Born, raise in Tijuana, MX. With a degree in Philosophy, have worked as janitor, sales person, pizza delivery boy, teacher, press operator, prepress, desktop Publisher, and for the last 19 years dev
Equal parts higher-ed IT, web dev and support; with a dash of freelance consulting thrown in for good measure. (Oct/19: Seeking change of pace. Not afraid to take a step back in order to move ahead!)
//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!!
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.
I'm a developer with over 10 years of commercial experience. I've worked on all areas of the stack (Web and OS) but do not claim to be a specialist in any one single area.
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!
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.
Born, raise in Tijuana, MX. With a degree in Philosophy, have worked as janitor, sales person, pizza delivery boy, teacher, press operator, prepress, desktop Publisher, and for the last 19 years dev
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
He/Him/His
I'm a Software Engineer and a teacher.
There's no feeling quite like the one you get when you watch someone's eyes light up learning something they didn't know.
He/Him/His
I'm a Software Engineer and a teacher.
There's no feeling quite like the one you get when you watch someone's eyes light up learning something they didn't know.
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>.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
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).
I'm a software engineer working as a full-stack developer using JavaScript, Node.js, and React. I write about my experiences in tech, tutorials, and share helpful hints.
I've been coding for over 20 years now! (WOAH, do I feel old)
I've touched just about every resource imaginable under the Sun (too bad they were bought out by Oracle)
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.
It's pronounced Diane. I do data architecture, operations, and backend development. In my spare time I maintain Massive.js, a data mapper for Node.js and PostgreSQL.
I've been coding for over 20 years now! (WOAH, do I feel old)
I've touched just about every resource imaginable under the Sun (too bad they were bought out by Oracle)
I've been coding for over 20 years now! (WOAH, do I feel old)
I've touched just about every resource imaginable under the Sun (too bad they were bought out by Oracle)
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)
30+ years of tech, retired from an identity intelligence company, now part-time with an insurance broker.
Dev community mod - mostly light gardening & weeding out spam :)
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...
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
I've been coding for over 20 years now! (WOAH, do I feel old)
I've touched just about every resource imaginable under the Sun (too bad they were bought out by Oracle)
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. :)
I've been coding for over 20 years now! (WOAH, do I feel old)
I've touched just about every resource imaginable under the Sun (too bad they were bought out by Oracle)
Vivid memory of my boss putting a box of punched cards on top of his car to drive to a customer and forgetting to put them in the car. First turn cards flew off, still ribbed him about it for years
30+ years of tech, retired from an identity intelligence company, now part-time with an insurance broker.
Dev community mod - mostly light gardening & weeding out spam :)
I work as CPO for a Swiss Telco/Messaging Platform Company.
My real passion is developing in Golang, Vue-Nuxt/ReactJs/Angular with Redis, Nsq/RabbitMQ, ArangoDB, MongoDB and Sql
I'm a fan of Open Source and have a growing interest in serverless and edge computing. I'm not a big fan of spiders, but they're doing good work eating bugs. I also stream on Twitch.
I'm a fan of Open Source and have a growing interest in serverless and edge computing. I'm not a big fan of spiders, but they're doing good work eating bugs. I also stream on Twitch.
Alex is an award-winning designer, Senior Front-End Dev @Healthx, and an avid sticker maker. He has worked for over 10 years as a web developer and designer.
In the early days of the language, the creators of PHP used to hang out in the #php channel on efnet. They would answer Stack Overflow-type questions (I mean the "why am I getting this parse error" kind). I remember being amazed when Rasmus Lerdorf once talked about a calendar app he'd written on a flight across the country. How could you write something like that in a few hours?! I learned web development hanging out in that channel.
Oh man, creating rounded edges on elements using a 9-slice grid and four separate rounded-corner-top-right.gif/left etc images was fun. Using DOS, I suppose. Jill of the Jungle!!
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
32K?? Big spender. I remember when my dad brought home a tube of insect-looking memory-chips to install into our Apple ][ so it would finally have "enough" memory to run some of the more recent programs. Eventually maxed it out at like 48K?
I've done a bunch of assembly (x86, PPC and ARM professionally, 6502 and Z80 for the heck of it) and I'm not crazy enough to try raw Windows programming in it. My hat's off to you.
Does anyone remember spacer gifs? Invisible gifs used to get your layout just right back when positioning was a total pain. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacer_GIF
Experienced ASP.NET developer passionate about learning Software Engineering, being an effective team member, and carving out my own little niche in the world.
I enjoy working with jQuery, Angul...
It's pronounced Diane. I do data architecture, operations, and backend development. In my spare time I maintain Massive.js, a data mapper for Node.js and PostgreSQL.
Experienced ASP.NET developer passionate about learning Software Engineering, being an effective team member, and carving out my own little niche in the world.
I enjoy working with jQuery, Angul...
Yep, you always started out counting by tens, and hoped you never got to the point where you had to start renumbering due to needing to insert more than 9 lines. 😁
Dozens of floppies to install a compiler (Hello Borland C)
VB (note lack of .Net)
Writing a DOS device driver so I could edit config.sys on bootup
Being at a dev conference where the presenter quickly wrote a C# program on the board "Oh, sorry, that's not C#, that's Java", changes the case of a few things "Now it's C#"
Turning on a computer with no storage and have it work (The Vic-20 and C-64 mentioned elsewhere here)
OS/2. Would've flunked college without this, I had neural nets running for weeks and could still write papers.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
Dozens of floppies to install a compiler (Hello Borland C)
Spending 20+ straight hours in the Sun lab to download Linux from MIT's TSX mirror ...then using rawrite to put it all on a stack of floppies. And, doing all that because the university's Sun lab was connected to NSFnet and its blazing 56Kbps "backbone".
I think I still have my SimEarth floppies somewhere.
I want to see someone join all the games together. Zoom into SimEarth, get SimCity. Zoom into SimCity, get SimTower or SimAnt depending on how built up the area was.
"Sim Ant" was a classic simulation game released by Maxis in 1991, allowing players to take control of an ant colony and guide it through various challenges and tasks. Back in the day, installing the game meant inserting floppy disks into your computer one by one until the installation process was complete. Each floppy disk contained a portion of the game's data, and you had to patiently swap them out as prompted by the installation wizard.
30+ years of tech, retired from an identity intelligence company, now part-time with an insurance broker.
Dev community mod - mostly light gardening & weeding out spam :)
XML databases
386max etc memory managers (necessary for non-US keyboard drivers so we could run the real software)
DOS windowing systems
“Xxxxx 2000” as the Next Big Thing (eg WordPerfect 2000, Wordstar 2000)
Forth
Structured Programming
Novell Netware (and MHS) - So Many Floppy Disks
IPX
Btrieve
Token Ring
OS/2
Paradox
dBase
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
My first software development memory is using toggle switches on the front of my friend's newly-assembled ALTAIR 8800 to enter individual machine opcodes into its 256 bytes of memory.
We had to hand-compile assembly code to get the opcodes.
It was exciting when we finally upgraded the memory and had Altair 4K BASIC (by "Micro-Soft") to write in a "high level language". Still had to hand-toggle the boot loader in before we could load the BASIC interpreter from cassette tape, though.
Lead Developer: Adobe Experience Manager.
Father of one.
Minnesota.
Occasionally write here: ahmedmusallam.com and there: https://blogs.perficientdigital.com/author/amusallam/
I remember when the US DoD decreed that everything would now be written in Ada, and then every contractor started filing for exceptions. I remember printouts of project source code on fanfold paper hanging in binders on a rack in the terminal room. I remember disk drives the size of dishwashing machines and CPUs the size of refrigerators. Take that, all you youngsters talking about web-centric things -- Al Gore hadn't even invented the internet yet. 😉
30+ years of tech, retired from an identity intelligence company, now part-time with an insurance broker.
