
Ask HN: Old guys, what do you miss about development in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s? - baron816
Sorry for calling you old.
======
mkozlows
On reflection, the thing I miss about web dev in the '90s is the low user
expectations.

Because I was going to say I missed the simplicity of it all -- your front end
was just HTML, no CSS (which didn't exist yet) and only sometimes a smidgen of
Javascript for like light form validation; your back end was just a Perl
script with CGI.pm running behind Apache that rendered that HTML.

No React, no flexbox, no REST API, no microservices, no Docker, no
Kubernetes... but the reason it didn't need any of those things is because it
had a terrible UI, didn't do all that much, and only needed to support trivial
numbers of users whose modems were probably the main bottleneck anyway.

Trying to make modern users happy with '90s era tech would be impossible and
deeply painful.

But it was nice, just for a while, to have a world where people were thrilled
that even a super-basic web application was a thing that existed.

~~~
LeoPanthera
I still make websites this way because no-one told me to stop. They can be
made responsive to things like smartphone browsers which incredibly minimal
changes. No complaints so far.

~~~
didericis
What kind of sites do you make? I’d imagine that avoiding things like react is
fine for a lot of sites that just need a bit of form input here and there and
some nice styling, but that anything relatively big with interactive pieces
would fairly quickly devolve into a difficult to maintain mess without
components. I’ve sort of been trained to think that, though, as I was just
starting development right before libraries like React started to get big. I
remember reading cs books and learning about how important encapsulation and
modularity was and then feeling like I wasn’t really able to apply those
concepts adequately in my really early web projects. React came along and
seemed like the best answer. Do you do something different to organize code
related to more complex frontend user interaction than forms/animations, or do
you find that you just don’t really need complex frontend user interaction for
the websites you make?

~~~
LeoPanthera
Most of the things I've made are not public-facing. I just try to keep things
simple. My sites generally require page loads more than the average single
page application, but they have the advantage of loading faster and working in
nearly any browser, even super old ones.

------
gHosts
The Scrum bullshit didn't exist.

XP was a sane and useful thing before the sc(r)?umbags came along and shat in
the Agile pool.

You could ctrl-u any web page, understand it, and do all the cool things you
actually cared about yourself.

The web peaked before javascript f*cked it up completely.

Nobody played Matryoshka doll's with VM's and Containers, they did real work
that mattered instead.

HTML and CSS standards and browser support for the standards were evolving
semi-sensibly before M$ strangled it and the javascript "html5" spat on the
grave.

Scheme/Lispy Lambda's just worked decades before these halfarsed modern
languages came up with dozens of borked half- baked versions of it.

GUI's were an almighty colossal pain in the proverbial to write, so almost
nobody did that and as a result were about 20 times more productive than they
are today.

Threading implementations were borked, so nobody did that. They used processes
and everything was much better. If you have any sense you will _still_ be
using processes and not threads and your life still will be much better.

An, oh yes, pen plotters were fun to watch. Laser printers are absolutely
wonderful.... but it's like the difference between a wood fire and panel
heater... Which would you rather sit with a whisky in hand and just watch?

I might be an old curmudgeon, but I do have a very longer list of things that
are much better than they were in the Bad Old Days if anyone cares.

Now GET OFF MY LAWN!

~~~
DrScump

      Laser printers are absolutely wonderful.
    

I got to operate IBM 3800 printers in the 1980s. The sight of a laser printer
running at printing-press speed hour after hour, going through a 2' tall box
of continuous-form paper in less than 20 minutes, was just _nuts_.

------
jjav
From the 80s I miss the variety of computer systems at the consumer level.
Apple ][, C64, Tandy Model 3/4 and the CoCo, OS/9 and more. When it became
clear everything would converge to x86, that made me sad. The world is just
that much more boring without variety.

I miss programming in assembly. Slapping together frameworks with some sample
code from Stack Overflow just doesn't provide the same mental satisfaction.

I miss interviewing in the 90s. No white board algorithm puzzles or such
nonsense. Just a conversation to see if your interests matched the role and
you're hired.

(I guess I don't miss the low salaries which were on par with any office
workers in non-tech fields, nothing like today. But the good side was that
everyone was in tech for the sheer love of it, not to make a buck.)

But what I truly miss (nostalgia aside) is when Silicon Valley used to be
about technology. The big names in Silicon Valley were all actual technology
companies: Sun, SGI, HP (the good original HP, not the ink maker). The product
was the technology and the culture reflected that. Engineers were in charge
and the goal was to make better technology.

