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Ben Halpern
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What are you "old enough to remember" in software development?

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javierg profile image
Javier Guerra

10 print "Hello World"
20 goto 10

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Rick Calder

My God thank you! I was reading these replies thinking "these people are all kids" lol

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Vincent Grovestine

//nod// Save+load from cassette, hoping dearly that you started at the correct counter position and had the tape recorder volume loud enough (but not too loud), then wait...10 minutes...to play Wumpus!

...And there was also the cursed temperamental 16K RAM pack plugged into my ZX81 which would cause the computer to crash if you jostled the thing even slightly--like typing!!

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calder12 profile image
Rick Calder

For me it was a Commodore 64 or a Vic 20 which was what our first computer classes in grade 11 used.

I still remember the joy of walking up to a demo computer in a store and doing the 20 goto 10 thing :D

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Nicholas Stimpson

You young whippersnapper! I was at school at a time when the school didn't have any computers. Its entire computing facility consisted of a single teletype terminal that could be connected via acoustic coupler to a mainframe across town. Paper tape was the local storage medium.

It didn't matter. I was hooked.

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Joe Buckle

I only recently joined this community and I'm happy to see more of us 'oldies' here

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Nikhil • Edited

My school had BASIC when I was 10 years old! Every alternate IT period (Computer period) was a lab session where 30mins was programming and 10mins games. We had to draw a rectangle using BASIC and I used to wonder... HUH! Why can't we just draw it on a paper?! I am not sure whether this comes under "Old enough to remember"... but damn that was long time ago!

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Mohammed Ismail Ansari

Completely agree. I've been through the same thing. They skipped a very important step: explain why we need to write tens of lines code for something that could be done in less than a couple of seconds on a sheet of paper.

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Javier Guerra

If you like to revisit BASIC from a culture and humanities perspective check out 10print.org/
It is a beautiful book

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unsungnovelty profile image
Nikhil

Hey, Thanks! I will check it out. It would be a cool to check how much I remember.

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Jarret Minkler

BASIC or Logo?

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unsungnovelty profile image
Nikhil

It was BASIC.

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Thomas H Jones II

And how brilliant GOSUB was.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I'm old enough to remember Java applets 😄

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Bhupesh Varshney 👾

Damn it
I have to write applet for exam today 😪

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Ben Lovy

My first calculator was a Java applet!

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Forest Hoffman

One of the first projects I ever completed was a Java applet with physics simulation, and a bouncing ball.

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Yechiel Kalmenson

My mother kicking me off AOL because she was expecting a phone call!

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Danielle

My friend coming round my house to play Habbo Hotel because her Dad put child restrictions on their AOL

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Yechiel Kalmenson • Edited

OMG it was cat and mouse with us! I was finding workarounds to my parents' parental controls as fast as they could find new ones 😂

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Phil Nash

Professionally: the double margin float bug in Internet Explorer 6 and hoping for the demise of IE5.

Also, I was aware of IE5 for Mac (different bugs to regular IE5) but never had a Mac at the time to try it out. Now we have Edge for Mac, so what goes around comes around, I guess.

My first web experience: all elements in capital letters and no CSS. Yay for <FONT> and <CENTER> and of course <BLINK> and <MARQUEE>.

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Yaser Al-Najjar

The marquee days... I still remember those websites were full of GIF ads 😂

This gif was a thing at those times:

under-construction

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Phil Nash

So much of the web was under construction!

Under construction

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

😂

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Andy Haskell

FLAMINGTEXT! I miss hokey 00s web stuff!

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Victor Aremu

cooltext.com 😀

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Josh

Entire site layout done in tables.

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Thomas H Jones II

Nested tables

...with some CSS thown in that rendered completely differentely in IE than in Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.

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Phil Nash

Styling MySpace pages! Which were just nested tables with no class names or ids. So all the CSS had to look like

table table table table p { ... }
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Daryn St. Pierre

I had the (dis)pleasure of using IE on a Mac once. If you thought the bugs were bad on IE for Windows... holy crap. That browser was so half-baked.

I still remember DHTML menus and all that stuff.

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David Cantrell

IE on Solaris was quite a lot better, mostly because they didn’t even try to implement half of it.

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Thomas H Jones II

Yeah. It was great, alright. Especially when you worked for a company that was Windows based but the only thing on your desktop was a Solaris box because you were in Unix Operations. "You need to do a daily timecard ...but the timecard system only works under IE" (and the IE for Solaris didn't quiiiiiiiiiiite render the page correctly).

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Cécile Lebleu

That sounds horrible!

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Ryan Smith

FTPing into the server and making live edits. YOLO.

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Valerie Woolard

Editing HTML in Notepad!

