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The man with the bushiest beard is Gordon Letwin. He single-handedly cost IBM a trillion dollars by making Windows do multi-tasking, killing OS/2 with less than 100 lines of code. I saw his photo in the 90s, and it still haunts me. I'm an ex-Windows API programmer. I gave up when they changed their database access APIs too many times.
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)
Think about developing for Arduino with software running on an Arduino.
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.
They also did a cut down version of BASIC for the Model 1, Level 1 machine, without floating point and single letter variables A-Z (!) It had just two string variables A$ and B$. It had precisely three error messages: "How?", "What?" and "Sorry". They squeezed that into a 4K ROM.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I LOVE the sound of the 10 cps teletypes. The cadendes him while at rest and the monotonous printing...
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)
Would they want to be employed in such an environment? Imagine spending long hours trying to fit your code into 128k?
And besides, there are people who enjoy it: the entire 64k and 4k demoscene categories live because it's an interesting challenge.
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.
Whereas today we have Android.