Today the product is advertising and the goal is just to drive more eyeballs.
Engineers have become commoditized and micromanaged (agile) by PMs who are
driven by advertising goals. (PMs as we know them today did not exist.) Except
for Apple, none of the big names today (FAANG) are tech companies anymore.

~~~
ScottFree
> Today the product is advertising and the goal is just to drive more
> eyeballs. Engineers have become commoditized and micromanaged (agile) by PMs
> who are driven by advertising goals. (PMs as we know them today did not
> exist.) Except for Apple, none of the big names today (FAANG) are tech
> companies anymore.

Does anyone know any tech companies or industries that aren't like this in the
US?

I've been considering saying goodbye to the American market and going to
Europe for a few years and see how things are there first hand. The one thing
that would make me stay is the discovery of an industry or large company that
doesn't micromanage and commoditize programmers.

------
onion2k
Developers being far less critical of other developers.

We were much more positive in the olden days. Back in the 90s you could post
an idea in a developer-oriented usenet group or discussion forum and get
pretty decent feedback. If you do that today there's good chance you're going
to either get nothing back or you're going to be flamed for using an "anti-
pattern". People are far too quick to dismiss things now.

It's probably a function of how everything gets marked with a score now and
every post is social proof, but it's quite annoying regardless.

~~~
mkozlows
You've got a very different memory of Usenet than I do.

~~~
DrScump
Onion2k's experience mirrors mine.

There was a genteel, supportive quality of having a participation base
comprised mostly of sincere, interested readers and posters. There were trolls
even then, for sure, but they were few and were generally embarrassed into an
inert mumbling.

I still remember fondly the debates in comp.lang.c about the first ANSI C
standard proposals. Even Henry Spencer's rants against NOALIAS were
entertaining.

And where user participation got unproductively unruly, moderated groups
served well, like rec.humor.funny.

There was also an open, transparent _process_ for forking groups, generally
along natural fracture lines, and for creating new subgroups.

What ultimately ruined Usenet (IMHO) was a falling signal-to-noise ratio, and
not just because of spam. The opening of the AOL gateway and the resulting
Eternal September proved to be mortal wounds.

------
mingmecca
Speaking as someone who cut my teeth in the 80s and early 90s: I miss the
elitism and exclusivity of it. Nowadays the internet has made it so any
question can be answered within seconds, but back then you had to scrupulously
acquire your information from magazines, Usenet discussions, and just plain
experimenting with the code. As things currently stand, programming has become
a commodity skill that anyone with a room temperature IQ can learn within a
reasonably small time frame. Then, you get on StackExchange and start cobbling
together your app from copypasta provided by other programmers.

Things have been dumbed down considerably.

~~~
maxxxxx
Yeah. In the 90s I met almost no computer scientists. We all came from
different backgrounds and got into programming because we were interested and
liked it. Now we have a lot of people who chose it as a well-paying career.
Nothing wrong with that but it's less fun.

~~~
gHosts
I'm an applied mathematician that worked in those days with chemists,
microbiologists, hydrologists, civil engineers, electronic engineers,
physicists and almost every darn flavour of critter _except_ computer
scientists.

Learnt a lot of interesting stuff.

Most of their code was utter shit to read and maintain... but then so is that
from most recent comp sc graduates...

------
LeoPanthera
That you could buy a book, read it, and then know literally everything about a
particular system. And often that book came with the system.

~~~
cakoose
Turbo Pascal came with reference manuals, but also with instructional books
that taught you OO programming and Windows UI programming from scratch.

They must have been well-written; I didn't really have Internet access, so
there was nowhere else to go if I got stuck. Though I was probably a much more
determined learner back then.

~~~
NikkiA
Borland C++ came in a fucking chest of something like 40 800 page books. Books
on OWL, books on the Win32 API, books on the Win16 API, lots of books.

------
maxxxxx
Worked in SW since early 90s. Back then you didn't have to think much about
security and you could push things to the limit.

Also things were not as "professional". When I started out my boss told me to
figure something out and I would report back weeks or months later. I had the
time to make mistakes and learn from them. Today the young devs are often very
micromanaged and have no freedom.

On the other hand we can do a lot of cool stuff today and it's amazing how
much info is out there. But I think the 90s were more creative. Stuff like
StackOverflow is great. Documentation was MUCH better in the 90s.

~~~
chkaloon
Yes, back in the day we used to consider thinking about security as sand in
the gears of progress. A slog to get through with little payoff.

~~~
majewsky
Sooooo.... like today?

------
kickingvegas
Despite this being an obvious honeypot to out the old people on HN, I'll bite.
There's not much to miss about development practices of yore, except for the
way better emphasis on documentation. I find most software developers today
can't write worth a damn in their development practice. Requirements, specs,
code comments, end user documentation, you name it. Really terrible bar.
Perversely enough though, software developers today who blog can write amazing
documentation on how to code. Go figure. OTOH, to view development in the 70's
to the 00's from an emotional lens, what I miss the most was really living
through the hockey stick of Moore's law. Everything was new and exciting until
it got replaced 18 months later with a newer and more exciting thing. And back
then, you were a sucker to bet against Moore's law. All it took to get a front
row seat to this action was to code.

------
LeoPanthera
I was tempted to write "computers were so slow and lacking in resources that
you were forced to write efficient code". Because efficient code is good,
right?

But I lived through that era and being _forced_ to write efficient code is a
god-damn nightmare. There were so many ideas flying around that you simply
couldn't do because the computing power just didn't exist.

Today people revere things like "vi" but when you were forced to use such
basic utilities because your human/machine interface was a 300 baud modem, or
even a paper teletype, life wasn't so good.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

------
not_kurt_godel
I hope I don't qualify as "old", but I guess I've been programming since the
early 00s...I miss the days when LAMP (+ XAMPP for local development) was
more-or-less state-of-the-art for a website. PHP, despite its numerous deep
flaws, really is a very pleasant way to write frontend code. I think what the
web dev world needs is a modernized version of LAMP which:

* Is trivial to bootstrap

* Is totally serverless/scalable

* Can be run effectively for free with low levels of traffic, like an S3 static website

* Uses a non-broken PHP-like templating language (maybe jinja?)

* Uses Postgres instead of MySQL (ideally without infrastructure to manage, a la Aurora Serverless)

* Somehow intelligently figures out how to split between server-side and client-side rendering - ergo, you write templates like PHP and it seamlessly figures out bits that can be AJAX-ified to avoid full page-loads

If someone could just, like, make that, web development could be as fun as it
was in the days of yore!

