Nostalgia in Programming
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Chris Maunder wrote:
What sort of relatively recent stuff (this was 10 years ago) did you used to have to do to get your apps to work?
Let's see. Because the database manager was an idiot, my manager and I had to create a skunk-works project to hide how we were doing things so it didn't take a week per table to write the update, insert, delete, select operations. I kid you not. Rewrote the "Application Coordinator" that this guy had put together taking up most of a year of his time. I rewrote it in a weekend, to the wrath of said developer and the envy of everyone else that had to use said developer's pile of dung. Needless to say, my team ditched this guy's code immediately, and we went on to be a productive, on time and on budget team. Along those lines, getting my team's app to work meant finding the right people, smart people, not dogmatic "design pattern" nincompoops that were running around the hallways touting Java and exclaiming "ooh, did you read about the Visitor Pattern?" On a personal note, getting my C++ apps to work meant realizing that "base class" was the top of the abstraction, not the foundation (and therefore the derived class) in a class hierarchy. I had to remove the "base of the pyramid" image from my understanding of OO. And lastly, solid architecture. And what that meant was, architecture that logged every keystroke, every mouse click, every button press, so I could tell the mostly good, honest, but sloppy people in the QA department, no, you didn't click on "Save", you clicked on "Cancel" to refute their claim that the app failed to save their document. Marc
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I was just daydreaming and thinking about the differences between the HTTP GET and POST verbs (OK, I'm a little tired, OK? The mind wanders) and I suddenly remembered a trick I had to do in the wee early days of the internet when posting article content. We used to have to split the content into small chunks before sending it in the form postback, and then rebuild it on the server end. What sort of relatively recent stuff (this was 10 years ago) did you used to have to do to get your apps to work?
cheers Chris Maunder
Not use local stack space for anything bigger than a pointer or integer (16-bit Windows)
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I was just daydreaming and thinking about the differences between the HTTP GET and POST verbs (OK, I'm a little tired, OK? The mind wanders) and I suddenly remembered a trick I had to do in the wee early days of the internet when posting article content. We used to have to split the content into small chunks before sending it in the form postback, and then rebuild it on the server end. What sort of relatively recent stuff (this was 10 years ago) did you used to have to do to get your apps to work?
cheers Chris Maunder
I have created a really complex and dynamic organizational chart using pure HTML Tables like a Boss! :cool: A giant table with crazy amount of pre-calculated
rowspanandcolspan, with even crazy amount of coding in picking the cell border colors (black or white). so that that whole madness will look like this[^] with really tiny scroll bars. It was in Classic ASP, and the only real alternative (that might not work everywhere) was to create an ActiveX control or Flash control and draw the whole thing. It was a network marketing company (like Amway) where members can see their complete network tree (people they have successfully infected/brainwashed). I am still proud of it. :-DRemind Me This - Manage, Collaborate and Execute your Project in the Cloud
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I experienced everything you mentioned and agree for the most part, but how can you knock Visual Studio ? We can’t stop here, this is bat country - Hunter S Thompson RIP
pkfox wrote:
how can you knock Visual Studio ?
Experience shows that a big shitty stick gives the most satisfaction
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pkfox wrote:
how can you knock Visual Studio ?
Experience shows that a big shitty stick gives the most satisfaction
Yeah. And that's why Eclipse is mostly used for Java, the stick isn't that satisfying when you can't hold it from all the dirt. OT: Didn't knew you are on FarceBook.
I will never again mention that Dalek Dave was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel.
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Yeah. And that's why Eclipse is mostly used for Java, the stick isn't that satisfying when you can't hold it from all the dirt. OT: Didn't knew you are on FarceBook.
I will never again mention that Dalek Dave was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel.
I prefer Netbeans, for some stupid reason. But then all IDE's have gone down hill since forever.
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Gawd! Back in the early days (when I was all embedded, and only had 4K of ROM and 4K of RAM to play with) there were all the tricks: self modifying code, undocumented processor features (that only worked in the pre V3 hardware mask), hand tuned spaghetti assembler, all the kinds of things that I recoil from these days! Nowadays, all I have to do is pour the blood of a virgin sacrifice into the DVD drive and Windows does the rest... Mind you, you wouldn't believe how hard it is find that around here these days!