Dev community mod - mostly light gardening & weeding out spam :)
The first Unix machine I worked on was a Gould Mini. It was two refrigerator sized cabinets. The 300MB HDD was in one of them and took three people to lift.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
• Radio Shack TRS-80
• Apple II, IIe, III, etc
• My 386SX
• Graphics mode v. text mode
• The text editor called "Brief"
• FoxBase/FoxPro/dBase
• Booting the Mac 512e with a floppy disk
• IDL (Interactive Data Language, like Matlab)
• Emacs & Emacs Lisp, XEmacs
• Sun Sparcstation
• ftp.wustl.edu & others like it where you downloaded & compiled your open source stuff
• BBSs (bulletin board systems accessed via direct dial up)
• The first laser printer (at UCSD)
• Gould Modicon programmable controller
Ah, the good ol' days. Yep, I'm old, but not old enough to have ever had to use punch cards. :)
My first computer was an Intel 80386SX @25MHz, 2MB RAM, 10MB of Hard Drive, Floppy 5¼" (B drive) and 3½" (A drive). Along with a Hercule display and a 9-dot dot matric printer (offering 4 different fonts! Yeah... The font where available ON THE printer, with a button to select which one). We had MS-DOS 5.0, Wordperfect 5.1, dBase 3.0, Lotus123, a Fighting Jet game (don't remember the name, was actually in 3D, couldn't make the damn plane land). I was 10 years old, and when I was like 13 my mother bought a Pentium 120MHz (without MMX), so she gave me the 386. I went to a computer store to ask what to do with it in order to play Diablo. They laugh at me so hard!!!
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
Staring at a blank DOS prompt in wonder on my dad's 286 in 2nd grade.
Programming randomly-shaped stars in logo in 4th grade.
Accidentally activating the BIOS password on my first computer and not being able to boot it again for six months until my uncle suggested "amibios" which worked!
Learning HTML so that my internet chats would look more awesome. Learning how to make it look like I was logged in as any other user in the chatroom.
Hacking my high school's login screen with COM files to say mean things about my school.
Setting IRQs for my sound card so I could play King's Quest with sound.
My first real program was a SkiFree clone written in Pascal. I invented the concept of sprites about 6 years before I learned that they had been a thing all along.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
Accidentally activating the BIOS password on my first computer and not being able to boot it again for six months until my uncle suggested "amibios" which worked!
And back before there was anything like Google to tell you "pop the battery to reset it".
I didn't know about the battery trick! I really wish I had. And I didn't even have a modem at the time to connect to Usenet. Later I got access to the internet through the local college's T1 line, and basically felt like the coolest person ever.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
Yeah. It was an annoying way to do things. You'd pop the CMOS battery, and then you'd have to wait for the CMOS to discharge (usually took a half hour or so).
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
I'm a full stack web developer who has been freelancing for the last 20 years. I write about everything from development to production and also have video courses on my site!
I remember my fellow students hyping the OpenMoko smartphones as THE place to be in terms of mobile development... Then Android and iOS came along.
I never made a Java applet, they were already hated quite much when I got onto the web, but I did some Flash cartoons. Saw many good people fall when Apple killed it, because they never learned code-based programming 😢
I learned C and Assembler on 8085 at school (went to an IT high-school) and Java on non-mobile devices 😂 at university, with enterprise beans, skelletons, stubs and what not 🤢
I remember Ruby on Rails being the hyped savior, like Elm a few years ago, and like Elm the well-know languages copied Rails' concepts and it simply became the new way of doing things.
I used components with ExtJS4 (called xtypes there) and VDOM like rendering with plain JS in 2011, so it felt totally naturally for me to switch to React later.
I didn't want to go into mobile development when I finished my degree in 2011, because I thought the hype was over, haha, started with it in 2017 and it's still a hot topic.
30+ years of tech, retired from an identity intelligence company, now part-time with an insurance broker.
Dev community mod - mostly light gardening & weeding out spam :)
Yay! OpenMoko definitely was the bleeding edge of open source mobile tech. I purchased a Neo1973 and spent hours keeping it alive (hardware fault caused the battery to drain in ~4 hours!)..
I wish I archived a website I made my freshman year at RPI (IN THE YEAR 2000). It had horizontal scrolling, an imagemap, hover effects. The user could hover over a fullscreen photograph of a scene in a diner in upstate NY and see a caption that offered an anecdotal story about the table and what the people were eating and price of the dishes. It was a school project to advertise a business. Would still probably hold up today as an excellent concept for a restaurant site. It will be lost forever.
1983 - Seeing my program load on the screen character by character from a cassette drive (VTech Creativision console)
1985 - pr#1 to print, pr#6 to access the diskette (Apple II)
1986 - writing BASIC programs to transfer data from CP/M-equipped Apple IIs to Tandy TRS-80s.
1990 - writing Occam II programs on a 4-node Transputer farm.
1991 - working with Watcom C++ and 386 DOS Extender
1992 - Microsoft C 7.0 and Windows SDK
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
All of my "old enough to remember" stuff is from childhood and early college:
When my dad brought home a series of TRS80s and, finally, an Apple ][
...and then transcribing games from hobbyist magazines and then having to save to and load from cassette.
The godsend that our first 8" floppy drive was (and the the 5 1/4", and finally, the hard plastic, 1.44MiB "floppy" that now only endures as the "save" button icon)
Buying tubes of memory chips for that Apple ][ to upgrade it to 32KiB (and seeing adverts for expensive 128K RAM boards in computer magazines)
A 40MiB hard drive that took up as much space as the PC it was connected to did
When my dad brought home a compiler for BASIC that made stuff so much faster
How much easier it was to get my code to compile when I disabled the (default) pedantic mode ...and how much harder it was to move my code from one UNIX flavor to another for having done so.
Having to learn assembler to make programs that were usably-fast
After investing time in learning "assembler", that each CPU I'd want to write for, I'd have to learn a different "assembler" implementation
First time I accidentally implemented a fork-bomb ...and the only reason I figured it out was that each time I invoked my program, the remote telnet connection would drop and the system's uptime, when I was finally able to restart my session, would display a value that pretty blatantly corresponded to when I'd invoked my program
How bad it can be to name a function exit ...and how useful it can be if your intents are less than nice.
Page-long conditional #Include blocks in multi-platform source-code.
When Sun made the decision to stop including cc in their OS ...and having to ask our labs' SAs to install gcc when the there were too many users of the FlexLM-governed add-on compiler for Sun
Making the transition from aout to elf
From some of the things in my background, you'd almost think that I was a Real Developer™, but, when time came to transition from hobbyist to professional, all the jobs that were available were sysadmin type jobs. Now, coding is mostly in service to automating infrastructure. :(
Flash intros
Tables for layout...with that single pixel gif column
Dynamic HTML
XML would save us
The “turbo” button on my pc
ISPs were local companies
Books were the only real way to learn new things
JavaScript had to be written to work in different browsers
FTP
Not super long ago, but I started Android dev back when Eclipse was the only option. Fortunately, just a few months later Google released Android Studio and Gradle as the build tool, and life immediately got significantly better for Android devs everywhere.
effing DOCTOR THADDEUS OZONE, photoshop-hero. First wave of skeumorphism when it still was cool. DHTML realness baby. Check all of his stuff out, please.
Serial podcast creator and .NET Core maniac.
Can often be found talking about everything and nothing on one of the many podcasts that he produces (only one of them is about .NET Core, honest)
Location
Leeds, UK
Education
Computer Science with Games Development - BSc
Work
.NET Development Contractor; Podcast host, producer and editor
Writing silly apps in BASIC for the family Amstrad 464 CPC when I should have been playing outside with friends
Creating a GeoCities website with images created using CoolText and PaintShopPro, when I should have been writing documents in my IT classes at school
Discovering an early version of OpenSuse in the store room at school and wanting to try it out (the packaging promised that you couldn't get viruses because of the way that Linux worked, and I wanted to know what that was)
trying to convince friends that the millennium bug was nothing to be worried about
Writing apps for a Motorola 68k in a similar configuration that the Mega Drive/Genesis had, at collge (I'm from the UK, so that means from the age of 16 to 18)
Brian Rinaldi is a Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly with over 20 years experience as a developer for the web. Brian is active in the community running CFE.dev and Orlando Devs.
Professionally, I am old enough to remember when IE6 felt like a godsend. We kept dealing with issues in the latest Netscape 4.5 release, that code often had to have specific workarounds for bugs in specific Netscape versions. IE6 was just the better browser...long before it became the ball and chain of the internet.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
I did my first project in basic with the commodore 64 and it changed the colors of the background and the characters.
The first difficult project in basic was the air balloon. I failed. One year later I had to copy the code of another person(Stackoverflow did not exist a programmer nightmare). I was 11/12 :D
Have had many hats on in my life: Developer, Team Lead, Scrum Master, Architect and Product Owner. Now back to developer \o/ Interested in product discovery, quality assurance and language design.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
Max is a force multiplier that uses Python. He seeks to use what he has learnt as a startup founder and tech community leader to solves hard problems with innovate products or services.