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David Müllerchen

Pro Version was Notepad++

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Valerie Woolard

Notepad++ was the first time I had syntax highlighting and it blew my mind.

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Phil Nash

I used Notepad2 and it changed my life.

Editing Java files for university coursework in Notepad was one of the reasons I still hold an irrational hatred for Java in my heart.

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Vuild

I stil do this

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Vincent Milum Jr

When the "console", "terminal" or "command prompt" was really just this thing called "DOS"

And it had QBasic. And QBasic was a godsend for learning how the computer actually worked!

Speaking of learning how things worked... Drawing graphics in QBasic? You interacted directly with the video card. There were no drivers. You would have to manually setup which VGA mode you wanted, such as 320x240 pixel with 16 colors. And then very single dot had to be manually plotted on the screen! There were a few libraries for drawing primitives, but these literally did the same thing, CPU based drawing to a generic frame buffer.

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Dian Fay

Having to choose between 640x480 with 16 colors or 320x200 with 256 was agonizing back in the day!

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Vincent Milum Jr

Color, or resolution... PICK ONE!

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Erik Pischel

Color! Plus 320x200x256 was easy to address because every pixel was a byte in an array.

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Vincent Milum Jr

MOSTLY YES! But there was also some odd-ball hardware that was 16-bit transfers instead of 8-bit. So to draw a single pixel, you had to read two bytes, replace one, then write two bytes back. HOWEVER though, this also meant that just raw performance of painting was twice as fast, as you could draw two pixels in a single operation, if you already knew what both were going to be! (like copying frame buffer for example)

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Phil Ashby

For those who get a kick out of wrangling old hardware to do things it was never designed to.. this back in 2015 blew me away when I found it: int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-102...

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

But damn the plaids were great. :p

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

But did you ever have to engage int he joy that was "shape tables"?

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Ben Halpern

Table layout

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Carneiro

Wait! We are not supposed to use that anymore??

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Glenn Stovall

We just call it “grid” now

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MetaDave 🇪🇺

Another couple of years and it'll be back.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

If high-waisted jeans could make a comeback, surely table layouts can!

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Gert Sønderby • Edited

I mean, table elements are good for, well, laying out tables.

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MetaDave 🇪🇺

Indeed!

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Anton Frattaroli

The position: absolute revolution

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Nina

Professionally, nothing.

Unprofessionally: Geocities. My sailor moon character had her own website and I loved it.

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Ben Halpern

Geocities ❤️

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David J Eddy

My first public web project was on Geocities. Spent countless hours figuring out how to z-index over the adverts...

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Samuel Abreu

Had a Dragon Ball fan site on geocities, unfortunately, never found in any archive site :(

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Nina

Yeah I know what you mean. What I'd give for those to have been archived, but it seems like it's not the case.

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Valentin Baca

Love it.

I had a Metallica Fan site on Geocities

Red text on a black background in "Viner Hand ITC" font everywhere

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Mike Bybee

Ah, good ol' red on black, like every goth and industrial website.

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Ady Ngom
  • Floppy disk to compile my C++ code
  • Tortoise SVN
  • Notepad (no syntax highlighting)
  • Netscape as a browser and IE6
  • Barnes & Nobles was Stack overflow
  • Circuit City was were the cool kids hung out and got their gears
  • Tables were the only way to control layout in HTML with some horrible CSS
  • Dreamweaver was the coolest shit since slice bread
  • ActionScript was how nerds did Flash
  • Flash
  • Napster (I don't want to get in trouble) let's say it was the premise for never ending playlists
  • The AOL DSL jingle and the famous "You've got mail"
  • Books
  • Java was the language of the web
  • CSS sprites when they first gained mainstream
  • YUI
  • Blogger
  • Google waves
  • Yahoo pipes
  • Hotmail - my first 'professional' email lol
  • Zend Framework for serious PHP dev
  • Phonegap as the first true HTML to mobile platform
  • jQuery mobile

Man plenty more I'm sure - it crazy going down the memory lane :)

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Vincent Milum Jr

Tortoise SVN is still a thing! And now we have Tortoise Git, which I use daily. I actually find it faster to do merge conflict resolution and file diffing with Tortoise compared to the command line. :)

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Ady Ngom

Yes indeed but back then it was the only thing. I think it had one off the best diff tools associated with it. I just can’t remember the name.

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Vincent Milum Jr

Tortoise Merge is their diff utility. And yeah, I absolutely love it. Still use it on pretty much every single commit just to verify file changes.

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Petar Petrov

TortoiseHG is my life saviour.

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David J Eddy

YUI - OMG, someone else remembers that!

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Ady Ngom

Yup way before Bootstrap and the likes