What was the "Next Big Thing" when you started programming?

[TheIdleProgrammer]

Great 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'.

[Lost User]

7 layer communication protocols, now .net has changed to wcf

[stephen hazel]

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 :)

[Nagy Vilmos]

You bad! I remember those at school.

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Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. or "Drink. Get drunk. Fall over." - P O'H

[Nagy Vilmos]

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.

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Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. or "Drink. Get drunk. Fall over." - P O'H

[realJSOP]

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, 2001

[Shog9 0]

I've no idea, didn't know at the time, and didn't care either. Was completely enamored with this ancient BASIC interpreter I'd happened upon. I do remember one of my younger brothers getting all excited about Java a few years later.

[Nagy Vilmos]

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.

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Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. or "Drink. Get drunk. Fall over." - P O'H

[PIEBALDconsult]

I 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.

[Russell Jones]

Colour 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.

[Gary Kirkham]

I 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

[Gregory Gadow]

They 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.

[Brady Kelly]

ASP, COM, DCOM

[peterchen]

When I started, we had them. Had to walk two miles uphill both ways in snow to fetch them, though.

Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | µLaunch - program launcher for server core and hyper-v server.

[Nagy Vilmos]

I thought you'd come up with this or transistors replacing valves.

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Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. or "Drink. Get drunk. Fall over." - P O'H

[Dan Neely]

The 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

[Flynn Arrowstarr Regular Schmoe]

Hmm, let's see, from my community college days in 1998-1999...

• The lab was just updating from Windows 95 to Windows 98 SE.
• Transitioning from Visual Basic 4 to Visual Basic 5 and having to leave 16-bit behind, which was hard on me since my only computer -- a 386-SX 20 mHz laptop -- only ran Windows 3.11.
• Java was a big thing, only they taught us Visual J++ instead of using Sun's compiler. Fortunately, it was Visual J++ 1.1 instead of VJ++ 6.0.
• C/C++ and Pascal were taught with the DOS versions of Turbo C++ 3.0 and Turbo Pascal 5.0 respectively. Delphi 4 was used for the Advanced SQL class (I was able to get by with Delphi 1).
• No mainframe access, so JCL was a Word document and a prayer. Couple that with an instructor that didn't hand back graded homework until just before mid-term and the class was a nightmare. I aced it, heh. :-\
• Cobol was done on a Unix terminal using Vi for editing. I ended up using Fujitsu Cobol for Windows 3.11 and an option that let me print to a window rather than paper. Had to play around with the settings for my printer to emulate the wide carrage impact printer, but I also aced that class (same instructor as JCL).
• Office class used Office 97. Most of the same things worked in Office 4.2 Professional.
• HTML class used Front Page 97. FP 98 was brand new, but the course materials hadn't been updated yet. BTW -- we did learn plain HTML, not just the FP editor.

My laptop at the time was a GRiD 386 SX 20 mHz with a greyscale VGA screen, an 80 MB hard drive and a whopping 6 MB of RAM. I had an LS-120 Super Drive (120 MB floppies) which served as an external hard drive since it was half-again the size of the internal hard drive.  I had DOS 6.22 installed with Stacker 4.0 and QEMM 8.0 to extend the base RAM in DOS to 603k free. The hard drive was packed with the essentials -- Windows 3.11, Acrobat Reader, WinZip, Turbo C++/Turbo Pascal, IE 4 (16-bit), etc. One LS-120 disk had VB 4 (16-bit), Access 2.0, Word 6.0 and Delphi 1. Another had Fujitsu Cobol and a few other programming utilities. Sometimes I miss that computer, heh. :-\ Flynn

[Gary Wheeler]

I've still got mine. I wonder what it would look like on the wide-screen TV? :rolleyes:

Software Zen: delete this;

[Oakman]

Judah Himango wrote:

I can claim to still owning the whole set of Windows 95 installation 3 1/2 floppies.

I've still got the 31/2 install floppies for DOS 2.1 and my TI99-4A complete with extended BASIC cartridge.

Jon "I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I'm an optimist. We will reach out to the stars." ~ Stephen Hawking, Soap Box 1.0: the first, the original, reborn troll-less

[Flynn Arrowstarr Regular Schmoe]

The C=64 was my first computer as well. Didn't do a lot of programming with it (some BASIC do-dads and stuff entered from Compute's Gazette), but I loved it for games. It was a huge step up from my Atari 2600, heh. I also got in to playing music on it. My second computer was a C=128. By this time, I had the max four disk drives -- 2 1541 5-1/4" drives and 2 1581 3-1/2" drives -- chained together. Made running GEOS so much easier. I had the C=1702 monitor by then instead of a TV (in fact, I used it as a TV by using a VCR as the tuner). Shortly after getting out of high school, I sold the system and software (kept the monitor -- still have it) and bought an Amiga 500. Sadly, that was the last Commodore computer I owned. I still wish I had it. *sigh* Flynn