I remember learning to use Marquee for web development class while I was in trade school. Web 2.0 was all the rage before Sun Microsystems was brought by Oracle.
|cpm to load up cp/m for amstrad CPC 6128! As first development experience writing a program to calculate the utilities expenses for the condo we lived in. And as first pc dev experience, writing clipper and dBASE 3 scripts.
I wrote some Basic as a kid (I think I was about 8-10 years old back than), but my first professional job was to write mobile websites using WAP and WML - protocols and languages that are long extinct...
I’m Erhan Kılıç, a curious web developer from Turkey who loves to write software applications and websites.
I have been working as a web developer since 2013.
I was reading in elementary school and one neighbor had a computer. I found a book "Basic" near to the monitor. I started to read and write some of the codes. I don't remember what I wrote but it was fun :)
I tried to draw somethings on black terminal screen with keyboard :p
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
Equal parts higher-ed IT, web dev and support; with a dash of freelance consulting thrown in for good measure. (Oct/19: Seeking change of pace. Not afraid to take a step back in order to move ahead!)
At university: Max 14.4 kbps dial-up access to the Computer Science server--bash, Jove, gcc. Could always tell the evenings when a first-year CS assignment was due because the modem bank would be full, and your only chance of getting in was to repeated redial in hopes of catching a free line.
Likewise, Friday and Saturday nights on the general computing server, but instead of assignments, it would be IRC that kept the modem bank busy.
I learned to write RPG II on paper coding forms for an IBM System/36 at an IBM Guided Learning.
In college, in my only Computer Science class, I wrote Basic and Fortran programs with punch cards and had to wait until the next day to find out that my program failed to compile
I remember learning FORTRAN by filling in bubble cards (which our teacher would take to the board of education building, to be run overnight and picked up in the morning) then progressing to punch cards, followed by those big green IBM 3270 terminals - which worked similar to current internet but without the lipstick. Do I get "The Oldest" prize ;?)
Writing a choose-your-own style adventure in TI-BASIC on my TI-82 in middle school. A Blade Runner tie-in story line with loads of menu selections and manual GOTO statements... written "by hand" on the TI-82.
When my 386 was only really good for DOS and I used bash to write scripts/small interfaces to get around my system because Windows was hard to run
The Internet before GUIs. Lynx, IRC and a culture of safety and anonymity.
Modifying the school computers' autoexec.bat to prank/bork the boot up process.
When Google/Hotmail were brand new and Google wasn't evil.
Having my mind blown by Ubuntu 4.10 "Warty Warthog"
Using Dreamweaver 3.0 to create JavaScript enabled elements because JavaScript was optional and I didn't feel like learning it. To even use JS with a browser you had to get a 3rd party plugin to work.
When CSS was more work than it was worth.
Maybe not as cool as some of the real old guard, but I remember fondly.
I remember my dad's punch cards. I remember when every computer at the department stores already had basic installed as an OS. I remember when Bill Cosby and Texas Instruments finally came out with a cable so I could plug my TI99 into to my cassette player and store my inventions without having to write them all down in a notebook and type them back in whenever I wanted to show them off to my friends... and yes, that constant refactoring made me the programmer I am today. :)
Every time Microsoft brings in some flashy "new" thing, they break the compatibility of the old, or throw the "old" out of the window. Every. Single. Time.
Remember the incompatibilities between DOS 2.0, DOS 3.1, DOS 3.3, DOS 4.0, 5.0, etc?
Remember the data access methods, OLE, ODBC, DAO, ADO, and whatever the newer approaches were called that I've lost track of.
Remember the time Microsoft introduced the flashy "Silverlight"? Microsoft finally throw that into the ditch, and consequently throw our company, who relied heavily on Silverlight, under the bus as well.
Again, Every. Single. Time., the examples are endless.
Sinclair Basic PEEK and POKE.
I had a TRS-80 and a dancing devil programme that. Played a tune on a specific shortwave frequency which was actually the RF interference generated by the computer for whatever background calculations were being carried out. Still can't imagine how you would debug the tune 😵
The local computer shop had an Apple IIe with an adventure game; when you fired your gun it would crash the read heads of the external disk drive (5 1/2 ") to make the shot sound. Can't have done the drive any good
Learning to program Basic from a photo copied thing that came with my second hand commodore 64 in 1987. My uncle's hand me down was the best thing ever and him including some manuals set me on a path to becoming a software engineer. I had a tapedrive, no disk drive, no modem, and did not know how to save my programs :-). My only sources of information were those manuals and library books. Everybody I knew at the time knew nothing relevant.
Using a browser for the first time after queue-ing to use the single terminal in the faculty with a gateway to the world wide web using mosaic in 1994. I had my own home page on the faculty's apache server a year later. HTML 3 seemed like an amazing upgrade.
Cycling home from university the next year with 27 slackware disks, which I downloaded from one by then 3 (!) internet capable HP UX terminals at the university. When I got home, I got busy installing and then had to cycle back because one of the disks was corrupted.
Teaching Java to first year students in 1996 and being amazed how well wordperfect ran in a beta of Java 1.02 for HP UX. By 1998 I was doing Swing applications (with the beta release) and implementing serializable application state that you could send over the network to another PC. Amazing progress in just a few years.
Apart from some stuff mentioned in comments like marquee I've had the pleasure of working with MS ActiveX to write a whole application which was used to print cards using a printer on client side.
Before we could write software, you had to format your hard drive. It was a three stage process. Pre-format using DEBUG (G=C800:5) then partition using FDISK finally a DOS format. Then you could install DOS/CPM and then crack on with BASICA/GWBASIC.
Programmed Canon Canola calculators in 1977. Assorted platforms and languages ever since. Assisting with HOPL.info.
I am NOT looking for work -- I've got more than enough to do.
Location
Perth, WA Australia
Education
A few diplomas.
Work
Software Engineer at [Daisy Digital](https://daisydigital.com.au/)
canola is an emulator of the first thing I ever programmed: a Canon Canola calculator. I was in my second-last year of highschool. The year was 1977. I flowcharted with a stick in the sand of a nearby beach.
webdev @ Autodesk |
Someone used to call me "Learn more", and I'm spending forever to live up to it. You'll find me dabbling in random stuff 👨💻 or missing a wide open shot in 🏀
I remember copying some BASIC source code of a parachute game from some Mac magazine into a school lab computer just to play the game. I figured out how to changed some of speed variables to make the game even more fun
I'm old enough to remember people complaining about people resisting Object Oriented Programming, but I never heard anybody actually resisting it at the time.
Reading some experiences here make me realise how lucky we are now.
I remember using Jumper switches (I think that's what it was called back then) to manually set the Master & slave hard drives on my 800MHz Pentium 3 PC.
Building my first website on free servers.net.
Microsoft Publisher and the eureka moment of discovering 'br' tags after a week of trying.
The joys of 'Macromedia' Dreamweaver before Adobe bought it.
Wondering why I have to put line numbers in front if each statement in Basic.
Upgrading from IBM Model 026 keypunches (which didn't print characters at the top of the card) to Model 029 (which did). No more reading cards by guess and by golly if you dropped them and there wasn't a sorter available (you did punch sequence numbers in each card, didn't you? You certainly did after you dropped a few boxes...)
In the Borland C Editor/compiler for DOS, there was a blurb in the help files for sound functions about how there was once a factory that produced a 7Hz noise near a chicken farm and apparently everyone found out that happened to be the resonant frequency of a chicken skull…
Started coding with a TI-57, then TI-59 (Texas Instrument). Continued with 8-bit computers, in Basic, of course, and assembly language (converted to hexa code by hand).
I did lot of real-time software on 8-bit processors (6800, 6809, 6502, etc.)
I bought Visual Studio 1.0. It was a box of several kilograms, because it had a dozen of books / manuals with the floppy disks.
Also I coded JavaScript at a time where the only debug tool was alert()... (later, I added lines to a div)
Going on a job interview, back when high tech companies were coming and going in weeks. There were two things you always did, ask to use the employee restroom, and ask to see code on paper. If the TP was like printer paper,and the code was on paper better used as TP, do not accept any offers there :)
My first computer was a Vic20, and the manual was HUGE! I learned BASIC and followed the lessons to make a Mars game -- tiny ship avoiding enemy ships, well, little blips, to reach Mars relatively unscathed. The program was in colour but my monitor was a small, black and white TV set. Too much fun!
