31–40 of 406 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always wondered why the desktop revolution didn't really take off until the 90s after seeing that the Mac was released in the early 80s.
Cheap IBM PC clones running pirated videogames on Windows sparked the "real" boom of PCs in homes. Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake etc.
This was the time of the Turbo-button. Programs were made for 4.77 MHz IBM PC, so you had to slowdown the 30 MHz by default. The Turbo speed was mostly useless, and so it seemed to be the ultimate end of computer development. Achually for 10 years nothing exciting happened. Until maybe 1992 when you could install your very own Unix.
I always wondered why the desktop revolution didn't really take off until the 90s after seeing that the Mac was released in the early 80s.
i better not tell employers that I haven't touched a physics text book in the last 10 years
> "It's not a video games major." If it was true in the 80s, it was certainly true in the early 2000s when I was getting my CprE degree. I met quite a few people who were studying ComS or CprE for reasons that can be summed up as, "I built my own computer, I like video games, people said I'm good with computers, so I should be a Computer Science/Computer Engineering major!" They rarely lasted more than a semester or…
Embedded dev and firmware both seem to pay comparatively poorly, despite the expertise required to do it well. Last year I discussed a number of contracts in this area, and when I found how much was on offer, they were all distinctly low compared with other contracts.
OS dev, I will grant you, can pay well, eg kernel development, graphics drivers, storage layers. I think that's driven by servers and mobile devices more than embedded.
> If you can write solid C, ring 0/EL3 doesn't scare you off, or you can figure out how to cram 10 pounds of hard realtime code into a 5 pound microcontroller... yeah, you'll go far.
Oh if only! Doing that stuff is fun.
I think cramming hard realtime into microcontrollers is best kept for hobby time if "coin" is what you're after though.
Perhaps it's different for big, serious controller projects (like say a Mars rover or satellite), but I think mostly, embedded/microcontroller type things seem to be paid closer to mid-level electronic engineering levels. I don't know why, because there's a lot of expertise involved, but electronic engineering seems to pay considerably less than software at the moment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always wondered why the desktop revolution didn't really take off until the 90s after seeing that the Mac was released in the early 80s.
Cheap IBM PC clones running pirated videogames on Windows sparked the "real" boom of PCs in homes. Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake etc.
In 1982 the MIT EECS department was trying to encourage students to pick other majors.* By ‘84 they didn’t need to.
* posters in the Infinite Corridor that read, “Course 6 got you down? Change majors!”
Edit: That crab stuffed fillet sounds good
Was this the actual feeling at the time? Or just one reporters perspective, spun into a story. I feel like the ad for $7.95 prime rib is probably a more relevant data point from the past than this article. Edit: Gourmet House: https://www.bismarckcafe.com/blogs/260/remembering-gourmet-h...
Entered college in 2001 just as the dot-com bubble was bursting. Freshman year graduating seniors were still pretty optimistic. Sophomore year I declared as a physics major, despite having worked at a dot-com and enjoying programming for fun, as a bunch of family friends started floating "Why would you go into software when all the jobs are being outsourced to India anyway?" Junior year I knew that I liked programmin…
Like Professor Frink said: "I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them"
I entered Waterloo in 2002 and I took "Computer Science for Business" where a confidently incorrect lady repeatedly told us all our jobs would be outsourced to India so we should all be managers instead.
20 years later and that person was the worst fucking professor I ever had.
The only reason I knew she was full of shit was because I was a second generation 'good at math class' person. It doesn't matter where you live or what non-logarithmic things cost, dialectical materialism is real.
Fast forward to now, and there's about 250 incoming CS undergrads without much student body expansion.
This was the time of the Turbo-button. Programs were made for 4.77 MHz IBM PC, so you had to slowdown the 30 MHz by default. The Turbo speed was mostly useless, and so it seemed to be the ultimate end of computer development. Achually for 10 years nothing exciting happened. Until maybe 1992 when you could install your very own Unix.
I always wondered why the desktop revolution didn't really take off until the 90s after seeing that the Mac was released in the early 80s.
I got my first computer, a Mac, in 1986. That was exciting for me, but I really felt that the revolution had happened when I got a modem in 1992 and connected first to a local BBS and then, a couple of years later, to the Internet itself.