~~~
pacifika
Django + stimulus

------
scottcha
Late 90's here. There are two things I miss: 1\. Going to the book store and
looking through the (mostly) O'Reilly books to see what there is to learn or
what new technologies are coming out. 2\. Having a huge pile of 3.5" floppies
(or even CDs) you are using to load the latest version of Visual studio or
whatever and just imagining how much knowledge is contained in those. I think
my copy of VC++ was something like 21 floppies.

------
GrumpyYoungMan
Elegant, tight, and efficient code mattered back in the days when a machine
with a 20 MHz processor and 8 MB of RAM was considered a high-end workstation.
You really had to understand what your hardware, your OS, and your compiler
was doing in order to produce decent software.

Nowadays, such esoterica is relegated to the tiny niches of systems and
embedded development.

~~~
ilaksh
My side project right now is flight control/readout software written in
assembler for the C64 which will control a virtual spacecraft inside of my lua
programmable 3d/physics libretro emulator front end.

I am really enjoying working inside of Turbo Macro Pro. It is an interesting
challenge to make the assembly code efficient and easy to understand.

------
mynegation
Turbo Pascal. Lightning fast compiler, snappy IDE, included graphic library,
simple and beautiful language.

~~~
gHosts
And every damn licence since then has been a frustration and tragic
disappointment.

I was pro-closed source in Turbo Pascal days.... once the licences turned to
complete shit I went pure opensource.

------
rdl
Main thing I miss is the lesser degree of abstraction in doing anything. If
you wanted to build a simple app which just took one input and did a
calculation and returned a result, there were multiple languages, but you
didn't need a huge number of libraries, infrastructure, etc. to deploy it --
you just built the code, compiled it, and distributed a binary (and source,
with a makefile). There was complexity crossplatform (even across unixes), but
there was a period of time in the mid-90s/early 00s where "some form of linux
or a BSD" was all I had to care about, and it was pretty easy.

Also, being able to trivially modify almost anything I used (because it was
largely open source, and simple).

Lots of things were worse, but less abstraction was pretty nice.

------
daly
I miss building my own computer out of TTL chips.

I miss "the front panel" where I could single-step my program and read the
octal / hex off the front panel lights.

I miss debugging my program with a plastic block and a wire to hand-punch
patches into the binary paper tape.

I miss the "user manual" that had circuit diagrams as part of the
documentation.

I miss doing "machine vision" on boxes of punched-card images.

I miss sitting "at the console" of an auditorium-sized "machine room" with a
sea of DASD, watching the PSW flicker as the program counter changed.

I miss analog computers.

I miss coordinating 24 IBM Selectric consoles all "typing out" classical music
(each one tapped out an orchestra instrument). Beethoven's fifth on
selectrics....

I miss playing music by holding my radio next to the mainframe while my
program was running, adjusting the program so it played a song.

I miss hand-designing a 16x16 multiply chip in MOS.

I miss programming plated-wire memory in binary switches to drive a Unimate
robot.

I miss "scoring a complete copy" of the listing of Lisp 1.5 and reading the
source code.

I miss running "the Hadoop algorithm" on a room full of punched card equipment
(Google didn't invent it).

I miss "real programmers" who could solder. And could replace a failing memory
address chip on your core memory board.

Good times.

But now I'm proving a computer algebra system correct. So it's all still good.

Rock on....

~~~
rwallace
> I miss building my own computer out of TTL chips.

That sounds like an interesting project! Can you expand on it? When was this?
How many TTL chips did it take? What other components did you use? What did
you do with the end result?

~~~
bradleyy
You should check out Ben Eater's 8-bit computer from scratch.

[https://eater.net/8bit](https://eater.net/8bit)

There's even a kit for you to build one.

------
crdoconnor
Just the sense that we were on the cusp of some magical, new, civilization
changing thing.

I don't get the same sense that stringing lines of code together can change
the world, largely because, where it could, it mostly already has (I am not a
believer in the latest wave of AI hype).

What we did used to be magic and was met with gasps and now, it's mostly just
expected and complained about if it breaks :/

------
mceachen
> Sorry for calling you old.

Whippersnappers these days are so gosh darn polite.

