51–60 of 87 posts
If 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 :-)
If 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)
Of course they would have usable skills - general understanding of computing, superb analytical minds, 36 years of advancement in education, excellent problem solving ability. At most they would have to learn a new lexicon of programming languages and operating systems which are FAR less complicated than the current range of languages and design patterns software engineers must master today. A few weeks (days?) of st…
So much paper.
Those noisy line printers must have been running constantly all day long.
Towards the bottom of the page, there are two pictures of the mainframe that they used. The desktop computers in the other pictures were probably just terminals that were connected to it. It was a DECSYSTEM 2020. It ran the TOPS-20 operating system. The text of the link calls it a minicomputer, but the links that I found called it a mainframe. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/digital/... https://en…
Many many hours were spent in Margaret Jacks Hall and CERAS at Stanford writing code and playing with the "net." Perhaps one of the best articles of the time was in Rolling Stone Magazine, February 1982 entitled "Hackers in Paradise"
http://www.designersnotebook.com/Scrapbook/Hackers_in_Paradi...
It was indeed a rich and yeasty environment in which I learned many things about computers, programming, networks, and friendship. Alas, VMS ruled the roost at DEC and I never really enjoyed that OS, switching to Unix in the mid-1980's and never looking back. That Unix adopted the COMND JSYS style of command completion made one feel right at home.
Oh, and if you have a mind to, you can fire up an emulator with code from http://klh10.trailing-edge.com/
Remember, FisK.
If 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)
Today's CS graduates are much better educated than people in those days. Early programmers wasted much of their energy fighting the platform, reverse engineering undocumented features, and haggling vendors for better access. Today, you just focus on the problem and take the underlying platform for granted. Free Software has liberated computing from vendor-reliance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could probably crank out a workalike clone of DOS 1.0 in a week or two :-)
Back then it took a week just to compile DOS 1.0.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those noisy line printers must have been running constantly all day long.
Actual line printers were pretty quick and wouldn't have been running for long periods of time, and were likely to be tucked away in a back room somewhere. Now get a few 30-character-per-second DECWriters buzzing... And those were a vast improvement over the 10-CPS Teletypes that were the rage before video terminals were affordable.
And 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...
...is what I was going to reply with, with examples of how replacing the component parts of the sentence may change how it's interpreted. Then I looked at the source article, and saw that it's a followup sentence after describing how she sued Microsoft for sexual discrimination. Regardless of how it was meant to be interpreted, that's some pretty poor awareness of context on the author's part.
If 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)
Perhaps cheating, since I started programming in that era, but I'm sure I'm not the only one that still has remembers assembly language techniques (if not even the mnemonics for one or more 8 bit chips), as well as remembering at least a handful of BASIC dialects, the finer points of bumming cycles and bytes to fit in tight spaces, etc.
In fact, though I certainly don't want to give up my curent tech, my primary emotion looking at those pictures was wistful nostalgia.