I remember writing Basic on my Sinclair Spectrum 128k (ram).
I remember how Turbo Pascal 7 was absolutely amazing when compared to Turbo Pascal 6.
I remember there being no Linux.
I remember windows 2.
Trying to convince my management that this new "web" thing was going to completely replace their client-server development model... then proving it by writing their newest 6-month development effort over a holiday weekend in ASP.
Have had many hats on in my life: Developer, Team Lead, Scrum Master, Architect and Product Owner. Now back to developer \o/ Interested in product discovery, quality assurance and language design.
When you had to test your Web application through IE6 to prevent further problems later on.
Also there used to be a time when Notepad++ was considered an IDE
Old enough to remember using peek and poke in Applesoft Basic. And be excited about getting an 80 column card, so I could display 80 characters across the screen (rather than the default of 40).
Started a Computer Science degree in '88 but circumstances changed and I started down the IT support, Systems Engineer path.
Trying to get back in to coding, find projects, continue the CS degree....
Well-versed in the technical side of things thanks to extensive Software Engineering experience. Enthusiastic about Statistical Inference, Machine Learning and Visualizations. He/him.
Ashraf Alam is well recognized for his expertise and contributions in cloud and web technologies, especially on top of Microsoft .NET technology stack.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
Data Science and Machine Learning enthusiast. Passionate Software Engineer with main experience in iOS, Python and JavaScript.
Visit my GitHub: You will probably find something interesting.
Location
Athens, Greece
Education
CS Graduate, Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB)
I'm a passionate learner and sharer. I always try to give back to the developer community. I create mobile and Web applications by day. Not Batman by night, in case you wondered :)
Holding up two versions of code, printed on a dot matrix printer on green bar paper, one on top of the other, up to the light to see where the differences were.
Dowloading ie4 which took over 36 hours on a 14.4k modem. Installing redhat 5 for the first time and calling a Linux support line for help getting my video card working in x11.
I lead a team of talented developers who create and maintain web applications that enhance the online privacy and security of millions of users.
Punctuality ninja, delivery addict, bibliophile.
6502 and Z80 assembly.
Floating point bug in intel processors
And of course, punched cards and punched tapes.
Memory expansion cards with drivers to switch them. Because of addressing limitation.
Have had many hats on in my life: Developer, Team Lead, Scrum Master, Architect and Product Owner. Now back to developer \o/ Interested in product discovery, quality assurance and language design.
I dissembled Windows games and debugged and edited the x86 assembly to circumvent the CD check on load because I was too lazy to switch CDs all the time.
10 print "Hello World"
20 goto 10
My God thank you! I was reading these replies thinking "these people are all kids" lol
//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!!
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
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.
I only recently joined this community and I'm happy to see more of us 'oldies' here
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!
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.
If you like to revisit BASIC from a culture and humanities perspective check out 10print.org/
It is a beautiful book
Hey, Thanks! I will check it out. It would be a cool to check how much I remember.
BASIC or Logo?
It was BASIC.
And how brilliant GOSUB was.
I'm old enough to remember Java applets 😄
Damn it
I have to write applet for exam today 😪
My first calculator was a Java applet!
One of the first projects I ever completed was a Java applet with physics simulation, and a bouncing ball.
My mother kicking me off AOL because she was expecting a phone call!
My friend coming round my house to play Habbo Hotel because her Dad put child restrictions on their AOL
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 😂
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>.The marquee days... I still remember those websites were full of GIF ads 😂
This gif was a thing at those times:
So much of the web was under construction!
😂
FLAMINGTEXT! I miss hokey 00s web stuff!
cooltext.com 😀
Entire site layout done in tables.
Nested tables
...with some CSS thown in that rendered completely differentely in IE than in Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.
Styling MySpace pages! Which were just nested tables with no
classnames orids. So all the CSS had to look likeI 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.
IE on Solaris was quite a lot better, mostly because they didn’t even try to implement half of it.
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).
That sounds horrible!
FTPing into the server and making live edits. YOLO.
Editing HTML in Notepad!
Pro Version was Notepad++
Notepad++ was the first time I had syntax highlighting and it blew my mind.
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.
I stil do this
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.
Having to choose between 640x480 with 16 colors or 320x200 with 256 was agonizing back in the day!
Color, or resolution... PICK ONE!
Color! Plus 320x200x256 was easy to address because every pixel was a byte in an array.
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)
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...
But damn the plaids were great. :p
But did you ever have to engage int he joy that was "shape tables"?
Table layout
Wait! We are not supposed to use that anymore??
We just call it “grid” now
Another couple of years and it'll be back.
If high-waisted jeans could make a comeback, surely table layouts can!
I mean, table elements are good for, well, laying out tables.
Indeed!
The position: absolute revolution
Professionally, nothing.
Unprofessionally: Geocities. My sailor moon character had her own website and I loved it.
Geocities ❤️
My first public web project was on Geocities. Spent countless hours figuring out how to z-index over the adverts...
Had a Dragon Ball fan site on geocities, unfortunately, never found in any archive site :(
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.
Love it.
I had a Metallica Fan site on Geocities
Red text on a black background in "Viner Hand ITC" font everywhere
Ah, good ol' red on black, like every goth and industrial website.
Man plenty more I'm sure - it crazy going down the memory lane :)
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. :)
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.
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.
TortoiseHG is my life saviour.
YUI - OMG, someone else remembers that!
Yup way before Bootstrap and the likes
A shoebox of punch cards with my Fortran programs on them. The output was printed on paper with green and white bars. What do I win?
The epithets of "venerable" and "inscrutable", certainly.
Vivid memory of my boss putting a box of punched cards on top of his car to drive to a customer and forgetting to put them in the car. First turn cards flew off, still ribbed him about it for years
don't drop the box (or at least configure the punch machine to print sequence numbers)
Nice - I experienced the 3 week run/debug cycle for a year or so while still in school, then the Maths dept got a Pet - also welcome to dev.to :)
🤯
have a look on my first ever page i did:
web.archive.org/web/19970124165936...
Imagemaps, IE3 Enhanced, 3D Buttons, Fireworks Shadows, FrameSets....
CGI-Scripts, Nervous animated Gifs
:-)
Today looks a bit better: fullstackjob.com
Programming in Basic on a VIC 20 and playing video games on my friend's Commodore 64 that were on audio cassettes.
Also, programing in Logo in elementary school.
Old school. 💪
Side note: Years later at a job, I discovered that one of my peers, much older than me, helped build the Logo programming language. 🤯
I did some Logo back in primary school. Those were the days, just pushing the turtle around the screen and making sweet graphics.
That's kind of amazing you got to work with one of the creators!
It was such a fun way to program in elementary school. And of course, someone ported it to JS, because Atwood's Law.
I was a fan of Logo support on Heroku.
I'm technically a minor and I remember both Logo and BASIC from elementary school. And
<font>.The entire layout for a website being a big ass table.
Haha. Ass table
xkcd.com/37/
Oh, man. Spacer gifs are the one I thought of when I saw this topic. And I remember what a miracle Firebug was when it was released.
This is what we do now, though, because jQuery is bloated and uncool. Time is a flat circle :)
Well, now we can use querySelectorAll and it does everything for us.
In the early days of the language, the creators of PHP used to hang out in the #php channel on efnet. They would answer Stack Overflow-type questions (I mean the "why am I getting this parse error" kind). I remember being amazed when Rasmus Lerdorf once talked about a calendar app he'd written on a flight across the country. How could you write something like that in a few hours?! I learned web development hanging out in that channel.
Oh man, creating rounded edges on elements using a 9-slice grid and four separate
rounded-corner-top-right.gif/left etc images was fun. Using DOS, I suppose. Jill of the Jungle!!I knowwwww.
The weird thing is that we were obsessed with doing it in the first place. Did we really need rounded corners that badly? 😵
Looking back, I think it was the challenge of the idea - an element that broke out of the square ✨⬜✨
Jill of the Jungle is free on gog.com an works perfectly in modern computers :D
😍😍😍😍😍
I got to know the Adobe suite much better than I wanted to.
Rubber keys with programming key words like "goto" and "poke" in red and yellow accessed via different key combinations.
