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Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)

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Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)

#81

Post by melling »

DonGateley wrote: post #70
melling wrote: post #11

Gordon 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.

I was there as the 'melling'. Trolling the Internet was more fun when you didn't have to worry about down votes and karma. :-). I tried to stay reasonable but the OS/2 guys were rapid. Those were the days before Microsoft was "evil" and people rooted for them against IBM. It might be time to root for Microsoft again.

Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)

#83

Post by gambiter »

jameshart wrote: post #56

For those of us who've spent our entire careers in the networked, computerized office, it's interesting to realize that at the time Microsoft was setting the goal of having a computer on every desk, there wasn't even a computer on every desk at Microsoft .

Given that we still haven't achieved the paperless offices that many want, sometimes I start feeling like not much has changed over the last couple decades, but this album really illustrates the difference. It is rather humorous to look at just how much PAPER they used in development. Developers using paper binders of documentation, tractor feed prints of code, etc... it's nice that at least those days are mostly over!

Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)

#84

Post by ralphc »

thought_alarm wrote: post #18

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 got my CS degree in 1984 and did programming on my own from 1977. I'm still in development so I can be your time traveler. Yes and no? If you've taken the GUI, drag & drop components route I think you'd have trouble. Another big sticking point would be if you've only worked in languages with automatic garbage collection. My opinion is you need to have malloc and free, or the equivalent in assembly etc. ingrained in you to get it right, to make sure your routines free up memory no matter the exit points. Of course you could be a modern Linux C programmer using vi and you'd be their ninja rockstar on day one. Comparing the two eras I'd say you could do a lot less back then but you were expected to do a lot less. Standing up a database, using a connector to it in your language, getting input from the user to put in the database; 1-2 days now, weeks or more back then.

Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)

#85

Post by kabdib »

WalterBright wrote: post #65
mark-r wrote: post #57

Earlier 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…

There were fast assemblers. The SC assembler on the Apple II did maybe 1,000 lines a second. The x86 assembler from Digital Research was pretty fast too. You could play games with RAM disks and so forth.

The thing about cross-development on a mini or mainframe that killed you was the download time. I did cross-assembly at Atari, and it was always the download time that took soooo longggg. Wrote a few smart downloaders while I was waiting for dumber ones to finish. 9600 baud sucks hard.

Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)

#86

Post by aswanson »

pcurve wrote: post #43
aswanson wrote: post #25

I love the 70s computing aesthetic along with the fashion. So unapologetically idiosyncratic.

Just curious, what do you find idiosyncratic about the 70s computing aesthetic?

I dig the gigantic, starship enterprise-like interface. LEDs and buttons, geek nirvana: http://www.technikum29.de/shared/photos/rechnertechnik/dec/p...

Re: Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)

#87

Post by superasn »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #76
pcurve wrote: post #7

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.

Could someone put this into a pastebin or something please? Somehow I can't go beyond the "we decided to investigate this" first page, either through the 'One page' or through 'Slides' (and there's no 'next'-'prev' either anywhere).

Thank you for that. I've tried disabling uBlock, run it in FF, but nothing seems to work. I was already coming up with conspiracy theories wrt my ISP. Guess their site is broken.

P.S. From what I can understand the site tries to load the page via AJAX on a local domain but is denied access. So while the top URL is www.businessinsider.com the content is being loaded from www.businessinsider.in (at least in my case) which your browser blocks as no 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present. Here is a mirror by the way [1]

[1] https://filetea.me/t1sizFxkd5jQVyhAq9LjUUkDw

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