Writing C code on a SPARCstation and Green Hills compiler/debugger as an
undergrad in 1989, I got used to step-forward, _and step-back_ , in a GUI
environment.

I had no idea that I'd never see that magic "step-back" button again, in C,
C++, MFC, Java, Scala, or a litany of scripting languages and development
environments.

Other people have touched on it, but you could be proficient in literally all
the programming languages back then. There were less than 20. The later
explosion of languages and techniques in common use can be overwhelming, but
has stretched the spectrum available to our craft.

~~~
mceachen
Oh, also: personal computers in the 80s booted into a BASIC prompt. It was a
_terrible_ language to cut your teeth on, but it was there, right in front of
you, and there were magazines and books (at the library and local book store,
on dead trees), that taught fun things (like how to animate sprites, or set
half your screen to graphics mode, or how to poke the midi controller into
croaking out something beepy).

~~~
gHosts
Or "poke" into the interpreter's ram region to do crazy things like shifting
the string store to overlay the graphics ram and clearing the screen faster
than any other technique by creating new blank strings and then poke the
original values you peek'd out of it back.

~~~
mceachen
Or spending afternoons typing in some game that was printed on the back of a
magazine in assembly, and then poke 32768 and poof, game. Magic when you're 9
years old.

~~~
Yetanfou
SYS 32768, not POKE 32768

As an aside, reading and understanding the entire disassembled "kernal" and
BASIC rom for the C-64. All of it taking up less space than just about
anything on just about any site nowadays - in that respect we took a wrong
turn somewhere IMnsHO. Yes, storage is cheap and bandwidth abundant but the
same is true for clean water yet nobody drinks 50 litres of the stuff per day
'just because it is cheap and abundant'...

------
parasubvert
I miss the wonder and awe and naivety that all of this programming is leading
to something better socially/politically or for lifestyle. In many ways it
did. It also may have created more problems than it solved.

Also, I miss the joy of learning all the deep features and idiosyncrasies of a
computer - its instruction set, I/O routines, timing and interrupt tricks,
etc. These days I am focused more on Big Hairy Goals and complex systems. Fun
of a different sort.

~~~
gHosts
Are the Good Old days before computers became those things the secretary
didn't quite know how to use.... it was downhill all the way from there.

------
karterk
There were very few ready-made frameworks and libraries to get things done, so
it was fun writing those meta libraries that runs your business. Of course,
purely from a business point of view, this is not ideal and is extremely
wasteful. At the same time, it really helped me understand the systems that we
use. Maybe that's why people survived without Stackoverflow :)

In comparison, modern software development is almost all about composing or
stitching together a bunch of different services. There are other complexities
around orchestration and breadth of the systems involved, but very rarely one
goes deep into a particular technical problem.

After a really long time, I'm getting a kick out of working on a highly
technical problem: an open source search engine from scratch
([https://github.com/typesense/typesense](https://github.com/typesense/typesense)).
It has been deeply rewarding and definitely something that's missing in a
typical web oriented software development career today.

------
7402
I miss job interviews (from both sides!) where a few people read the
candidates' resumes, asked them deep and intelligent questions about what they
had worked on in the past, and then made a hiring decision, without further
quizzes, take-home projects, or probationary work-to-hire contracts.

~~~
maxxxxx
I agree. My first interviews were like "You have no clue about C but you are
good at FORTRAN and you are smart. No problem. You'll pick it up in a second.
Read this book before you start.".

~~~
gHosts
Ah, the good old, "Read this pile of books", call me when you done style of
onboarding.

~~~
notacoward
For my second programming job my manager handed me a pile of books and AFAICT
that was the last thing he did before he resigned.

------
DavideNL
An office/room with only 1 or 2 developers (versus "open office spaces" now.)

My experience is that it was much better for concentration, creativity and
productivity...

------
chopdcheez212
I miss building everything from scratch, in assembly, because I could do it
better than the libraries that shipped with the system.

I can _still_ do it better today, but the stack is so deep now, I just don’t
have the time.

Would I go back if I could? Nah.

Hacking is a blast, but never forget it is to achieve a greater purpose. A
greater purpose for our software’s users, for ourselves, and for for our
subroutines.

Old hackers never die— we merely gosub without return.

------
RickJWagner
I miss dump reading on reams of green-bar paper.

The dump reading was done with a cardboard pamphlet that listed the machine
instructions, arguments, address offsets.

You'd find the hex abend on the greenbar, mark it up with a pencil, and use
the machine instructions to figure out what went wrong (and the record that
caused it).

In my business (banking) this was done sometime around 2 a.m. after you got
called back to work by the night operators.

Ah, the good old days.

~~~
DrScump
My systems were core to business operations (manufacturing shop-order control)
and always ran between 2-4 AM.

I quickly hardened the shit out of our interfaces so that we (a) wouldn't
break and (b) had automatic workarounds for when feeding systems blew up. Oh,
how my project leader loved me.

------
tonteldoos
The ability to know a lot about a lot. And I'm not that old yet - I started my
journey in the early 90s.

