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January 21, 2022 09:49 am GMT

Back in My Day...

It has come to my attention...

It has come to my attention that I am old. I know, that's not a shock to most of you, but it's quite shocking to me. Tonight I left a detailed answer on Reddit about XML usage that inspired me to write this. I will attempt to refrain from commenting on if things were better back then, but instead focus on what development and the tools was like back then.

This will require some background on my part as I approached my career from a very non-traditional path. I got my first computer in 1984 when I was 13. It was a Commodore VIC-20. I had one published game for it on cassette tape, and two published games on cartridge. It was hooked up to a 10-inch black-and-white TV purchased at a pawn shop, and eventually I got a plotter printer for it, which slowly changed my world when programming as prior to getting a printer it was impossible to visualize your entire program.

Commodore 1520 Plotter Demonstration

Here's an example of Commodore BASIC that could be written directly on the VIC-20. Note that the VIC-20 had a fixed character resolution of 22 columns with 23 rows.

10 REM - THIS NUMBER GUESSING GAME IS BASED ON GUESS AND HI-LO20 REM - FROM DAVID H. AHL'S BOOK BASIC COMPUTER GAMES.30 PRINT "======="40 PRINT " ZERO!"50 PRINT "=======":PRINT60 PRINT "I CHOOSE A NUMBER BETWEEN 1 AND 100.":PRINT70 PRINT "YOU MUST ZERO IN ON IT IN 7 GUESSES.":PRINT80 PRINT "I TELL YOU TO GUESS HIGHER, OR LOWER.":PRINT90 INPUT "PRESS ENTER TO START. READY"; START$100 NUM = INT(100*RND(1))110 PRINT:PRINT "====================":PRINT120 PRINT "I HAVE CHOSEN A NUMBER ":PRINT:NUM130 FOR COUNT = 1 TO 7140 PRINT "GUESS ";COUNT;150 INPUT ": "; GUESS$160 GUESS = VAL(GUESS$)170 IF GUESS = NUM GOTO 250180 IF GUESS > NUM THEN PRINT "GUESS LOWER"190 IF GUESS < NUM THEN PRINT "GUESS HIGHER"200 PRINT210 NEXT COUNT220 PRINT:PRINT "YOU'VE USED ALL OF YOUR GUESSES."230 PRINT "THE NUMBER WAS";NUM240 GOTO 270250 PRINT "YOU GOT IT IN ";COUNT;260 PRINT " GUESSES."270 PRINT280 INPUT "PLAY AGAIN? (Y/N) "; A$290 IF A$ = "Y" THEN GOTO 100300 END

Code was hard to read on screen...

VIC-20 Code

I stuck with the VIC-20 for a couple of years until I got a Coleco Adam, which was my first computer with a modem... a 300 baud modem, which introduced me to the joys of long distance phone bills. Back in the 1980s, Bell was a monopoly controlling all Telephone service in the USA. An anti-trust suit saw the breakup of Ma Bell into regional carriers such as Bell South, Verizon and Pacific Bell. It also opened up the market for long distance calls to competitors that paid the Baby Bells to access their networks, the most significant of which were MCI and Sprint (the same Sprint that just merged with T-Mobile). MCI was focused on providing the cheapest possible service and they grew rapidly and changed their name to WorldCom to reinforce their goals of being a global competitor. Later, you will see that the ambitions of WorldCom's leadership would reshape the business world and everything in it forever.

The Adam was a great machine that pulled off being three devices at once. When you turned it on, you were presented with a Word Processor that was as good or better than any dedicated Word Processing machine on the market. It was only sold with a massive daisy-wheel printer that was far faster than most dot-matrix printers at the cost of being EXTREMELY loud. Next, the Adam had a complete Colecovision inside it, as it was literally a Colecovision repackaged as a home computer. The third way to use the Adam was as a normal computer where you could use whatever software you could buy or build. The Adam's display was 32x24 characters, which felt absoluely spacious after using the VIC-20, but it couldn't match the 40 characters of it's contemporaries from Commodore 64 and Apple II. The flavor of BASIC distributed with the Adam was Smart Basic, which is a knock-off of Apple Basic. This made it easy and fun to work with because most schgools that had a computer lab only had Apple computers, and the programming schools taught there were typically usable directly on the Adam.

