How was programming back in the days?

[sergent]

All the programmers here that were programming for a really long time, tell us, the next generation of programmer, what programming was like back in 80`s and 90`s. What had changed since then (for example: "back in my days memory was really expensive, and we never wasted it! I wrote a FORTRAN compiler in Real Mode Flat Model, with only 64k of memory in Assembly!! Nowadays the memory is cheap and you cannot fit "Hello world!" on 64k!" or "Back in the days, we did not have 1's! We had to write a databae using only 0s!!".

[almostbob]

programming in the 70s,
loading an entire business accounting app in 32kb, to leave 32kb for data, ram is ExPeNsIvE
'Hello World' was 16bytes, production code with no included commenting, it just didnt fit
serial terminals, sharing a 9600bit data line
keeping a months work, on a cassette tape in your pocket
'graphics' what is graphics, the lower 128 ascii characters, thats all there is
remote admin, by 300baud dialup, forget page refresh
need a language,, author the language before you use it to write the app

Used to get such a sense of satisfaction from getting it to do anything at all, that you almost didnt notice that it would have been faster to do it with a pencil
ascii art

[sergent]

Sounds sexy. Too bad I wasn`t born at that time :( I think I would have enjoyed the 70`s and making your own mini-computers, and all that low-level programming! I don`t like all the high-level languages. Most of the new programmers don`t even know how computer works nowadays!

[abelLazm]

I am not that much old programmer I started in 2002..... And when I started .net beta version launched, the old 8 CD pack..... and at that time floppy drives were taking their last breaths and there was no facebook and social networking was not the buzz word there we used to say 512 MB RAM Large memory and used a common joke "Oh GOD such a large memory .... Will you sleep in it ??"..... We used to make all the GUI controls by coding as drag and drop facility was not available..... C# was new for even our teachers they made classes of all controls in shared places and we use them in our projects to avoid coding for them every time

[Azmah]

Hey Guys,

What language should I learn?
I'v tried this-and-that but not sure where to stick :/

[Ancient Dragon]

C programming in mid-80s -- zenith 100 computer, 2 floppy drives, no hard drive, 64K 8 MZ RAM, MS-DOS Version 1.0 which did not support sub-directories. The C compiler was on a 5 1/2" floppy in one drive and the data/program in the other drive. Started a compile then go read a book or something, come back in about 1/2 hour and it might be done.

C language was still in its infancy, no function prototypes, which made for very buggy programs.

Programming in 60s: No personal computers, all programs were written in binary and hard-wired the circuits. Glad I wasn't writing programs in those days :)

[itsols]

My first programs were in BASIC on an 8K RAM computer known as the Vic20, from Commodore. This was in 1985. And with an extension cartridge, I got 16K as an upgrade. My first computer at home in 1986, was the wonderful Commodore 64. And unlike the Vic20 and Amstrads, I had my own floppy drive - lol. No more stock file on cassette tape! This was about a foot long and it was one cool gadget. When my colleagues had to wait 20 minutes to load their programs, I had it in around 90 seconds. Hard disk? What's that?

My full colour screen could display an astounding 320px horizontally!

Around the same time I coded on the Commodore PET, Sinclair spectrum, later the Atari, Aquarius, Amstrad and IBM PC-Jr. But by the time the XT came about, we had a 'massive' 384K RAM or somewhere around that.

On my C64, I had Super-C and thus I was drawn to these languages - Pascal and C.

We literally did wonders with these machines and the little resources we had. It's a shame that today not many brains are put into good use. If we oldies team up, we can not only rock the new world but also rule it :)

[sergent]

I am not that much old programmer I started in 2002..... And when I started .net beta version launched, the old 8 CD pack..... and at that time floppy drives were taking their last breaths and there was no facebook and social networking was not the buzz word there we used to say 512 MB RAM Large memory and used a common joke "Oh GOD such a large memory .... Will you sleep in it ??"..... We used to make all the GUI controls by coding as drag and drop facility was not available..... C# was new for even our teachers they made classes of all controls in shared places and we use them in our projects to avoid coding for them every time

Thats not old enough :) I never use drag and drop for my user interface and I too thing C# is new. I used computer with 512 mb of ram just 7 month ago :)

C language was still in its infancy, no function prototypes, which made for very buggy programs.

Really, in 80s?? I thought It was already widely used then. When was it invented 60s or 70s?

[vegaseat]

At the uni a weeks worth of assembly coding was stored in a shoebox full of punch cards. Don't drop those walking to the reader and get them out of order!

[sergent]

wow

[Ancient Dragon]

Really, in 80s?? I thought It was already widely used then. When was it invented 60s or 70s?

The first ansi standard for C language was not officially ratified until 1989. I used Lattice C compiler in those days and they were unable to make it ansi compliant so they lost their entire c compiler business. Their compiler was so buggy that it was unusable. That's when we switched to Microsoft C compiler.

I started programming in the early 90's. It was a great time because it drilled in the habit of conserving resources, and squeezing every bit of performance. It was also a great time because it encouraged more experimental programming.

One downside, however, is that it was easy to fall into writing architecture specific APIs. Another downside is that data types were not properly standardized.

Philosophies that should forever be preserved:
- Define bit fields for flags which are not frequently referenced
- Optimize your code, once stable and tested, to run as efficient as possible
- Know your compiler, programming language, debugger, platform, and APIs
- Write reusable code as often as possible
- Share your knowledge when you've improved upon the knowledge you've gained from others
- Find a creative way to minimize the amount of code you write, while maintaining readability

Philosophies that should be added:
- Use generic type definitions
- Write endian neutral values to disk wherever you can
- Design your APIs to be a generic, even if you're using something like .NET
- Make your API layer as thin as possible