged into a television set and had full CGA graphics: no boring monochrome for me! I don't think there's been a personal computer with as much potential as the Commodore.
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Inspired by this SO thread, What was "the next big thing" when you guys started programming? I remember a couple things in college: -Java was big. Write once, run anywhere...people believed it. -There was some interest in, and lots of articles about, Microsoft's new version of COM+, which they named DotNet. Oh, and some interest in the Java copycat they called C#. -I distinctly remember my college textbooks claiming "natural languages" would be the future of programming. -To prepare me for the future, my college taught us Fortran and C. The closest thing I've come to utilizing either of these is the rare piece of C++ code I have to deal with on contracting gigs.
Religiously blogging on the intarwebs since the early 21st century: Kineti L'Tziyon
Judah HimangoASP, COM, DCOM
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He had pebbles and dirt? The lucky, lucky, lucky b'stard. What i wouldn't have given to have pebbles and dirt!
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Inspired by this SO thread, What was "the next big thing" when you guys started programming? I remember a couple things in college: -Java was big. Write once, run anywhere...people believed it. -There was some interest in, and lots of articles about, Microsoft's new version of COM+, which they named DotNet. Oh, and some interest in the Java copycat they called C#. -I distinctly remember my college textbooks claiming "natural languages" would be the future of programming. -To prepare me for the future, my college taught us Fortran and C. The closest thing I've come to utilizing either of these is the rare piece of C++ code I have to deal with on contracting gigs.
Religiously blogging on the intarwebs since the early 21st century: Kineti L'Tziyon
Judah HimangoThe internet. Suddenly I had access to more code samples than were provided by the compilers help file. :cool: I just had to 'smuggle' floppies from the school computer lab to home to look at my take since I didn't have a connection at home; for some reason I accomplished very little work for my independent study in the class room and always had a lot of homework. :-\ (Officially we were forbidden to use personal floppies, unofficially as long as we scanned them our teacher trusted her programming students not to be stupid.)
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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Punch cards was just a rumor when I started programming...
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001I thought you'd come up with this or transistors replacing valves.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. or "Drink. Get drunk. Fall over." - P O'H
