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 HimangoThere was this new computer on the horizon: The IBM PC XT. Imagine my delight when I discovered it just flew along at a mind-boggling 4.7 megahertz. And that 8-megabyte hard drive! Why, we'd never need anything bigger than that, right?
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You're right. I'm actually pretty lucky I didn't make it so big. One of my earlier associates was George Tate, one of the founders of Ashton-Tate of dBase fame. George died at 40, in 1983 obviously due to complications from a lifestyle of excess. The last time I talked to him in 1982, he had just returned from a vacation in the Carribean and was boasting about how little sleep he got and how fun all the partying was.
Yep. There's a blessing in every curse. :)
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 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 HimangoFor me it was Advanced Revelation (Arev for short) around 1990 or so. We trained night and day and on weekends for a month because the consulting company I worked for at the time was convinced it was going to supplant dBase, FoxPro and even SQL Server 6.5. None of us ever worked on a single billable project with it.
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My first programming course used punch cards for Fortran. Using terminals was big new stuff. Using a modem at 110 baud to work from home was amazing. A DECwriter going 1200 buad was just unbelievably fast. Java was coffee. Real languages were PL/C derivatives... ;P
A Decwriter was shear heaven -- a lot of people had to use the unbelievably horrible teletype.
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My first job was working on a machine called the GEC 2050[^]. This was an 8 bit minicomputer with up to a massive 64K of memory! The memory was magnetic core - made, if memory serves, by little old spanish ladies. The logic was TTL, and the peripherals were a hard drive, a teletype, a barrel line printer and a paper tape reader/punch. It was about the size of a refrigerator. So for me the next big things were: * Solid state memory (still only 64K though) * VDUs (those green screen CRT things with a keyboard) * VLSI (chips with more than just a few logic gates on them) * Multi-user operating systems
My first computer (an Imsai) had a whopping 4K! I had to wait and save another $400 so I could get another 4K and use Bill Gates 8K Basic. Try progamming where every character matters. You only use one or two character variable names and can't afford to document your source code!
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For me it was Advanced Revelation (Arev for short) around 1990 or so. We trained night and day and on weekends for a month because the consulting company I worked for at the time was convinced it was going to supplant dBase, FoxPro and even SQL Server 6.5. None of us ever worked on a single billable project with it.
In the mid to late 80's and early 90's a lot of people made a lot of money consulting with dBase and Lotus 1-2-3. Knowing Wordstar and especially WordPerfect was icing on the cake!
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My first computer (an Imsai) had a whopping 4K! I had to wait and save another $400 so I could get another 4K and use Bill Gates 8K Basic. Try progamming where every character matters. You only use one or two character variable names and can't afford to document your source code!
Eee 4k! We used to dream o' 'aving 4k! There were twenty four o' us living in shoebox in middle o' road...
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Eee 4k! We used to dream o' 'aving 4k! There were twenty four o' us living in shoebox in middle o' road...
You got a shoebox? How lucky is that? We got a potato sack!
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Hexadecimal. Seriously. :)
Boy! You ARE old! (lol?)
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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.
> Colour was the next big thing when I started programming although a lot of people couldn't really see the point in it I remember that was the big deal about the Apple II. It was the first relatively affordable personal system that had built-in color. Remember, games back then were text-only, like "Adventure". Why would you need color for a computer game? Also, remember that the first Macintosh was black-and-white. Steve Jobs was known for once saying, "There will never be a color Macintosh".
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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 wrote my first program in 1973 (as a kid mind you). I used an IBM 1500 system with light pens and TV-like CRT screens that could only render characters. The radical idea here is that you could have your program run immediately after it was input, and you could interact with it in real time. I loved to write games. I recall very smart people wishing for screens that would be graphic rather than alphanumeric - but memory at the time was very expensive and such a system would not be economical. This was almost heresy at the time. Most "serious programmers" only used Hollerith Cards run on batch. Your output from the compile / run cycle would be printout onto a large sheet of paper. You could pick it up after about 10 minutes, and fix any errors by retyping the offending cards and inserting them back into the deck. Yuck! Slow! By about 1980, most "serious programmers" had moved to screens and keyboards. I was then exposed to a Xerox Sun (the forerunner of the Mac). All of us knew that this was the future. The mouse and graphic-based screens were a no-brainer for anybody that did scientific programming. Unfortunately, the marketing people did not see it that way, so we had to wait until the Macintosh in 1984. By that time I was entering the workforce and most companies still used green screens attached to mainframes. It was not until 1989 was I able to convince the company I was working with to use Windows 2.11 instead of the mainframe. This was considered dangerously radical - but I managed to keep it under the corporate radar until it was done. It was a huge success that spawned a lot of copy cats. Since that time, I have seen little real change. The capabilities and refinements of personal computers has increased perhaps a million-fold since then, but the basic principles have not really changed since the early 1980's with the Xerox Sun. Unfortunately, software is so bloated today that most of the hardware improvements have been largely negated. The start-up times are still agonizingly slow. Like the Lewis Carroll's red queen, we're an industry that spends a lot of energy going nowhere. Just my two cents worth.
