Ask HN: How different was the software industry when you first started out? - armaizadenwala
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tomohawk
When I started, TCP/IP was in the process of vanquishing other network stacks.

C or possibly Fortran or Pascal were the main languages. Although, skill with
assembly was often necessary to work around buggy or non-performant compilers.

Information was shared on dialup BBSs - access to the internet was rare or
expensive.

If you wanted to know something, you bought a book or got a job at a place
that did that thing and learned from others.

x86 was just one of many possible hardware choices.

Companies were so desperate for people who could write software, I knew people
who were hired right out of high school because they could program. They
instantly made more money than their teachers.

Upon discovering UNIX and X11, a whole new world opened up. Learning that
ecosystem has really paid off as I've been able to more or less ride that wave
for decades.

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ksaj
In the early 90's, everything was client/server where I worked. If you
couldn't fix your problem from the command line, there was something really
wrong with the software itself. If the database broke, it was perfectly normal
to fire up a command line client and manually enter SQL queries to find the
bug.

Before the decade was up, the overall belief was if you had to use the command
line to fix a problem, there was something really wrong with the software
itself. But you wouldn't use the command line to debug it. There is a reason
penetration testers still use the command line so extensively to this day. I
pity developers who don't get to learn what you can do from "underneath" since
it is often so much more efficient.

The funny thing was, it was all client/server, but both the server and the
client were powerful. Then things got monolithic and power was taken away from
the client. And now that we're still reaping the benefits of Moore's Law, our
clients are super powerful again, but we moved the server portion to "the
cloud" which may or may not have simplified things. It's starting to look like
the mainframe days again - just more efficient.

The takeaway is that no matter how you see things right now, it'll be
deconstructed and reconstructed forever -- even if it doesn't really need to
be. There is a lot of money being made on change for change's sake.

ADDITIONAL: A big thing back then was how information got shared so freely in
the 80's and early 90's. It was easy to get into conversations about
Artificial Life (for example) directly with folks at the various national
laboratories. Once the Internet started to become commercialized, it was all
about keeping secrets and profits - even on things that were mundane or
reasonably well known to technical folk. Patent trolling really messed things
up. There is still some openness, but it isn't as casually free as it was
then.

Having said that, I really love how technology is evolving. Look at Raspberry
Pi. In the 90's, you couldn't afford to build your own super computer to learn
parallel coding, and cpu's were single core, so you couldn't really even fake
it all that well. Now you can build some really amazing things on the cheap,
with all the available sensors, etc, and of course, Arduino.

Perhaps sharing didn't really die. It just became more focused.

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chrisbennet
When I started (1985) there was no web/internet to speak of. Development was
for desktop apps and embedded.