~~~
somatic
Like, because there are so many more unknowable levels of abstraction now?
Hyper-specialization?

~~~
tonteldoos
Among other things, yes.

For example: On an IBM PC, running DOS. You could know all there was to know
about the BIOS, hardware ISRs, DOS ISRs, DMA, how a file system works, and
maybe a bit about the graphics system, and you could make the machine do
anything you wanted.

Today, if my kid wanted to learn all those things, I wouldn't even know where
to tell him to start. You simply can't get that low (easily) anymore, or know
that much about numerous subsystems. And the higher level stuff, like you say,
is buried in layers of abstraction.

Of course, now we have an unprecedented access to cheap, powerful
microcontrollers and SBCs, which make up for it to some degree - but it's
still harder to translate that knowledge into something of perceived
usefulness on a 'proper' computer.

~~~
gHosts
It's all still down there somewhere....

"We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a
plan, on top of ruins." Ellen Ullman

------
palad1n
There was a lot less stuff, in general. Now you have libraries, protocols,
umpteen different languages, paradigms, design patterns, IDEs, runtimes,
platform after platform, etc.

I remember all I used to need was a C compiler and a task and basically alone
I would be able to complete it with the standard stuff that came with the
compiler.

------
dano
Perhaps the largest change over the forty years was the transition from
software that shipped once every six months and had to last for years in
production, to something that can ship every few minutes with a lifetime hours
to a week.

During the era of shipped software (long cycle times) a hardware / software
co-design model worked well to work out the customer requirements,
dependencies, documentation, training materials, marketing, sales sheets,
software, installation tools, and all manner of support modifications. Some of
that cross-team communications takes more time and coordination than may be
available in a two week sprint.

There were also the constraints of the release schedule burnt into everyones
brain. So many things depended upon your shipping date that you dared not miss
it. Sure, agile / scrum / whatever enables you to ship something a bit later,
but there was nothing like the pressure cooker of everyone working as a team
to make their delivery date. Requirements, in my rosy recollection, became
very clear - things were in or out, not maybe.

Moving from large shipped software to web applications in 1999 offered any
number of advantages, but it was quite difficult to keep the non-coders up to
date with features and capabilities. Understanding doesn't always move at the
same speed for all people.

What I'm going to say next may not be everyone's experience, but the two week
sprint has started to seem like a convenient way to set and miss objectives;
i.e., we can put it into the next sprint. Sure, I understand that planning is
a black art in some cases, but always missing your commitments and making the
same statement indicates, to me, that there's a problem with the absorption of
the agile development model.

Product development and execution is a very hard process for all involved.
Brooks had it wright, there are no silver bullets and the web seems to
proliferate the belief that such things actually do exist.

I miss Tops-20 CMDJSYS sometimes. I don't miss VAX/VMS. SunOS was pretty
darned scrappy at the beginning. Usenet prior to the 1994 Apocalypse On Line
(AOL). I miss Fujitsu mechanical keyboards (so much noisy awesomeness). I miss
having an office with two or three people, we had so much fun and worked so
darned hard together. We remain terrific friends 30+ years later.

------
notacoward
I know it's kind of wrong, but I miss being part of a smaller community. I
wasn't even one of the _really_ early pioneers, but when I started computing
was still small enough that I could find common ground with just about any
other programmer I met. Sure we had our specialization and even our
disagreements, but there was probably _some_ overlap between what we each
knew. We also got the chance to work on some genuinely new things. The early
days of SMP or clustering were pretty cool. _Nobody_ really knew all the
answers or thought they did. We were all experimenting. Now there are so many
programmers doing so many different things that we might have _no_ shared
knowledge, and so much of what most people do is reimplementing or papering
over the flaws in some previous piece of software, layer upon layer like a
giant midden. I'm exaggerating a bit, but it really does feel different in a
way that makes me sad.

Since this is phrased as "old guys" I'll also add that I miss working with
more women. Remember when I mentioned the early days of SMP? In those days we
were still working closely with the people who were figuring out how to
physically connect the pieces, keep caches coherent, what kinds of lock
_instructions_ (let alone higher-level patterns) would be useful, etc. Hard
core stuff, and maybe a third of the people I was working with were women.
That's still not a majority, but it's down to less than half that in most
teams I've been on for the past decade. Things have gotten worse, and that
_really_ makes me sad. In so many ways, I feel this industry has been going
backward.

------
segmondy
The simplicity of things. If you needed to write a 20 line shell script to
solve a problem. That was fine. Today we argue about if tools are production
ready. We take the simplest of problems and magnify it 20x. It will need a
framework with 100% code coverage and 5,000 github stars, blah, blah, blah.
All of a sudden you end up with 10k line of code, CI, CD and a team of 10
people for something 1 person could have rolled out in a day with a shell
script.