Typing in code from magazines and then having to debug it because of printing errors.
Only having 32k of memory.
32K?? Big spender. I remember when my dad brought home a tube of insect-looking memory-chips to install into our Apple ][ so it would finally have "enough" memory to run some of the more recent programs. Eventually maxed it out at like 48K?
Writing keygens for software in Assembly language... found this code in my old folders (still wondering how I managed to write such lines 😂)
This was written on a Win XP machine 😆
I've done a bunch of assembly (x86, PPC and ARM professionally, 6502 and Z80 for the heck of it) and I'm not crazy enough to try raw Windows programming in it. My hat's off to you.
Does anyone remember spacer gifs? Invisible gifs used to get your layout just right back when positioning was a total pain. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacer_GIF
Then of course invisible GIFs became ad tracker GIFs :(
QBasic under DOS 5.
Learning QBasic, then opening gorilla.bas and being like "I'm not there yet" lol
Learning QBasic by opening gorilla.bas and tripling the explosion radius....
I was 6-7 then and it was awesome. My mom was like :O.
To insert lines in a basic program you create a line with an intermediate number.
to insert a line there you do
and use
RENUMto re-enumerate in tens again... and create more "interlines", it would fix all the goto references automatically... that was amazingYep, you always started out counting by tens, and hoped you never got to the point where you had to start renumbering due to needing to insert more than 9 lines. 😁
In no particular order:
Spending 20+ straight hours in the Sun lab to download Linux from MIT's TSX mirror ...then using
rawriteto put it all on a stack of floppies. And, doing all that because the university's Sun lab was connected to NSFnet and its blazing 56Kbps "backbone".My fav game back then, Sim Ant was installed from floppy!
I think I still have my SimEarth floppies somewhere.
I want to see someone join all the games together. Zoom into SimEarth, get SimCity. Zoom into SimCity, get SimTower or SimAnt depending on how built up the area was.
"Sim Ant" was a classic simulation game released by Maxis in 1991, allowing players to take control of an ant colony and guide it through various challenges and tasks. Back in the day, installing the game meant inserting floppy disks into your computer one by one until the installation process was complete. Each floppy disk contained a portion of the game's data, and you had to patiently swap them out as prompted by the installation wizard.
+1 for DOS device driver authoring, that was always fun:
dev.to/phlashgbg/comment/2okc
XML databases
386max etc memory managers (necessary for non-US keyboard drivers so we could run the real software)
DOS windowing systems
“Xxxxx 2000” as the Next Big Thing (eg WordPerfect 2000, Wordstar 2000)
Forth
Structured Programming
Novell Netware (and MHS) - So Many Floppy Disks
IPX
Btrieve
Token Ring
OS/2
Paradox
dBase
Thanks Ben, you’ve made me feel very old
No Banyan Vines? No Appletalk? None of the excruciating joy of making two or more of them work together?
Oh! And having to shut down an entire LAN to reset a stuck token!
Oh... And having to install Trumpet WinSock!
Also:
Compuserve
Dial up bulletin boards - eg FidoNet
Default passwords on Prime OS systems across the world
UKs JANET network
So much YES. That list brings back so many memories.
I feel absolutely ancient reading these replies.
My first software development memory is using toggle switches on the front of my friend's newly-assembled ALTAIR 8800 to enter individual machine opcodes into its 256 bytes of memory.
We had to hand-compile assembly code to get the opcodes.
It was exciting when we finally upgraded the memory and had Altair 4K BASIC (by "Micro-Soft") to write in a "high level language". Still had to hand-toggle the boot loader in before we could load the BASIC interpreter from cassette tape, though.
Development Specific:
Other things:
PHP4 represent!
I’m old enough to remember when mysql_query wasn’t deprecated.
I’m old enough to have put W3C validator badges on at least 10 web sites.
I’m old enough to have used table layouts
I’m old enough to have made a website in MS Publisher
Never mind table layouts. Remember using multiple nested blockquotes for indentation?
Using dreamweaver to edit HTML files over FTP.. in 2013..
I learned "web development" using Dreamweaver in University in 2010 🤷
I remember when the US DoD decreed that everything would now be written in Ada, and then every contractor started filing for exceptions. I remember printouts of project source code on fanfold paper hanging in binders on a rack in the terminal room. I remember disk drives the size of dishwashing machines and CPUs the size of refrigerators. Take that, all you youngsters talking about web-centric things -- Al Gore hadn't even invented the internet yet. 😉
Ah Ada. My university (York, UK) was an Ada centre of excellence.. I never saw anyone ship anything in Ada in 4 years though :)
The first Unix machine I worked on was a Gould Mini. It was two refrigerator sized cabinets. The 300MB HDD was in one of them and took three people to lift.
Hey: we called those project source printouts "backups" at one place I did time at.
• Radio Shack TRS-80
• Apple II, IIe, III, etc
• My 386SX
• Graphics mode v. text mode
• The text editor called "Brief"
• FoxBase/FoxPro/dBase
• Booting the Mac 512e with a floppy disk
• IDL (Interactive Data Language, like Matlab)
• Emacs & Emacs Lisp, XEmacs
• Sun Sparcstation
• ftp.wustl.edu & others like it where you downloaded & compiled your open source stuff
• BBSs (bulletin board systems accessed via direct dial up)
• The first laser printer (at UCSD)
• Gould Modicon programmable controller
Ah, the good ol' days. Yep, I'm old, but not old enough to have ever had to use punch cards. :)
My first computer was an Intel 80386SX @25MHz, 2MB RAM, 10MB of Hard Drive, Floppy 5¼" (B drive) and 3½" (A drive). Along with a Hercule display and a 9-dot dot matric printer (offering 4 different fonts! Yeah... The font where available ON THE printer, with a button to select which one). We had MS-DOS 5.0, Wordperfect 5.1, dBase 3.0, Lotus123, a Fighting Jet game (don't remember the name, was actually in 3D, couldn't make the damn plane land). I was 10 years old, and when I was like 13 my mother bought a Pentium 120MHz (without MMX), so she gave me the 386. I went to a computer store to ask what to do with it in order to play Diablo. They laugh at me so hard!!!
Ah Brief. I still miss Brief. Also the version control plug-in for it called Sourcerer's Apprentice
EMACS. Killit with fire. Nothing like the first time you open EMACS and are left wondering, "how the hell do I exit this beast"?
VIM: "Hold my beer"
Staring at a blank DOS prompt in wonder on my dad's 286 in 2nd grade.
Programming randomly-shaped stars in logo in 4th grade.
Accidentally activating the BIOS password on my first computer and not being able to boot it again for six months until my uncle suggested "amibios" which worked!
Learning HTML so that my internet chats would look more awesome. Learning how to make it look like I was logged in as any other user in the chatroom.
Hacking my high school's login screen with COM files to say mean things about my school.
Setting IRQs for my sound card so I could play King's Quest with sound.
My first real program was a SkiFree clone written in Pascal. I invented the concept of sprites about 6 years before I learned that they had been a thing all along.
And back before there was anything like Google to tell you "pop the battery to reset it".
Of course, back before Google, we had Usenet.
I didn't know about the battery trick! I really wish I had. And I didn't even have a modem at the time to connect to Usenet. Later I got access to the internet through the local college's T1 line, and basically felt like the coolest person ever.
Yeah. It was an annoying way to do things. You'd pop the CMOS battery, and then you'd have to wait for the CMOS to discharge (usually took a half hour or so).
In no order but random memories
Nothing quite like waiting two days for the kernel to re-compile only to discover that you left the
sddriver out.The move away from the monolithic kernel was such a vast improvement in maintainability.
NeoPets Personal Pages.
A single html file. Way too many
<marquee>sAlso...
Any idea why NeoPets is excluded from the Wayback Machine:
Internet Explorer 5 Macintosh Edition..
I’m sure there are many of the same memories here.
There are more, but know I’m feeling old, 😂- thanks for the thread @ben
I used Basic on the C64. 😂
I remember my fellow students hyping the OpenMoko smartphones as THE place to be in terms of mobile development... Then Android and iOS came along.
