5 ms·

I must have been a bloody hard and interesting work, back then.

vardump 8y ago
Things are much harder nowadays due to complexity. From almost impossible to understand CPU cores to massive amounts of third party code to the modern requirements (IoT, ouch!). Debugging predictable single thread single core system was also child's play compared to distributed networked beasts each running on lots of cores and thousands of threads. Nineties problems were contained in a small box. Oh, and no internet like today, so needed to order books and magazines. And to use BBS and usenet. Even then, a lot of it was reinventing the wheel again and again. Modern problems are sometimes nearly uncontained (think software like web browsers, etc.).
- enjo 8y ago
  Just jumping in to agree here. I've always thought of this way: In the 90's the code I wrote was more difficult. Today coding is much easier (better languages, tooling, etc..). However the systems I build are many times more complex. In the 90's we hired the best programmers, today we hire the people who are best at managing ambiguity and complexity. All of this is very hand-wavy as there are certainly still disciplines where pure programming skill is most important, but those seem to be fewer and fewer every day.
- pulsarpietro 8y ago
  Anyway I envy you guys, now things tend to be too high level and you lose that holistic view of the computing machine. Back than you felt pretty skilled I am sure, now I feel anybody could do my job, often. Unless you are working for the big 4 or similar, many jobs don't give you that excitement.
richardjdare 8y ago
Back then assembly language was much more ergonomic than it is now, and the machines were simpler. Many of my favourite games in the 80s were made by teenagers programming in their bedrooms. Check out this 68000 assembly tutorial video from Scoopex, the Amiga demo scene group: https://youtu.be/bqT1jsPyUGw https://youtu.be/bqT1jsPyUGw He gets a simple graphical effect going on the Amiga in only a few lines of assembly. Doing the same thing using DirectX in c++ would take you all day!
- pjc50 8y ago
  > much more ergonomic than it is now, This is an interesting line of argument - in what way, and what could be done to improve the ergonomics? > He gets a simple graphical effect going on the Amiga in only a few lines of assembly. Doing the same thing using DirectX in c++ would take you all day! This is absolutely true, but in something like ShaderToy you can go back to producing complex pixel-bashing effects with a huge amount of processing power. It's just the external Tower of Babel from boot to usability has got a lot larger.
  - richardjdare 8y ago
    My notion of ergonomic mostly comes from programming the Amiga in 68000 and then moving to the PC and being horrified by x86! In 68k you had 8 32-bit data registers, (d0-d7) and 8 address registers (a0-a7) If you wanted to access bytes or 16 or 32 bits you could do so like this: move.w #123,d0 ; move 16bit number into d0 move.b #123,d1 ; move byte into d1 move.l #SOME_ADDRESS,a0; set address reg a0 to point to a memory location. move.b d1,(a0) ; move contents of d1 to memory location a0 is pointing to. Nice and easy to work with and remember. On x86, thanks to its long and convoluted history you have all kinds of doubled up registers which you have to refer to by different names depending on what you are doing, and tons of historical cruft. On top of the CPU, the old home computers had no historical cruft and it was very easy to talk to the hardware or system firmware; usually you'd just be getting and setting data at fixed memory locations. I can read an Amiga mouse click in one line of 68k. I've no idea how you'd do it on a modern PC or even Java! Modern systems just aren't as integrated, for better and worse. Assembly language was also part of mainstream programming back then. You'd learn Basic then go straight to assembly if you wanted to do anything serious. So there were computer magazine articles on assembly, childrens books[1]. My first assembler, Devpac, came from a magazine coverdisk with a tutorial from Bullfrog, Peter Molyneaux's old game company[2]. So there were a whole range of cultural and technical reasons for assembly language being much more of a human-useable technology back in the day. >It's just the external Tower of Babel from boot to usability has got a lot larger. Yes I agree, I kinda miss being able to see the ground, which is probably why I find retro programming so appealing. [1]https://archive.org/details/machine-code-for-beginners https://archive.org/details/machine-code-for-beginners [2]https://archive.org/details/amigaformat39/page/n61 https://archive.org/details/amigaformat39/page/n61