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
OriginalGriff wrote:
pour the blood of a virgin sacrifice
Way back in the Before Times, children, I worked in the computer center at our local Air Force base. We were having a Cray supercomputer installed in the front of the 2 acre computer room. It's the only time I've seen an installation have gawkers. I observed to the other folks from my office who were with me that we needed to find a virgin operator to sacrifice on it before starting it up for the first time. The joke of course being the notion of a virgin operator, since it was well known that the operators (especially those on the night crew) humped like weasels in out of the way corners of the computer room at every opportunity.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
flip the NEXT switch UP once to advance to the next memory location, enter the instruction using the 8 DATA switches, then flip the WRITE switch once to save it. ;P
Will Rogers never met me.
Been there, did that on a DEC PDP-11/05 at school. The machine stored its 80 word bootstrap in a piece of core memory. Student programs routinely wiped the bootstrap due to an errant addressing mode or somesuch. I had to do it once or twice. One guy became legendary for his ability to enter the bootstrap in under 60 seconds. Of course, that doesn't say much for how he acquired the skill...
Software Zen:
delete this; -
flip the NEXT switch UP once to advance to the next memory location, enter the instruction using the 8 DATA switches, then flip the WRITE switch once to save it. ;P
Will Rogers never met me.
You young folks don't know how lucky you are. Why, when I was your age, a byte only had two bits -- and they were both 1s! Do you have any idea how hard it is to do floating-point arithmetic in Roman numerals? Ah, but the men were men in those days...
(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)
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Chris Maunder wrote:
What sort of relatively recent stuff (this was 10 years ago) did you used to have to do to get your apps to work?
Let's see. Because the database manager was an idiot, my manager and I had to create a skunk-works project to hide how we were doing things so it didn't take a week per table to write the update, insert, delete, select operations. I kid you not. Rewrote the "Application Coordinator" that this guy had put together taking up most of a year of his time. I rewrote it in a weekend, to the wrath of said developer and the envy of everyone else that had to use said developer's pile of dung. Needless to say, my team ditched this guy's code immediately, and we went on to be a productive, on time and on budget team. Along those lines, getting my team's app to work meant finding the right people, smart people, not dogmatic "design pattern" nincompoops that were running around the hallways touting Java and exclaiming "ooh, did you read about the Visitor Pattern?" On a personal note, getting my C++ apps to work meant realizing that "base class" was the top of the abstraction, not the foundation (and therefore the derived class) in a class hierarchy. I had to remove the "base of the pyramid" image from my understanding of OO. And lastly, solid architecture. And what that meant was, architecture that logged every keystroke, every mouse click, every button press, so I could tell the mostly good, honest, but sloppy people in the QA department, no, you didn't click on "Save", you clicked on "Cancel" to refute their claim that the app failed to save their document. Marc
Marc Clifton wrote:
And lastly, solid architecture. And what that meant was, architecture that logged every keystroke, every mouse click, every button press, so I could tell the mostly good, honest, but sloppy people in the QA department, no, you didn't click on "Save", you clicked on "Cancel" to refute their claim that the app failed to save their document.
Ooh, good idea. I was figuring on using the C# version of
UnhandledExceptionFilterHandlerfor ultimate deniability error-catching, and that's a good addition as well. Now I just need to work around C#'s "if anything but the main thread has an unhandled exception, terminate the thread and ignore it" methodology... -
Marc Clifton wrote:
And lastly, solid architecture. And what that meant was, architecture that logged every keystroke, every mouse click, every button press, so I could tell the mostly good, honest, but sloppy people in the QA department, no, you didn't click on "Save", you clicked on "Cancel" to refute their claim that the app failed to save their document.
Ooh, good idea. I was figuring on using the C# version of
UnhandledExceptionFilterHandlerfor ultimate deniability error-catching, and that's a good addition as well. Now I just need to work around C#'s "if anything but the main thread has an unhandled exception, terminate the thread and ignore it" methodology...SortaCore wrote:
if anything but the main thread has an unhandled exception, terminate the thread and ignore it" methodology...
Well, you could put try-catch's in your threads! And there is Application.ThreadException[^] as well. Marc
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I was just daydreaming and thinking about the differences between the HTTP GET and POST verbs (OK, I'm a little tired, OK? The mind wanders) and I suddenly remembered a trick I had to do in the wee early days of the internet when posting article content. We used to have to split the content into small chunks before sending it in the form postback, and then rebuild it on the server end. What sort of relatively recent stuff (this was 10 years ago) did you used to have to do to get your apps to work?