By the mid 80's, the Commodore 64 had established itself as the dominant system in Home Computing. An entire culture sharing software at disk parties had sprung up where teens and young adults who liked to date teens would spend entire weekends devoted to sharing their experiences gaming, coding and hacking, which at the time meant a range of related activities that included downloading games from Bulletin Board Systems, cracking games and releasing them to Bulletin Board Systems, creating Demos which are pieces of art to show off programming skillz, and just hanging out with people who you admired for their skills. The social hierarchy was simple on first look, there were Elites and Lamerz. Elites did stuff, Lamerz leeched stuff and stroked the egos of Elites to make sure their supply of fresh games never went dry. Large International groups such as FBR and ESI were coveted for their quality and ability to produce cracked games that often fixed bugs in the original that publishers never bothered to patch, because patching was expensive.

The Software Industry Starts Evolving

There was a publishing company called SSI that got the license to produce Advanced Dungeons and Dragons branded games, and they were amazing. The first game was called Pool of Radiance and completely redefined expectations that consumers had for quality of both content and code. SSI actually patched PoR at least once, which required mailing a whole set of eight disks to customers who paid the shipping for the patch. Although patching business software like this was already common, it was extremely rare in the Home market, but it started a precedent for providing quality that exploded at the time as newer systems such as the Mac and Amiga were much larger platforms that required more rigor to design for and thus customers bought software fully expecting update to fix bugs, even for A-list games. Those newer machines had the advantage of 800K+ floppy drives, which greatly reduced the number of disks needed to distribute software. The eight floppies of Pool of Radiance could fit on a single 3.5" Floppy of the Commodore 1581 drive, but so few people had them that they never took off. Also, Commodore ran into a supply crunch obtaining 3.5" mechanisms for Amiga 500 systems and cannibalized all of the 1581's in the supply chain for their mechanisms as an Amiga could not be sold without its floppy drive. This crunch lasted long enough that the 1581 became unobtanium which had the effect of driving many users to abandon 8-bit Commodore altogether and move on to newer systems, which was pretty much split between the Amiga and IBM PC. The Mac was out of the question mostly due to Steve Jobs' hubris (making many unsubstantiated claims about Apple's market share when Commodore was literally sell 20x as many computers as Apple) and the Atari ST was also out of the question as Commodore's founder and CEO had been fired and went to Atari with the express purpose of taking down Commodore, and the ST was designed by Commodore engineers while working at Commodore who left when Jack was fired and went with him to Apple. Today that would be a clear indicator for the public to pivot, but in the 1980s, people were much more brand loyal and the relative investment in a Commodore 64 with a couple of disk drives, dedicated monitor and software that was typically $29 new could be very large, so moving to a completely incomptible platform was a non-starter for many people, and also the main reason that the last computer made by Commodore was not an Amiga, but a Commodore 64c.

The Beginnings of My Career

So, this is the environment I grew up in. I started coding in 1984 and have never looked back. When I graduated HS in 1989, I went straight to Tennessee Tech to learn computer engineering. A series of very unfortunate events derailed that idea, but I was exposed to Pascal, Fortran and COBOL, which completely changed my perspective on computers and ultimately led to my transition to PCs and "big-boy" programming where you actually get paid.

From there I spent most of the 1990's doing odd jobs until I landed at Sunbelt Office Trader in Naples, Florida. There I managed the reconditioning of PC bought at auctions and then created their first website in 1995 using Commerce Builder and hosted onb Windows NT 3.51 on a server we purchased at auction and co-located at local ISP that was the only private company in Collier County with a full T1 line. The ease that I was picking up new languages and concepts motivated me to return to school, but this time at Austin Peay State University, where Dr. Bruce Myers took me under his wing and helped me navigate college life, which even at 26-years old was overwhelming due to my then undiagnosed ASD. I also met my first wife that first semester in school and that had a profound effect on my approach to life and responsibility which I greatly attribute to me making it 3 full years in school with a 3.6 GPA with double-majors in Computer Science and Accounting. Even though family responsibilities truncated my school career, I only had two classes left in my Computer Science major and was well prepared for my first job after school.

There is just so much to tell, this is really the tippity-tip of the iceburgh.


Original Link: https://dev.to/sharpninja/back-in-my-day-1ije

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