I never made a Java applet, they were already hated quite much when I got onto the web, but I did some Flash cartoons. Saw many good people fall when Apple killed it, because they never learned code-based programming 😢
I learned C and Assembler on 8085 at school (went to an IT high-school) and Java on non-mobile devices 😂 at university, with enterprise beans, skelletons, stubs and what not 🤢
I remember Ruby on Rails being the hyped savior, like Elm a few years ago, and like Elm the well-know languages copied Rails' concepts and it simply became the new way of doing things.
I used components with ExtJS4 (called xtypes there) and VDOM like rendering with plain JS in 2011, so it felt totally naturally for me to switch to React later.
I didn't want to go into mobile development when I finished my degree in 2011, because I thought the hype was over, haha, started with it in 2017 and it's still a hot topic.
Yay! OpenMoko definitely was the bleeding edge of open source mobile tech. I purchased a Neo1973 and spent hours keeping it alive (hardware fault caused the battery to drain in ~4 hours!)..
Embedding a webring on the bottom of my geocities page.
Here is a weird school project from a net art class in 2002. It's really broken (no images). I used the slice tool in Photoshop when that was a relatively new thing.
I wish I archived a website I made my freshman year at RPI (IN THE YEAR 2000). It had horizontal scrolling, an imagemap, hover effects. The user could hover over a fullscreen photograph of a scene in a diner in upstate NY and see a caption that offered an anecdotal story about the table and what the people were eating and price of the dishes. It was a school project to advertise a business. Would still probably hold up today as an excellent concept for a restaurant site. It will be lost forever.
So many good memories in this thread. Few of mine:
1983 - Seeing my program load on the screen character by character from a cassette drive (VTech Creativision console)
1985 - pr#1 to print, pr#6 to access the diskette (Apple II)
1986 - writing BASIC programs to transfer data from CP/M-equipped Apple IIs to Tandy TRS-80s.
1990 - writing Occam II programs on a 4-node Transputer farm.
1991 - working with Watcom C++ and 386 DOS Extender
1992 - Microsoft C 7.0 and Windows SDK
Dang, I'm old.
<marquee>tagsAll of my "old enough to remember" stuff is from childhood and early college:
exit...and how useful it can be if your intents are less than nice.#Includeblocks in multi-platform source-code.ccin their OS ...and having to ask our labs' SAs to installgccwhen the there were too many users of the FlexLM-governed add-on compiler for SunFrom some of the things in my background, you'd almost think that I was a Real Developer™, but, when time came to transition from hobbyist to professional, all the jobs that were available were sysadmin type jobs. Now, coding is mostly in service to automating infrastructure. :(
Flash intros
Tables for layout...with that single pixel gif column
Dynamic HTML
XML would save us
The “turbo” button on my pc
ISPs were local companies
Books were the only real way to learn new things
JavaScript had to be written to work in different browsers
FTP
"XML will save us". We're so much wiser now. Now we know that "Blockchain will save us"
Not super long ago, but I started Android dev back when Eclipse was the only option. Fortunately, just a few months later Google released Android Studio and Gradle as the build tool, and life immediately got significantly better for Android devs everywhere.
effing DOCTOR THADDEUS OZONE, photoshop-hero. First wave of skeumorphism when it still was cool. DHTML realness baby. Check all of his stuff out, please.
developing web pages to support both
<div>and<layer>Flash being "the cool thing" (it's where I started coding with my best friend and in my opinion never stopped being cool!)
jQuery dominating the web ecosystem
I stayed away from flash because I never had a decent internet connection back then. I was always drawn towards plain HTML for the better 😂
Professionally, I am old enough to remember when IE6 felt like a godsend. We kept dealing with issues in the latest Netscape 4.5 release, that code often had to have specific workarounds for bugs in specific Netscape versions. IE6 was just the better browser...long before it became the ball and chain of the internet.
Unless you were someone that used multiple computers throughout the course of a day. I was so pissed when Roaming Profiles died.
I did my first project in basic with the commodore 64 and it changed the colors of the background and the characters.
The first difficult project in basic was the air balloon. I failed. One year later I had to copy the code of another person(Stackoverflow did not exist a programmer nightmare). I was 11/12 :D
I experienced the switch from X11 to Xorg... and writing the configs for both was the biiiiiigest pita in computer history
Remember LILO?
But did you ever burn a mark into your monitor's phosphors when the config file your wrote was close to correct, but just not quite right?
Using 8" floppy disks to boot a CP/M machine with a 12" wide 10 MB hard drive. The hard drive alone weighed 20+lb, 10+Kg.
Or, writing 6502 machine code by hand on a VIC-20.
Or, using Uniflex on a SWTPC 6800
I remember when the word "burnout" was used mostly in car racing. Now it's a thing I personally experienced more than once.
Also, WinAPI. It still gives me shivers.
The one that keeps coming up this week for some reason is that I was writing React back in the
createClassdays!Oh, that’s a good one 😄
I remember learning to use Marquee for web development class while I was in trade school. Web 2.0 was all the rage before Sun Microsystems was brought by Oracle.
My first websites were all about the marquee!
Yeah right Ben, your "first" websites?
We've all seen your personal site now. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
oh, what beautiful times were those...
Writing
gotoandgosubstatements in Commodore (C64) basicThis nostalogic screen and memory address 1024 (0x400) at which you could peek/poke the top-left character on the screen.
|cpm to load up cp/m for amstrad CPC 6128! As first development experience writing a program to calculate the utilities expenses for the condo we lived in. And as first pc dev experience, writing clipper and dBASE 3 scripts.
When no one wrote any tests. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada!
It's true, and the code we wrote even worked without them.
I wrote some Basic as a kid (I think I was about 8-10 years old back than), but my first professional job was to write mobile websites using WAP and WML - protocols and languages that are long extinct...
I was reading in elementary school and one neighbor had a computer. I found a book "Basic" near to the monitor. I started to read and write some of the codes. I don't remember what I wrote but it was fun :)
I tried to draw somethings on black terminal screen with keyboard :p
I learnt to program with these:
I remember REALLY wanting one of these when computers were thousands of dollars:
MSN messenger
Bebo - the social media platform before Facebook reached New Zealand
Having to use multiple floppy disks to install a PC game
At university: Max 14.4 kbps dial-up access to the Computer Science server--bash, Jove, gcc. Could always tell the evenings when a first-year CS assignment was due because the modem bank would be full, and your only chance of getting in was to repeated redial in hopes of catching a free line.
Likewise, Friday and Saturday nights on the general computing server, but instead of assignments, it would be IRC that kept the modem bank busy.
EMM386 and trying to reduce the source code enough so the Ada83 compiler could get the job done in less than 640k memory
Copying BASIC programs out from computer magazines, and then trying to find the typos
NCSA mosaic, finger, archie and gopher
The tag
You could have 3D animations in Internet Explorer 4 in 1997, programmed in JScript.
The feature was called DirectAnimation news.microsoft.com/1997/12/10/micr...
It was later blocked and removed, due to security vulnerabilities.
I learned to write RPG II on paper coding forms for an IBM System/36 at an IBM Guided Learning.
In college, in my only Computer Science class, I wrote Basic and Fortran programs with punch cards and had to wait until the next day to find out that my program failed to compile
I remember learning FORTRAN by filling in bubble cards (which our teacher would take to the board of education building, to be run overnight and picked up in the morning) then progressing to punch cards, followed by those big green IBM 3270 terminals - which worked similar to current internet but without the lipstick. Do I get "The Oldest" prize ;?)
IE6 hasLayout
Writing a choose-your-own style adventure in TI-BASIC on my TI-82 in middle school. A Blade Runner tie-in story line with loads of menu selections and manual GOTO statements... written "by hand" on the TI-82.
Maybe not as cool as some of the real old guard, but I remember fondly.
I remember my dad's punch cards. I remember when every computer at the department stores already had basic installed as an OS. I remember when Bill Cosby and Texas Instruments finally came out with a cable so I could plug my TI99 into to my cassette player and store my inventions without having to write them all down in a notebook and type them back in whenever I wanted to show them off to my friends... and yes, that constant refactoring made me the programmer I am today. :)
Every time Microsoft brings in some flashy "new" thing, they break the compatibility of the old, or throw the "old" out of the window. Every. Single. Time.
Sinclair Basic PEEK and POKE.
I had a TRS-80 and a dancing devil programme that. Played a tune on a specific shortwave frequency which was actually the RF interference generated by the computer for whatever background calculations were being carried out. Still can't imagine how you would debug the tune 😵
The local computer shop had an Apple IIe with an adventure game; when you fired your gun it would crash the read heads of the external disk drive (5 1/2 ") to make the shot sound. Can't have done the drive any good
Cycling through 16 colours.