cheers Chris Maunder
First Programmer: Back in the day, we didn't have Windows. A command-line was our only interface to the machine. Second Programmer: Command-line?!? You had a command-line?!? All we had was punch cards to input all of our code. First: Punch cards?!? You had punch cards?!? All we had was paper tape. Second: Paper tape?!? You had paper tape?!? We had to hand toggle switches on the front of the machine and hand assemble all of our code. First: Toggle switches?!? You had toggle switches?!? We had to wire wrap our 0's and 1's directly into the logic of the computer. Second: 1's?!? You had 1's?!? ;-)
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I was just daydreaming and thinking about the differences between the HTTP GET and POST verbs (OK, I'm a little tired, OK? The mind wanders) and I suddenly remembered a trick I had to do in the wee early days of the internet when posting article content. We used to have to split the content into small chunks before sending it in the form postback, and then rebuild it on the server end. What sort of relatively recent stuff (this was 10 years ago) did you used to have to do to get your apps to work?
cheers Chris Maunder
Going back to the 90's I learned to program using a 16bit compiler for DOS which meant I had to deal with memory segmentation and near/far pointers. Needing to use pointers to have more than 64k of data (and when I was working with multiple 64,000 byte screen buffers this was inevitable) forced me to actually learn how to use pointers for things beyond the textbook standard linked list, etc.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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Bet you were glad when they finally invented the wheel so beer trolly didn't spill as much beer. Jeez...
cheers Chris Maunder
If doing that in school counts I've entered code that way (68000 breadboard computer in an electronics class) and I'm 95% sure I'm younger than you are. :doh:
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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First Programmer: Back in the day, we didn't have Windows. A command-line was our only interface to the machine. Second Programmer: Command-line?!? You had a command-line?!? All we had was punch cards to input all of our code. First: Punch cards?!? You had punch cards?!? All we had was paper tape. Second: Paper tape?!? You had paper tape?!? We had to hand toggle switches on the front of the machine and hand assemble all of our code. First: Toggle switches?!? You had toggle switches?!? We had to wire wrap our 0's and 1's directly into the logic of the computer. Second: 1's?!? You had 1's?!? ;-)
Oh, good old days ^
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I remember flipping switches when the machine we used for communications went down. I would get a call from the field and had to walk to the other side of the building and start the boot switching sequence.
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am. JimmyRopesI remember that about 30 years ago, the links to the UK JANet network (Joint Academic Network) used PDP11s as communications servers which needed half a dozen instructions toggled into the front panel to boot the main program. I used to be able to do it from memory! BOOM! BOOM! :-D
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I was just daydreaming and thinking about the differences between the HTTP GET and POST verbs (OK, I'm a little tired, OK? The mind wanders) and I suddenly remembered a trick I had to do in the wee early days of the internet when posting article content. We used to have to split the content into small chunks before sending it in the form postback, and then rebuild it on the server end. What sort of relatively recent stuff (this was 10 years ago) did you used to have to do to get your apps to work?
cheers Chris Maunder
Long time ago...... programming a PDP 11/45 via the front console. Load an address and insert the octal instruction 014747. Then start running from the address you loaded the instruction (single stepping the execution is more fun!) The "program", a single instruction, will cause the computer to run "backwards" and fill memory backwards from the starting point with 014747 until it gives a hardware trap (address error.)
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I remember that about 30 years ago, the links to the UK JANet network (Joint Academic Network) used PDP11s as communications servers which needed half a dozen instructions toggled into the front panel to boot the main program. I used to be able to do it from memory! BOOM! BOOM! :-D
StarNamer_ wrote:
I remember that about 30 years ago
It was the early 1970's and it was a PDP8 if my memory serves me correctly. It used to drop out a lot so I got pretty good at doing it also. :cool:
The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
I'm on-line therefore I am. JimmyRopes -
I have created a really complex and dynamic organizational chart using pure HTML Tables like a Boss! :cool: A giant table with crazy amount of pre-calculated
rowspanandcolspan, with even crazy amount of coding in picking the cell border colors (black or white). so that that whole madness will look like this[^] with really tiny scroll bars. It was in Classic ASP, and the only real alternative (that might not work everywhere) was to create an ActiveX control or Flash control and draw the whole thing. It was a network marketing company (like Amway) where members can see their complete network tree (people they have successfully infected/brainwashed). I am still proud of it. :-DRemind Me This - Manage, Collaborate and Execute your Project in the Cloud
Using Tables? OK, that's kinda cool.
cheers Chris Maunder
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Yeah. And that's why Eclipse is mostly used for Java, the stick isn't that satisfying when you can't hold it from all the dirt. OT: Didn't knew you are on FarceBook.
I will never again mention that Dalek Dave was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel.