------
1over137
No DRM. No walled gardens. You could write code on your own computer without
needing Apple's permission to code sign it.

~~~
notacoward
It wasn't always so great across the board. Back in the late 80s or 90s I
could write and distribute my own code for free. OTOH, for my day job
developing network code on larger machines, we had to pay hefty licensing fees
to get a decent compiler. Or debugger. Or libraries to do the most basic kinds
of things. Corporate control hadn't come down to the smaller machines, but
open source hadn't grown up to the larger ones either.

------
jaybeavers
I miss being able to buy a complete 3rd party component for $400 that came
with great docs and tech support.

Yeah, there are some excellent, well documented OSS libraries out there, but
they are the minority and there's no one who feels obligated to help you if
you need a small improvement or moderate bug, cause no one took money from
you.

Imho, the trade-off isn't worth it (free but self serve support) for
professional development.

------
seancoleman
I miss developing in the 00s when I wasn’t considered old yet.

~~~
ianai
Agree. I’m around students often. The way they treat me is pretty alienating.
I liked the Sir Davos quote from GoT “the young treat us old people with
respect because we’re an uncomfortable reminder of the inevitable.”

------
AnimalMuppet
Moore's Law was pretty amazing while it was ruling the landscape.

The transition from monochrome monitors to color.

The explosion of new peripherals that did _new_ things, not just the same
thing slightly better.

The first (consumer) hard disks.

For that matter, a computer that a _person_ could own, rather than a
corporation, was an absolutely amazing shift. If you had an idea, you could
try to make it a reality - not a reality for a company, but a reality that
might become _your_ company. You could do that with just a bit of money, in
your spare time (it would eat _all_ your spare time, though, and some more
besides.)

I miss the 68000 series of chips. They were great to work on. (Others have
said that the 32000 were even better, but I never worked on them.)

I miss SGI workstations. For their day, they were awesome.

~~~
notacoward
> Others have said that the 32000 were even better, but I never worked on
> them.

I worked on both. The NS32K had a more complete instruction set, but I
wouldn't say that made it more fun. Then again, maybe I'm a bit weird. The
chip I most enjoyed working on was the MC88K, which everyone else _hated_
because of its exposed pipeline. Part of me would like to tinker around with a
6809 or Z80 some day, not because I'd expect anything useful to come out of it
but just because fitting within those constraints is a fun kind of puzzle for
me.

------
mamcx
FoxPro.

A real, ent-to-end development environment, with the ability to do the
database, logic, forms and reports just 1 second after install. No package
managers requiered!

My current dream is to build a spiritual successor
([http://tablam.org](http://tablam.org)) and doing it I start to appreciate
how hard and how awesome it was. Also, the current me can't shake off the new
ways (so, already diverted from Fox in a lot of ways) and must rely on
imprecise memory of the past doing it. But still, I think a dbase-alike
environment is surely missed....

------
molecule
Learning web development via view-source

~~~
micah94
I'm voting this one up because I still hit view source out of habit knowing it
will show me nothing. Gone are even the cute messages like "Hey, if you're
looking here, we'd like to hire you!"

------
cperciva
In the 1990s nobody thought I was crazy for writing CGI scripts in C.

(I still do it, but now people think I'm crazy.)

~~~
gHosts
Or writing amazing CGI scripts in perl that did amazing things before I
realized I had to maintain aforementioned perl scripts.

Turned to shit pretty rapidly, but for a day or three I was wondrously happy.

------
codewritinfool
70's and 80's here. Big fast printers. I know, who does massive code listings
or memory dumps anymore? I feel that if I had one, I'd be using it all of the
time, though.

~~~
DrScump

      massive code listings or memory dumps anymore?
    

When I started in mainframe programming, our organization had a license for a
core dump formatting package that would do a lot of cross referencing for you
and even break down COBOL into assembler on a line by line basis for you. Well
thought out little things like that made a big difference.

------
stephenwithav
From the early '90s.

I miss the simplicity of a 320x200x256 screen. Want to access the pixel at (0,
0)? $A000:0000.

I miss FIDONet.

I miss the big GOPHER network.

I miss the the variety of monthly ANSi packs.

I miss ACiD.

I miss the wonder and amazement of the demo scene.

I miss the community feel.

~~~
NuSkooler
While not exactly as it was of course, FTN-style networks including FidoNet
are still going and active, Gopher is still a thing, ANSI packs are still
being released very regularly (ACiD folks are mostly Blocktronics at this
point), demo scenes are still active, so on.

Hop on a Telnet/SSH BBS and check it out!

------
thrower123
I guess the 2000s count, especially since I was working with 90s era
technology when I learned to program. I miss QBasic. I don't think programming
has been so much fun since. One of our projects was to make an animated
Christmas card, with carols playing over the built-in sound. Later on, a
friend and I worked on making a really stuttery, buggy version of Slime
Volleyball. Everything you needed was built in, and the in-IDE documentation
was great.

------
corysama
For nostalgia purposes only:
[http://cowboyprogramming.com/2010/06/03/1995-programming-
on-...](http://cowboyprogramming.com/2010/06/03/1995-programming-on-the-sega-
saturn/)

Things were much simpler back then. But, simple did mean easy. It meant you
had to do every little thing manually from scratch.

------
sparrish
Goofing off while waiting for a compile to finish.

~~~
DrScump
Getting analog lines in my office and/or the lab so I could rlogin around and
fire off builds and tests from home so I could get an extra iteration or two
in with minimal lag time.

