Is it just me or are they not smiling in any of the pictures :(
Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
31–40 of 87 posts
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#32Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#33Is it just me or are they not smiling in any of the pictures :(
That is true, but you can't infer they didn't enjoy their jobs.
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#34Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#35And this is what these folks are up to now. http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-1978-photo-2011-1?o... Some of them have done reasonably well.
After that, it doesn't look like she did much else. She raised her children and became a volunteer Not a great way to phrase things...
I agree, that is shameful. Each year I take a week of from work to care for my 2 children when my wife goes out of town. Hardest week of my entire year!
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#36If it were possible to send a modern software engineer back in time to that era, would they have any usable or employable skills in such an environment? (besides the uncanny ability to correctly predict the future)
I could probably crank out a workalike clone of DOS 1.0 in a week or two :-)
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#37And this is what these folks are up to now. http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-1978-photo-2011-1?o... Some of them have done reasonably well.
After that, it doesn't look like she did much else. She raised her children and became a volunteer Not a great way to phrase things...
Phrased as perceived. The author is probably too young to appreciate what his mother likely did for him. Becoming a parent has a tendency to change your perspective on parenthood.
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#38If it were possible to send a modern software engineer back in time to that era, would they have any usable or employable skills in such an environment? (besides the uncanny ability to correctly predict the future)
Would they want to be employed in such an environment? Imagine spending long hours trying to fit your code into 128k?
Try 64K on a PDP-11. Or writing assembly to fit into (say) 16K of ROM on a Z-80 or 6502; that's terrifying, because ROM is forever and you do a 6-8 week spin if you make a mistake. (EEPROMs? Sure, at about 8X the cost of a ROM).
Mostly you'd be up against:
- No Intenet to look up reference material. For that you have books. I'm not sure how much of a revolution the online Unix man pages were, but I'd not worked on any other system that had that kind of documentation. Hope you have lots of bookshelf space (I did :-) ).
- No GUIs anywhere. There was Emacs, kind of. Mostly you got along with ed and regexprs.
- Frustrating toolchains; pre-ANSI C, with 7 characters of significant symbols on earlier systems. I don't remember if any Unix debuggers had symbol information, but they were all command-line driven at the assembly level, with no source information. That's okay, you could pretty much tell where you were by the assembly, because the optimizers were terrible.
- Email? Hoo boy. Might as well just go across the hall to talk to somebody, because unless you were on ARPANET that's about all the farther your email would get.
It'd be frustrating, but kind of fun.
Nice things:
- Tinier software. You've got skillz dealing with hundred thousand line programs. Things were smaller back then, mostly.
- No security worries. I don't know whether to laugh or cry, but DES was pretty controversial (the whole 56-bit key thing) and US citizens couldn't say anything to foreigners about crypto. No network, no crypto, right? (Unix passwords were encrypted with a rotor engine similar, and I think that salts came later).
- Boot times are about the same then as now. :-)
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#39Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#40And this is what these folks are up to now. http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-1978-photo-2011-1?o... Some of them have done reasonably well.
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