Things are much harder nowadays due to complexity. From almost impossible to understand CPU cores to massive amounts of third party code to the modern requirements (IoT, ouch!). Debugging predictable single thread single core system was also child's play compared to distributed networked beasts each running on lots of cores and thousands of threads. Nineties problems were contained in a small box. Oh, and no internet like today, so needed to order books and magazines. And to use BBS and usenet. Even then, a lot of it was reinventing the wheel again and again. Modern problems are sometimes nearly uncontained (think software like web browsers, etc.).

enjo 8y ago
Just jumping in to agree here. I've always thought of this way: In the 90's the code I wrote was more difficult. Today coding is much easier (better languages, tooling, etc..). However the systems I build are many times more complex. In the 90's we hired the best programmers, today we hire the people who are best at managing ambiguity and complexity. All of this is very hand-wavy as there are certainly still disciplines where pure programming skill is most important, but those seem to be fewer and fewer every day.
pulsarpietro 8y ago
Anyway I envy you guys, now things tend to be too high level and you lose that holistic view of the computing machine. Back than you felt pretty skilled I am sure, now I feel anybody could do my job, often. Unless you are working for the big 4 or similar, many jobs don't give you that excitement.

richardjdare 8y ago

Back then assembly language was much more ergonomic than it is now, and the machines were simpler. Many of my favourite games in the 80s were made by teenagers programming in their bedrooms. Check out this 68000 assembly tutorial video from Scoopex, the Amiga demo scene group: https://youtu.be/bqT1jsPyUGw https://youtu.be/bqT1jsPyUGw He gets a simple graphical effect going on the Amiga in only a few lines of assembly. Doing the same thing using DirectX in c++ would take you all day!

pjc50 8y ago
> much more ergonomic than it is now, This is an interesting line of argument - in what way, and what could be done to improve the ergonomics? > He gets a simple graphical effect going on the Amiga in only a few lines of assembly. Doing the same thing using DirectX in c++ would take you all day! This is absolutely true, but in something like ShaderToy you can go back to producing complex pixel-bashing effects with a huge amount of processing power. It's just the external Tower of Babel from boot to usability has got a lot larger.
- richardjdare 8y ago
  My notion of ergonomic mostly comes from programming the Amiga in 68000 and then moving to the PC and being horrified by x86! In 68k you had 8 32-bit data registers, (d0-d7) and 8 address registers (a0-a7) If you wanted to access bytes or 16 or 32 bits you could do so like this: move.w #123,d0 ; move 16bit number into d0 move.b #123,d1 ; move byte into d1 move.l #SOME_ADDRESS,a0; set address reg a0 to point to a memory location. move.b d1,(a0) ; move contents of d1 to memory location a0 is pointing to. Nice and easy to work with and remember. On x86, thanks to its long and convoluted history you have all kinds of doubled up registers which you have to refer to by different names depending on what you are doing, and tons of historical cruft. On top of the CPU, the old home computers had no historical cruft and it was very easy to talk to the hardware or system firmware; usually you'd just be getting and setting data at fixed memory locations. I can read an Amiga mouse click in one line of 68k. I've no idea how you'd do it on a modern PC or even Java! Modern systems just aren't as integrated, for better and worse. Assembly language was also part of mainstream programming back then. You'd learn Basic then go straight to assembly if you wanted to do anything serious. So there were computer magazine articles on assembly, childrens books[1]. My first assembler, Devpac, came from a magazine coverdisk with a tutorial from Bullfrog, Peter Molyneaux's old game company[2]. So there were a whole range of cultural and technical reasons for assembly language being much more of a human-useable technology back in the day. >It's just the external Tower of Babel from boot to usability has got a lot larger. Yes I agree, I kinda miss being able to see the ground, which is probably why I find retro programming so appealing. [1]https://archive.org/details/machine-code-for-beginners https://archive.org/details/machine-code-for-beginners [2]https://archive.org/details/amigaformat39/page/n61 https://archive.org/details/amigaformat39/page/n61