What was the "Next Big Thing" when you started programming?
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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 -
upgrading from cassette tape to SSSD 51/4 floppies.
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
Oakman wrote:
upgrading from cassette tape to SSSD 51/4 floppies. Jon
Yea! Same here Jon. When I heard I wouldn't need cassette tapes anymore, I was "Wha? No way!". :thumbsup:
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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 Himango4GL's
==================================== Transvestites - Roberts in Disguise! ====================================
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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 HimangoHexadecimal. Seriously. :)
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We must be from the same vintage :-) What about Turbo Pascal from a guy named Frank Borland? Ahh, good times... Martin.
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Artificial Intelligence was always a hot topic, but always failed to impressed.
Watched code never compiles.
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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 HimangoJudah Himango wrote:
Inspired by this SO thread, What was "the next big thing" when you guys started programming?
Going from Basic to Pascal to C, on an 8 bit Tandy Color Computer circa 1983. Come to think of it, I'm still going from Basic to Pascal to C. Same system. Today. :wtf: At work I use something called Windows, Visual Studio something. Still waiting for the Next Big Thing. :-\ -- Rogelio
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We must be from the same vintage :-) What about Turbo Pascal from a guy named Frank Borland? Ahh, good times... Martin.
Frank Borland was a fictional person used in documentation. Will the real Frank Borland please stand up.[^] Anders Hejlsberg wrote Turbo Pascal. He was the lead architect for Delphi and C#. When I started programming the next big thing in my circle was the Intel 8080, the Motorola 6800, Vax PDP 11, ...
Cheers, Mike Fidler
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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)Ian Shlasko wrote:
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).
Remember when they first came out with the EGA monitors? I was at Quadram then. Man, did those things look SMOOTH after looking at a CGA for so long! My first one was a Princeton Graphics monitor. I thought it could never get better! -Max :D
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CGA[^] :) Of course, I was quite young at the time, so didn't know much about the state of technology, aside from BASIC on my old Atari 800XL.
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 Himango -
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, but didn't realize what I was doing was programming. I was 13-14 and I was trying to organize my games, so I could access them easily. That's when I found out about MS-DOS .bat files. I read a lot of the help command in DOS and built my first program: A games menu, with password (so my lil brothers would need my permission to play) built in a batch file. By that time I dind't realize where I would land, so my expectations were how could I build a cooler games menu, with more features like the dos .EXEs. My dream was to be able to make a .exe program. But by the time I was 15 to 16 years old I discovered by accident a "program tha makes programs", aka Visual Basic 5. That's when I realized what I wanted to do for fun and for living. At that point the next big thing to me would be game programming. A little later I figured I'd had to learn C/C++ to enter the gaming industry and my dream job was to work at Blizzard. I was a huge fan of their games, specially Warcraft II. It's still some sort of a dream, but it's not exactly easy to emmigrate from Brazil to US and get a job at Blizzard, maybe someday. I ended up learning a bit C/C++ but never really worked with it. So I didn't end up doing what I considered to myself the next big thing I would do. By then I didn't know what really was the next big thing on software industry, I just wanted to program. Now I work with C# in manufacturing industry. What is the next big thing now?
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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 HimangoFor me it was the awesome 16-bit Texas Instruments 99/4a. 16-bit was the NEW technology then. :omg: I saved up tons of money to get one and started creating video games that had to be saved on cassette tape! Later they came out with a large floppy disk drive that I drooled over but never got because it was just way too much money (about $400). That was two weeks pay back then. Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
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We must be from the same vintage :-) What about Turbo Pascal from a guy named Frank Borland? Ahh, good times... Martin.
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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 Himango1. Baby steps for protected memory segments for Windows. This probably flushed out thousands of bugs from Windows 2.1 to Windows 3.0. 2. HP NewWave was the big thing. Way ahead of its time. AT&T and NCR were both reselling NewWave to large corporate clients. It supported Object Linking and Embedding type of concepts running ontop of Windows 2.x platforms & higher. You could cross script all applications via the Agent language (think AppleScript). It had a standard platform installer package similar to what MS did not deliver until late 1990's early 2000's. The file system was completely irrelevant to the GUI layer. If you did actually look at the file system, it was all GUIDs. It is barely a blip in the records now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_NewWave[^]
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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 back in the 6th grade, having this cardboard instructional "computer". You used a pencil to write in pseudo codes and data into its 20-odd bytes of memory. Then you had this paper movable widget that acted as the IP (instruction pointer for the youngsters) that you moved through the code, and you would write the results of the instructions into a register or accumulator. It was actually quite interesting in giving a taste of what computer programming was about. As far the "next big thing", I remember a hobbyist kit for a MITS (?) computer that I drooled over in the electronics magazines back then. First computer was a TRS-80, sans expansion box, with only 4K RAM. Quickly modded that to 48k, and added the lower case mod as well (by design they only had upper case, which made word processing a real challenge). As far as the next big thing in programming at that time, it would have been Tiny Pascal - got a copy of the source code from some computer mag, might have been an early edition of Dr Dobbs back when they were in print. I got it mostly working, but the print quality was really bad (newsprint) and I was never sure if I had typed it all in correctly. I can remember when I got an assembler, after outgrowing the built-in Basic - quite the speed improvement. And incredible the number of ways you can crash a machine. Then I can recall hearing these rumours that IBM was going to put out some sort of personal computer...
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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 HimangoAda, the new DOD language and the programming methodology it implemented, OOD, was going to revolutionize defense software development. The rest of the world was starting to realize that C might be worth using. Years later, I taught introductory C/C++ to a group of COBOL programmers from a local bank. They took to it alright, had a little trouble with pointers but caught on quickly. But what really struck me was that they were as arrogant about their COBOL as any programmer is about "their" language. "Oh, you use C? I always thought Real Programmers use COBOL." I was honestly surprised.
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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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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.
OS2 really did kill DOS .... kinda sorta. OS2 was initially a joint venture between IBM and Microsoft. Late in the game, the Microsoft devs disappeared and before you know it NT hit the market (amazing like OS2 with some improvements). And the rest is history.
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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