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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 HimangoRISC, Concurrent Euclid, VAX/VMS (which I used for fourteen years[^] :cool:) /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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You got a shoebox? How lucky is that? We got a potato sack!
A whole sack!? :omg: /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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I wrote my first program in 1973 (as a kid mind you). I used an IBM 1500 system with light pens and TV-like CRT screens that could only render characters. The radical idea here is that you could have your program run immediately after it was input, and you could interact with it in real time. I loved to write games. I recall very smart people wishing for screens that would be graphic rather than alphanumeric - but memory at the time was very expensive and such a system would not be economical. This was almost heresy at the time. Most "serious programmers" only used Hollerith Cards run on batch. Your output from the compile / run cycle would be printout onto a large sheet of paper. You could pick it up after about 10 minutes, and fix any errors by retyping the offending cards and inserting them back into the deck. Yuck! Slow! By about 1980, most "serious programmers" had moved to screens and keyboards. I was then exposed to a Xerox Sun (the forerunner of the Mac). All of us knew that this was the future. The mouse and graphic-based screens were a no-brainer for anybody that did scientific programming. Unfortunately, the marketing people did not see it that way, so we had to wait until the Macintosh in 1984. By that time I was entering the workforce and most companies still used green screens attached to mainframes. It was not until 1989 was I able to convince the company I was working with to use Windows 2.11 instead of the mainframe. This was considered dangerously radical - but I managed to keep it under the corporate radar until it was done. It was a huge success that spawned a lot of copy cats. Since that time, I have seen little real change. The capabilities and refinements of personal computers has increased perhaps a million-fold since then, but the basic principles have not really changed since the early 1980's with the Xerox Sun. Unfortunately, software is so bloated today that most of the hardware improvements have been largely negated. The start-up times are still agonizingly slow. Like the Lewis Carroll's red queen, we're an industry that spends a lot of energy going nowhere. Just my two cents worth.
Back in those days, one program could easily weigh 20-30 pounds! (not including job control)
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Back in those days, one program could easily weigh 20-30 pounds! (not including job control)
Also, heaven help anyone that dropped that box!
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Back in those days, one program could easily weigh 20-30 pounds! (not including job control)
I am sure that many pranks were based on dropping fake card decks. I seem to recall that some people would make corrections to their cards with tape. Best yet, old decks also became a ready supply of geek bookmarks when they were no longer needed. I think I still have one in the bottom of a drawer somewhere.
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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 HimangoLet's see... PL/I was the first language I wrote a "Hello world" program in (It was supposed to "replace COBOL") I worked on paper cards for an IBM system 360/75 running OS 360 MFT and HASP 4.0... A 300mb drive was the size of a washing machine, tape was king at a density of 6250bpi (that's bits per inch)... The smallest machine I worked with in College came built into it's own desk, had 16k bytes of Plessy Microsystems ferrite core memory and a single 18" platter 5mb disk. That was when DOS 1.0 was still in Bill Gates' dreams... The first PC language I learned was Intel Assembler for the 8088...
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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 like this question ... There's a song, "Everything Old is New Again". If you can find an MP3 snaffle it. * [] 'When' I started - Networked operating systems (like what evolved to AmigaDOS, CTOS, SNA 6.2) and died with the internet. Networked data models (like what relational systems killed off) and O/R ORM-s and Object Graphs reinvent. Hand-held devices like my HP calculator, small computers. Useful languages like Algol-68, Simula, Smalltalk, awk, SNOBOL -- May be 4GL ideas that made solutions tractable -- BUT still employers want you to code in (um) 2nd level assembler languages. I 'get' it. Language technology only ads 3% to our development productivity (depending on 'how' its measured).
* I'll debate that because 4GL-s also add value to the business analysis (that gives you 60% of project performance -- Anyway you measure it).
The biggest "next big thing" was that management would learn something about software development (because at that time, there were no developer managers, just people wanting a H-RESULT :laugh:). ... I'm older now. I've worked my way through 2 masters degrees on technology and management so I might be wiser (grunt:suss:). The intractable software development problem is NOT technical or technology. If I can comment; an architecture professional told me the 'same' profile of the same story for builders. In contrast chemical engineers 'prescribe' below 10% +/- deviation on projects. If your project exceeds -- It dies. I'm sure everyone knows what happens when the costs on phase I go past 10%? The "next big thing" for me? They all failed to deliver the promise. If I find smart people, we can fulfil that promise (from 40 years ago). When Apple was new. DEC was new. HP was old, IBM was old. 3M was old then. There was NO 'Microsoft', 'Google', 'Yahoo', 'no PC-s'. W
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Upgrading from 16k to 48k Colour Monitors I heard talk of a strange devie called a mouse, but it seemed so far away. Affordable hard drives instead of twin 8" Floppies. 5 1/4" Floppies.
------------------------------------ I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave
I wrote my first program in BASIC on an IBM PCjr running DOS 2.10. Being a kid at the time I didn't have any concept of the next big thing, although I remember having to load disk after disk into the 5 1/4" drive when playing King's Quest. When I wrote my first program commercially my co-workers were desperate to get off Visual InterDev and into this new .NET thing.
Mike Devenney