------
BjoernKW
As for web development in the 90s I'd be remiss to not mention live code
editing in production ...

Just kidding, of course. It's a terribly bad practice. Don't do it.

However, there was something about the simplicity that came with it (in case
everything went smoothly, that is) as well as the ability to make minor
changes without having to go through a deployment pipeline.

------
lofties
Solving problems together instead of finding the answer on Stack Overflow.

~~~
gHosts
Actually had an office with a door you could close and a window you could open
to actually think in.

And then walk down the corridor to the terminal room to turn thoughts into
programs and/or ask the other guys or gals.

Strangely enough there were more ladies around in those days.

Miss that.

~~~
DrScump

      Actually had an office with a door you could close and a window you could open to actually think in.
    

Microsoft ran a radio recruitment ad campaign in SV in the late 80s with that
exact theme! The narrator exclaimed how hirees would get "... an OFFICE! With
a DOOR! That you can CLOSE! So you can THINK!"

------
Japhy_Ryder
Late 90s, early 2000s... CSS Zen Garden, the amazing community of true
forums/messageboards, IRC, learning from O'Reilly/Sams 24 hour/etc. books...
so many memories...

Things were just more fun and about hacking. Now it's what's the next hipster
JavaScript library.

~~~
thedevindevops
Zen Garden still exists!

------
tjansen
I miss how simple programs were in the 80s and 90s. I mean, they were a lot of
work because there were no powerful libraries and you had to do almost
everything from scratch. And then wait 30 minutes for the compiler each time
you did a build. And it was way too easy to lose work before there were usable
version-control systems (and even with the early ones, like CVS, it was easy
to shoot yourself in the foot).

Stuff that was a major challenge back then, like rendering a polygon or
keeping the state of an HTML form, is trivial to do today. I wish I would be
paid to write early 90s programs with today's tools :)

------
cyberferret
There was little or no evangelism for a particular
language/framework/database/stack. People just trusted you to pick the right
tools to get the project done, without feeling the need to insist you look at
the latest flavour of the month thing out there.

But mostly, I miss the fact that 20+ years ago, programming was still
considered a professional, white collar role that engendered respect from the
entire organisation. Nowadays, I feel that most coders are lumped together
with "support people" and are considered nothing more than replaceable factory
line blue collar workers.

~~~
parasubvert
That’s a very different experience than I remember. Macho culture dominated:
assembler was the king, then C, then C++. LISP or Smalltalk or COBOL people
hung out on their own and didn’t talk to each other. Java was a joke usurper
at first. Perl, python, ruby were toys. Etc.

IOW language advocacy and flavor of the month were rampant in the late 80s
onwards from my POV.

These days at least there is enough community for all of the major languages
and even the minor ones.

Also I find programmers get a lot more respect now than they did in the 80s
and 90s. Programmers can make $300k+ USD at a top Bay Area company today, and
starting salaries are well over $100k. Often they talk directly to users - no
handlers or analysts in between to shield people from the “strange
programmers”. Attitudes have shifted. Though given your experience, I guess
not uniformly.

------
falcolas
Not having so many plug-n-play abstractions that you’re so strongly encouraged
to use to “not re-invent the wheel”. The problem in my mind is that the
abstractions leak all over the place, but we stop caring.

Pushing off compute to the browser because it’s cheaper, nevermind the cost to
non-powerhouse phones.

Avoid putting any thought into optimization because compute and memory is
cheap. Nevermind that you’ll have to do a complete re-write when a few dozen
600+ ms microservice responses results in 20 second page loads.

Store all the things! You might need them someday, after all. GDPR what?

I work with developers who think that DB migrations are “of the devil”. As a
result, they have pivoted to use the RDBMS as a rudimentary k/v store and
create the relational data structures in memory. All they need to do is pull a
few dozen GB of rows from the DB with every container restart.

So, yeah. I miss having fewer abstractions; having more constraints. The
software seems somehow nicer through the CRT-colored lenses.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> Not having so many plug-n-play abstractions that you’re so strongly
> encouraged to use to “not re-invent the wheel”.

 _Inventing_ the wheel, rather than re-inventing it. There was a lot more
"doing something for the first time" and less "doing something for the Nth
time, slightly differently".

(Or so it felt to me. But there was still a bunch of "doing what the mainframe
people did a decade ago, but doing it badly". Still, it _felt_ different.)

------
BerislavLopac
XSLT

Edit: Well, to be precise, not XSLT per se -- but I'm missing a similar
generic transformation DSL for structured data, ideally able to deal with any
form of structured data like JSON, XML, CSV etc...

------
CSMastermind
I miss some of the old graphics solutions. Drawing something on the screen
took a lot more work but it felt more real to me.

The prevalence of applications over webpages. Don't get me wrong the web has
massive benefits in terms of standardization, distribution, and security but I
miss the power and flexibility of traditional applications. And yes, I know
they still exist but I'd say they're not the primary delivery mechanism of
most user-facing software today.