Layout with tables.
Creating a web page in Microsoft Word, and uploading it by FTP.
Editing a configuration file in text-mode to set-up the graphical mode on my computer.
Learning to program Basic from a photo copied thing that came with my second hand commodore 64 in 1987. My uncle's hand me down was the best thing ever and him including some manuals set me on a path to becoming a software engineer. I had a tapedrive, no disk drive, no modem, and did not know how to save my programs :-). My only sources of information were those manuals and library books. Everybody I knew at the time knew nothing relevant.
Using a browser for the first time after queue-ing to use the single terminal in the faculty with a gateway to the world wide web using mosaic in 1994. I had my own home page on the faculty's apache server a year later. HTML 3 seemed like an amazing upgrade.
Cycling home from university the next year with 27 slackware disks, which I downloaded from one by then 3 (!) internet capable HP UX terminals at the university. When I got home, I got busy installing and then had to cycle back because one of the disks was corrupted.
Teaching Java to first year students in 1996 and being amazed how well wordperfect ran in a beta of Java 1.02 for HP UX. By 1998 I was doing Swing applications (with the beta release) and implementing serializable application state that you could send over the network to another PC. Amazing progress in just a few years.
Etc.
Apart from some stuff mentioned in comments like marquee I've had the pleasure of working with MS ActiveX to write a whole application which was used to print cards using a printer on client side.
Oh what a joy ¯_(ツ)_/¯
scriptaculous babbyyyyyyy
Before we could write software, you had to format your hard drive. It was a three stage process. Pre-format using DEBUG (G=C800:5) then partition using FDISK finally a DOS format. Then you could install DOS/CPM and then crack on with BASICA/GWBASIC.
canola is an emulator of the first thing I ever programmed: a Canon Canola calculator. I was in my second-last year of highschool. The year was 1977. I flowcharted with a stick in the sand of a nearby beach.
Visual Basic 6 was my favorite language 😄
I'm old enough to remember Internet Explorer being a breath of fresh air after Netscape Navigator 4 stagnation.
Also,
gorilla.basin QBasic.I remember copying some BASIC source code of a parachute game from some Mac magazine into a school lab computer just to play the game. I figured out how to changed some of speed variables to make the game even more fun
This book: Write Your Own Adventure Programs for your Microcomputer
I'm old enough to remember people complaining about people resisting Object Oriented Programming, but I never heard anybody actually resisting it at the time.
Reading some experiences here make me realise how lucky we are now.
I remember using Jumper switches (I think that's what it was called back then) to manually set the Master & slave hard drives on my 800MHz Pentium 3 PC.
Building my first website on free servers.net.
Microsoft Publisher and the eureka moment of discovering 'br' tags after a week of trying.
The joys of 'Macromedia' Dreamweaver before Adobe bought it.
Wondering why I have to put line numbers in front if each statement in Basic.
Pheew
Upgrading from IBM Model 026 keypunches (which didn't print characters at the top of the card) to Model 029 (which did). No more reading cards by guess and by golly if you dropped them and there wasn't a sorter available (you did punch sequence numbers in each card, didn't you? You certainly did after you dropped a few boxes...)
trying to create an app for windows 3.1
Studying fortran at university and pascal at high school and logo with thomson MO5 at school
-Trying to programm three body app on Amstrad CPC in basic and finishing with a stack overflow (too much recursion to solve differential equation)
In the Borland C Editor/compiler for DOS, there was a blurb in the help files for sound functions about how there was once a factory that produced a 7Hz noise near a chicken farm and apparently everyone found out that happened to be the resonant frequency of a chicken skull…
Custom MySpace layouts made by jamming CSS into the bottom of the bio text input
Started coding with a TI-57, then TI-59 (Texas Instrument). Continued with 8-bit computers, in Basic, of course, and assembly language (converted to hexa code by hand).
I did lot of real-time software on 8-bit processors (6800, 6809, 6502, etc.)
I bought Visual Studio 1.0. It was a box of several kilograms, because it had a dozen of books / manuals with the floppy disks.
Also I coded JavaScript at a time where the only debug tool was alert()... (later, I added lines to a div)
Not specifically dev (or me) but a few from Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle of [random] tech.
Pre
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
youtube.com/watch?v=wC3E2qTCIY8
youtube.com/watch?v=OIRZebE8O84
Post
es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q
youtube.com/watch?v=J33pVRdxWbw
youtube.com/watch?v=Udi0rk3jZYM
youtube.com/watch?v=Kh0tMOmlIys
youtube.com/watch?v=nG7hquyHncU
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia
w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1-961217
spacejam.com/archive/spacejam/movi...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
ASL
youtube.com/watch?v=lEyrivrjAuU
youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_grail_(...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Shockwave
youtube.com/watch?v=hw4wzwYeZ0Y
youtube.com/watch?v=n9kgZqbCJiM
encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?...
flashkit.com
sitepoint.com (@sitepointdotcom )
wordpress.org/news/2004/01/wordpre...
komar.org/christmas/hoax/
twitter.com/fwa/status/95824963451...
seroundtable.com/archives/000470.html
anildash.com/2004/06/04/nigritude_...
web.archive.org/web/20050217094837...
youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw
youtube.com/watch?v=eUHBPuHS-7s
youtube.com/watch?v=MnrJzXM7a6o
youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
cultofmac.com/491792/app-store-vir...
bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
coinmarketcap.com
Right now?
dev.to
repl.it
unity.com
unrealengine.com
🤣
Going on a job interview, back when high tech companies were coming and going in weeks. There were two things you always did, ask to use the employee restroom, and ask to see code on paper. If the TP was like printer paper,and the code was on paper better used as TP, do not accept any offers there :)
Old enough to say that my first program was in Pascal.
My first computer was a Vic20, and the manual was HUGE! I learned BASIC and followed the lessons to make a Mars game -- tiny ship avoiding enemy ships, well, little blips, to reach Mars relatively unscathed. The program was in colour but my monitor was a small, black and white TV set. Too much fun!
Operating system related
In web development
I remember writing Basic on my Sinclair Spectrum 128k (ram).
I remember how Turbo Pascal 7 was absolutely amazing when compared to Turbo Pascal 6.
I remember there being no Linux.
I remember windows 2.
Trying to convince my management that this new "web" thing was going to completely replace their client-server development model... then proving it by writing their newest 6-month development effort over a holiday weekend in ASP.
Printing the CSS1 specification on paper and studying it, thinking "I don't know if it will ever be useful, but it's cool!"
Buying a HUGE book about SVG and thinking "I'm sure that coding an image by hand will be surely useful"
Mandrake Linux! And after that Slackware because I was feeling a pro.
And I wrote inline x86 assembler to optimize image rendering in C++ and turbo pascal programs 🤔
When you had to test your Web application through IE6 to prevent further problems later on.
Also there used to be a time when Notepad++ was considered an IDE
Build “web sites” before CSS existed in browsers.
FoxPro.
The first conference I ever went to -- before I understood anything about programming -- was a FoxPro conference!
Basic, teletype, paper tape.
Core memory on an early HP machine (I think).
Using a clearfix div after floated divs.
call -151
"4 Out of memory": the zx Spectrum had only 16k of RAM...
QBasic
Turbo Pascal
Turing
<blink> tag.
😂
forward 20
right 90
forward 20
right 90
forward 20
right 90
forward 20
right 90
Old enough to remember using peek and poke in Applesoft Basic. And be excited about getting an 80 column card, so I could display 80 characters across the screen (rather than the default of 40).
Of course Logo, and then, MySql when had no Referencial Integrity,
Using Notepad as an IDE
TURBO button and Boot diskete for w95.
Terminator console and space invaders.
VB6 and 3.5 floppy disks... nuff said 😂
VRML
Calling myself a "webmaster".
Since writing non-compiled HTML and PHP4 was considered to be something very different than "real development" for some reason.
I am old enought to remeber programming Assembler. And a time without Internet.
There was no version control.
There were no deployment systems.
There were no DevOps.
There was FTP, and there was uploading updated files, there was a crossing of fingers 🤞
DHTML,
<marquee>,<blink>,<body bgcolor="#FF0000">, and this brand new thing called CSS.DOS 3.3 and GW-Basic, first introduction to programing.
