A lot changed in 14 years, but this reminds me of the video of a visit to id Software in 1993: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65xJfVkiaI
Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
61–70 of 87 posts
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#62If 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?
You can still find jobs today where you need to fit all code into 512 instructions and you only have 32 or 64 bytes of RAM (e.g. a low-end PIC12 IIRC).
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#63If 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?
128k?!
Heh. Heh heh.
As if.
Try less than 16k. Less than 8k in may cases. Certainly well less than 64k.
Oh, and it was an absolute blast fitting code into that space.
In fact, my first computer of my very own was a 1802 based single board I wire-wrapped my self. I had loads of fun coding up programs in the 1K of RAM I had at first.
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#64Earlier 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 sort-of miss nursing a flotilla of chain printers for IBMs now. Sort of.
A former coworker had a story from when he used to service those things. He was doing a cleaning and was tossing the solvent-soaked rags into a garbage can on the other side of the printer door. Someone came by and tossed a cigarette into the can - managed to blow out quite a few ceiling tiles. He was always a bit hard of hearing but I never determined if it was connected to this incident or not.
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back then it took a week just to compile DOS 1.0.
You both exaggerate a bit. Sure you could knock out a proof of concept for DOS in a week, but it would takes months to get the nitty gritty details right. And assemblers were pretty spry back then, they had to be, and you didn't write an OS in anything higher level.
MASM 1.0 was hardly spry, it had a linear symbol table, meaning that it took exponential time as the size of the program increased. Plus, it crashed a lot, and I mean a lot. Every crash meant a tedious reboot, making development very slow.
I'd write a cross-assembler that ran on the PDP-10. That's probably what Microsoft did, as I find it hard to believe that MASM 1.0 could have been used to compile DOS.
I'd also write the DOS clone in C, running it on the 10 with an emulator. Then I'd hand-translate it to assembler.
Remember, DOS 1.0 fit on a 160K floppy, including the numerous utilities thrown in. That isn't much code, even assembler code.
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#66If 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 don't think some modern engineers would be successful back then because today many rely on the abundance of online resources, code schools, and such. I was only 2 at that time but when I learned programming on an Apple II+ a few years later I was entirely dependent on having a mentor (my father). I wouldn't have known where to go for help or what books to read otherwise. There was no concept of going online as far…
Old manuals go a long way towards understanding the computers they describe though. I've been nothing short of impressed with any manual I've found that was made before 1990.
Maybe because computers were not so complex yet so you could actually fit their basic operation/commands in a few hundred pages.
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#67The 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.
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
You both exaggerate a bit. Sure you could knock out a proof of concept for DOS in a week, but it would takes months to get the nitty gritty details right. And assemblers were pretty spry back then, they had to be, and you didn't write an OS in anything higher level.
MASM 1.0 was hardly spry, it had a linear symbol table, meaning that it took exponential time as the size of the program increased. Plus, it crashed a lot, and I mean a lot. Every crash meant a tedious reboot, making development very slow. I'd write a cross-assembler that ran on the PDP-10. That's probably what Microsoft did, as I find it hard to believe that MASM 1.0 could have been used to compile DOS. I'd also wri…
Paul Allen confirmed (in his books) that in the early years Microsoft used PDP's a lot to emulate smaller hardware. In fact the very first Basic was developed without ever having the physical Intel CPU, only the Intel manuals.
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#69If 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)
He'd mop the floor with them. Systems, languages, environments, etc., etc., were trivial then compared to today. I worked back then in a few "labs" that looked a lot like that.
Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
#70Gordon Letwin went on to troll OS/2 users in the early 1990's on Usenet. He had some sort of bet that Windows would have a specific feature (multitasking?) before OS/2. The bet was the loser would fly the winner to any city the winner desired (probably US) for dinner.
I was the one on the other side of that bet (not under this name.) It was multiprocessing. I said OS/2 would be there first and he said NT would. I'm not sure who won but we were pissed off at each other enough by the end of it, with some weird threats having been made, that dinner was pretty much out of the question.
Odd that you would remember that. I thought I was probably the only one who did.