------
chopdcheez212
I miss when default username/password combos like admin/admin and root/“”
would let you log in to a solid 5% of internet and Telenet (RIP) connected
hosts.

~~~
gHosts
And most .rhosts or /etc/hosts.equiv just had a single lonely '+' in them and
nothing went wrong...

------
oldguy666
I miss working in my own office

------
drmpeg
Burning and erasing UV EPROMs.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Wow, do I ever _not_ miss that!

------
anotheronce
working in an office with a door

------
pulketo
i miss the lack on distractors like fb,tw,whatsapp,et al i miss the time when
people used to think instead of just search for the exact answer ;) do not
misunderstand me, i'm not against it, i'm a php/js scripter 40yo guy that
enjoys to copy paste Almost Everything but When I am not able to find the
strightest answer, i start the thinking machine, i won't Almost Never ask that
question on Facebook, hacker news, Twitter, stack overflow... I would prefer
thinking than waiting for anyone else to answer my question. so, i miss the
think first era.

------
atomicbeanie
Not much, so much more is possible. But if Stack Overflow goes out of
business, I quit. I do not miss trying to find obscure stupid things myself.
The Internet is very good at making my time more valuable.

------
ghukill
I don't miss the assumption that all developers are "guys".

------
bahmboo
Nothing

------
bd2009
6502 machine language of the Apple II+ really helped get a mental picture of
how computers work. Call -151 at the prompt then you’re in. A manual listed
what most ROM addresses did: move the audio speaker cone once by reading or
writing anything to C030 (I think, or was it C080?), of course, 30 C0 syntax.
85 store the accumulator? Geez, it’s been a long time. 1 MGhz 8-bit CPU, X and
Y registers, an accumulator, only adding and subtracting commands except for
shifting bytes left and right. No audio routines.

It was all very inefficient but what a way to learn!

It was probably like the 1930s and 1940s with radio: people really knew how it
worked at the nitty gritty level and could friggn make an impromptu radio out
of debris from a crashed army jeep (probably on youtube now).

That’s civilization: layer upon layer upon layer of knowledge and advancements
until we all roast the planet from our greed, driven by the 4% (the
sociopaths).

------
ilaksh
Just because I did development in the 2000s does not make me old.

------
azevedol
I had great times with .asp and ms access db ^^

------
flashgordon
No leetcode puzzles in coding interviews!

------
oceanghost
Hi, I posted this about mid 90’s development in another thread:

""" Before about, 1996-- (I'm estimating)-- before network connectivity was
the norm-- I understood how every processor in every system I dealt with
worked. Two things happened in the mid to late 90s.

First-- an explosion of silicon. The days of understanding how the system
worked, in its entirety, were over. I had a copy of "80386 systems designers
guide", and I can't remember the name- but the Michael Abrash's guide to VGA
video cards and a PC Interrupts were all that were needed to master computer
architecture. If you were super fancy you understood the Pentium math
extensions (whose names I cannot recall), that let you do a crossbar in a few
cycles, and you understood how common chips like the 16550 worked, which is an
addendum to PC Interrupts if I recall.

Second, and this is the key thing, technology started working AGAINST us. As
complexity exploded, so did network connectivity. We had this era in which
Operating Systems complexity exploded (win95), silicon complexity exploded,
and connectivity exploded. The thing about connectivity is this-- that's when
our computers went from isolated things to these things that are always
online-- they started working against us. They could now talk to other
computers, other people, and that changed computing fundamentally.

Computers went from these things that were our helpmates to our masters. This
is what I lament the most. I don't miss bit-banging, assembly programming
(well, a little). I fudging love Ruby/Python, as opposed to C++ being
considered "High Level." I love that I can buy a computer for 35$ (RPI) that
is fantastic. RPi's are so cheap I employ half a dozen just to run my 3d
printers (yes I have a problem). But I do so much not miss being scared of my
computer. Miss being scared of the ne5work. I miss the sense of wonder at what
a computer could be or do. You have to understand technology as it exists now,
is beyond my wildest dreams. I watched Star Trek TNG as a child and the
devices we have now, legitimately have exceeded my wildest dreams. The
simplest cell phone now has as much computational power as every computer
combined at the time I graduated high school.

But, I do miss simplicity. So much so, I've been considering writing an NES or
Sega game; I'm precisely 40 years old, and I've finally come to understand
that art and constraints are intimately connected. That they press on each
other, and neither is possible without each other.

I have so few restraints on modern systems that I... am constrained. I miss
the constraints of my earlier years that were, in fact, my freedom. I miss
software that shipped and worked on the first day. I, like everyone, miss my
childhood. Because the universe is an explosion of complexity-- and when we
look back, we will always feel like things were simpler-- because they god
damned actually were.

"""

Also, I am old.

------
jpindar
Cubicles

~~~
znpy
I'd love to have a cubicle, honestly.

------
fitnesshealth
Some do, some don’t. It’s the same with every period and every group born in
it. I grew up in the 1940s and can think of some things from that time that I
miss, but I wouldn’t go back for quids. Let’s face it, we’ve never had it so
good. These are the good old days.

A famous Australian (well, he was born in England but spent his life here)
named Paddy Pallin nutshelled it. “The best place to be is here. The best time
to be here is now.”

