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Man. The web was barely used in 1991, which seems very not-that-long-ago. I was born in 1988, so it's strange to me to imagine life without the web. I eventual
by palish 16y ago
Man. The web was barely used in 1991, which seems very not-that-long-ago.
I was born in 1988, so it's strange to me to imagine life without the web. I eventually want to be in an environment where I'm surrounded by the grandmasters of those older eras, to learn the lessons they learned; lessons that can only be taught after decades (plural) of engineering experience.
- qq66 16y agoThe true whitebeards make most programmers like us look like middle school Lego programmers.
- hawflakes 16y agoOr elementary school turtle programmers. Anyone else that relates to that reference is also officially old.
- hugs 16y agoside-note: very few people know turtle is built-in to Python >>> import turtle
- jacquesm 16y agoThank you, I really needed that. :(
- dmd 16y agoMy elementary school teacher was very confused by my LOGO programs - they produced no graphic output. I mostly wrote bizarre choose-your-own-adventure IF. It was pretty bad. (b. 1978; I'm in the net.legends file, to my eternal shame)
- mkramlich 16y agoso are you a 32-year old C/Lisp wizard now? ;)
- technoweenie 16y agoOMG Turtles! I seem to recall the cursor actually being a turtle. I'd re-skin them as buildings and spaceships, and crash them into each other with scripted animation commands. Is that the same thing?
- GFischer 16y agoHeh, it was still taught until a few years ago here (Uruguay). I remember it from 1990, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's still taught in some schools.
- kls 16y agoI would not exactly call us whitebeards, I was 17 when the web was invented and was already on the net. I am 35 now, not exactly over the hill, I may be an old dude to some of you young guys, but to me the whitebeards are the COBOL guys form the 60-70s. On another note, an interesting bit of trivia is that the web was invented on a NeXT box and the first group of developers to jump on to web development (me included) generally opted for NeXT boxes as their development platform of choice. If you where to have looked at that snap shot in time, you would have though NeXT was going to rule the web development world. I think it is a strange twist of fate that it did not and now some how through a twisted chain of events, NeXT (OSX) is again a lot of web developers system of choice.
- qq66 16y agoNo, I meant whitebeards. The NASA programmers, Kernighan/Richie, etc.
- Luyt 16y agoIn those days, you'd use FTP a lot. And Archie, a search engine for FTP sites. IRC and usenet also existed as popular ways of online communication before the web, and email of course ;-). Somewhat later Gopher servers came into being, and you could use Veronica to search gopherspace.
- Keyframe 16y agoNot to mention MUDs.
- chrisduesing 16y agoWhich, perhaps surprisingly, are still alive and well to this day: http://www.mudconnect.com/ http://www.mudconnect.com/ Incidentally I was an advertising major until I found MUDs in 93 and practically failed out of the program. I switched to CS so I could learn to make my own, and here we are 17 years later...
- kls 16y agoThere was also WAIS, which was interesting in it own respect. you would open "databases" across the net and search for info that you where interested in. A lot of counterculture stuff was available as well as a lot of good programming documents. The process got pretty cumbersome after the net expanded past the universities and government establishments. It did not scale well. To the GP poster. I can remember a time before the net (it seems like yesterday) and back then we had local BBS services that some tech guy, in the local community, usually ran. There where also some regional and national BBS networks. They would advertise them in the back of DR. Dobb's and some of the other computer hobbyist magazines. In some ways, that was a cooler time to be into computing, everything was new, everything was exclusive because it took some technical know how to get onto these networks. Small things where groundbreaking developments back then. Computers where slow so you had to be resourceful and creative when developing. Don't get me wrong, I love where we have come, but back then there was a sense of being part of a revolution, it may just have been because, I was a little younger than you are now, but it seemed so much more fascinating back then.
- neilk 16y agoEventually? Dude. Look around you, virtually speaking.
- technoweenie 16y agoAnd the most upvoted message from them: lmgtfy.