I remember when every service just took plaintext usernames and passwords, over unencrypted connections, and everyone was just fine with that ¯\(ツ)/¯
Making AIM buddy icons by manually constructing GIFs frame by frame
Zx81 Assembly :) sinclairzxworld.com/viewtopic.php?...
Punch cards(my dad had them)
My TRS-80 (debugging sucked)
Java’s initial release
AIM
Professionally? VB6.
turbo pascal from high school 🙈
I'm old enough to remember Clipper Summer '87 😱
I am old enough to remember saving programs to audio cassettes.
Punched cards.
punched cards
Moog
Hacking Myspace themes by putting CSS in the "About Me" field.
C64 BASIC.
It was my first drop of The Drugs, 8 years old, and I was addicted.
If we're talking in terms of jobs, the IE takeover, when Netscape got sidelined.
Anyone mention CVS yet?
#include<conio.h>Zip and Jaz drives
Angelfire
Netscape Navigator
LOGO in elementary school!
Programming with Visual C++ on Windows 3.1(1) and having to reboot my computer after every crash in my code.
Gopher servers, 300 baud BBS, Atari 400...
Messing around with Java Applets to make some funny stretchy face plugin for my primary school Geocities website.
A bit further on, tracking down missed semicolons to fix IE6.
Dreamweaver. Thanks to that experience, I never became a web developer. Haha
It seems not enough people even know floppy disk - I have used 5.25 inch floppy disks ("High Density") of whopping 1.2 MB capacity.
tnx
I remember toggling a bootloader into core on a PDP-11.
I remember when you had to type \A to a teletype to enter a lower case 'a' in Unix.
repeat 72 [repeat 360 [fd 1 rt 1] rt 5]
When Flash websites were new and cool and everyone wanted one
IBM Macro Assembler - on 80 column cards.
Windows 2.0
Z80 machine code on ZX81 and Spectrum, Lisp machines, Livescript for Netscape.
Games listings printed on magazines for my Commodore 16.
Using 8" disks to boot a CP/M machine with a 12" 10MB (yes, MB) hard drive that weighed about 10Kg (just the hard drive).
Debugging with the front panel switches on a PDP-11/70.
When you couldn't assume that a browser had "console.log"
GW basic/ Q Basic
The YayQuery Podcast 🌈🦄🎙 (Linking to the wayback machine, because images on their website are now broken.
<marquee>Using Netscape Navigator | First interaction to web development with IE5</marquee>
Launching C console using this floppy disk and also saving program on to the same disk.
REPEAT 4 [FD 40 RT 90]
Clearfix used to be the biggest hack in positioning.
DASD device mounting commands in REXX the OG devops
In Delphi 6, "file" was a keyword XD
(The IDE was amazing at the time though)
🐢
Css micro clearfix hack
At some point, I was proud of using jQuery and WordPress 😅😅
Editing Cobol in edlin on an AIX system.
Vbscript , ie6
Having to program games in assembly. Oh, and HTTP 1.0 was ratified the year I graduated 😀
BASIC, CP/M, Pascal, Z80 assembley
C64, Amstrad and MicroBee
I am old enough to remember .NET Framework 1.1
I'm old enough to remember Borland Turbo Pascal
QuickBasic, Visual Basic 4.0, Delphi 1.0, Java 1.0...
No 64-bit PCs.
No Internet access, no Stack Overflow.
Old enough to realize that the Amiga got so many things right.
Run a job on the mainframe. Get the printout on the net morning.
Punch cards, Apple II VRAM segmented but not contiguous (WTF?) 8088 Assembly and Ahhh Turbo Pascal...
snap ! (on 6502) also Z80
I remember web layout by table element. It's about 2000 year. There's no float css rules then.
I remember building games in Borland Delphi. Creating interfaces was made by drag-n-drop components from a library to a canvas. Magic 🌟
Visual foxpro
Frontpage anda time when the tag was cool.
BASIC on the ZX Spectrum and BBC micro
li $v0, 4
Ajax (XMLHttpRequest) was really mind blowing stuff... then came Comet (HTTP long polling), which sounded like science fiction.
WBMP
Redundancy vs Dependency
Playing a Fortran version of Adventure on a DEC PDP 11
Writing a tic-tac-toe game on an IBM 5100 series in APL.
Oracle Power Objects shop.oreilly.com/product/978156592...
I could never make it work.
Typing in whole games from magazines on my Amstrad CPC 6128. Trying to grasp Basic from the printed manual.
Not in software development, but I remember getting into Neopets pages to change the HTML and CSS from it.
That's oddly what got me into web dev.
The release of JavaScript
I'm old enough to remember vb 6.0.
Microsoft front-page
The feel of the rubber keys on the ZX Spectrum and the sound the tapes made when you loaded games...
Programming with 1Kb of RAM.
Solaris computer labs.
vi original as a text editor.
My undergrad class wasn't allowed to use vi as it was too resource intensive! I think we had to fall back on ed or em....
When numbering lines, always go up in 10's because you need to leave space later for inserting further lines.
Variables can only be 2 characters long (C64 Basic)
hpux
The internet arriving by mail in a CD with a yellow man running towards something on the cover.
Oh and NetZero for when the yellow man stops running for free :)
I'm not too old, but in school while learning about programming, my first program was written in visual basic 6. Also remember using Windows 98.
Where the "wow" was how freaking huge and noisy they were. :p
Learning JCL, then graduating from Hollerith cards to TSO.
Visual Basic 6.
It was actually the first programming language my father taught me in late elementary school years.
Turing (the programming language not the legendary mathematician), Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic.
SOUND 1000, 20
VT100
Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
Dialing up with 1200bps modem to FidoNet BBSes.
DBase & Clipper.
Later, the Turbo C IDE !!!
6502
qbasic
Macromedia Dreamweaver :D
Linking code by literally cutting and pasting paper tapes.
When PHP file extensions were php2 and php3
Haha I remember "programming" in FoxPro...
program PascalIsWeird;
uses crt;
var
Windows 98
IE6
a little bit of action script (I wrote a simple game)
"leisure suit larry" was all the rage while I was in college.
retrogames.cz/play_493-DOS.php?lan...
I'm old enough to remember how stunned I was when I wrote my first code on my ZX Spectrum telling it to print something and it did.
wow....I'm old :)
JQuery mobile... i was in love with that
with Ada.Strings.Unbounded; use Ada.Strings.Unbounded;
From Ada95 But I am not that old :P
class component in react
First ever program I wrote in BASIC in 6th grade:
10 PRINT "This class is cool!"
20 PRINT "But I don't understand it"
30 GOTO 10
Or something...
Life could not go on without //SYSUDUMP DD SYSOUT=A
Holding up two versions of code, printed on a dot matrix printer on green bar paper, one on top of the other, up to the light to see where the differences were.
"4 Out of memory" the zx Spectrum had only 16kb of RAM...
BASIC, IRC in 1993 (chatting with people all over the WORLD...in real time!), my dad's Apple Macintosh classic, dial-up :)
96 column punched card sorters, removeable disk packs
That back when I started, you were receiving a programming book with your computer.
Dowloading ie4 which took over 36 hours on a 14.4k modem. Installing redhat 5 for the first time and calling a Linux support line for help getting my video card working in x11.
Using BASIC to make a diy screensaver
ARPANET email address.
Macromedia Flash
Microsoft Office FrontPage
RCS being replaced by CVS as the go-to SCM.
6502 and Z80 assembly.
Floating point bug in intel processors
And of course, punched cards and punched tapes.
Memory expansion cards with drivers to switch them. Because of addressing limitation.
VBScript for my feedback forms.
No web, 8 char limit on vars, no pixels just 22 * 80 char screen size, database is a dbf file .... No mouse,
I dissembled Windows games and debugged and edited the x86 assembly to circumvent the CD check on load because I was too lazy to switch CDs all the time.
Sprites on the C64.
How I built web pages using wapka.mobi and xtgem.com in my early days of web development.
When HTML5 was a thing.
PD
FD 6
RT 90
PU
FD 3
RT 90
PD
FD 6
RT 90
PU
FD 3
RT 90
FD 3
RT 90
PD
FD 3
PU
FD 1
LT 90
PD
BK 3
PU
FD 4
Typing C0 F0 00 on my Elf II's hex keypad to do a long jump to address F000 to enter the monitor.