3 ms·

> it would be less than 1" of paper (remember green lined fanfold?) I must have been writing very verbose code then. The frame-based reasoner I was coding in C

> it would be less than 1" of paper (remember green lined fanfold?) I must have been writing very verbose code then. The frame-based reasoner I was coding in C (long story) was at least an inch thick itself (it's in my loft or I'd measure it). > It was possible to actually know all the software that you had at your disposal at the byte level I don't think this was true of the dev tools I was using on the Vaxen I had access to. > There was no internet, you needed to either find a more knowledgeable buddy or you had to go to the library, read magazines or book. Well, pedantically, there was an internet but you are right about the need to use dead-tree reference material - and the man pages. What was missing compared with today was software libraries and frameworks. My development environment was vi and cc. If I needed a hash table or a queue, it was a case of reading an algorithms book. The journal of the British Computing Society was still happily publishing papers presenting new sorting algorithms. [Edit] - the other big thing missing was deployment tooling, VMs, containers, etc. Admittedly I was coding in academia, but at no point was I introduced to version control tooling.

rbanffy 5y ago
> it would be less than 1" of paper (remember green lined fanfold?) I had a book, an extremely useful one, "What's Where in the Apple II" which contained a full commented ROM disassembly with all known entry points, what their inputs were and where they stored their output. It was about 2 inches thick when printed. My copy (of course it was photocopied - it was almost impossible to get imported books in Brazil back then) had an extra inch from all the post-it notes, markers, paper notes and so on I added to it.
jacquesm 5y ago
If you had a VAX then you were in a very small extremely lucky segment. For most people 8 bits was all they had, unless they were involved professionally.
- KineticLensman 5y ago
  Yes, I was very impressed by the Vax and aware of how lucky I was. This was at Leeds University, and I got to use it as a post-grad. I think most undergrads were limited to timesharing on an Amdahl 470 and / or DEC-10. I can't remember now whether the Vax was a 750 or 780 - I suspect the former. The Vax had perhaps five users so it was fine for our needs. If the Vax wasn't impressive enough, I recall that sometime in 87/88 I was developing a quadtree visualiser on a Sun workstation - perhaps a Sun-2? This was a really mind-blowing graphical environment after being stuck with curses [0] on the Vax. But still reliant on the man pages, coming back to the original topic. I hadn't yet discovered usenet and the comp.sci FAQs. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_(programming_library) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_(programming_library)
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Only slightly jealous ;) I'd have probably given a kidney for access to a machine like that, it would have moved my skills and career forward by a couple of years in one shot.

rbanffy 5y ago

> it would be less than 1" of paper (remember green lined fanfold?) I had a book, an extremely useful one, "What's Where in the Apple II" which contained a full commented ROM disassembly with all known entry points, what their inputs were and where they stored their output. It was about 2 inches thick when printed. My copy (of course it was photocopied - it was almost impossible to get imported books in Brazil back then) had an extra inch from all the post-it notes, markers, paper notes and so on I added to it.

jacquesm 5y ago

If you had a VAX then you were in a very small extremely lucky segment. For most people 8 bits was all they had, unless they were involved professionally.

KineticLensman 5y ago
Yes, I was very impressed by the Vax and aware of how lucky I was. This was at Leeds University, and I got to use it as a post-grad. I think most undergrads were limited to timesharing on an Amdahl 470 and / or DEC-10. I can't remember now whether the Vax was a 750 or 780 - I suspect the former. The Vax had perhaps five users so it was fine for our needs. If the Vax wasn't impressive enough, I recall that sometime in 87/88 I was developing a quadtree visualiser on a Sun workstation - perhaps a Sun-2? This was a really mind-blowing graphical environment after being stuck with curses [0] on the Vax. But still reliant on the man pages, coming back to the original topic. I hadn't yet discovered usenet and the comp.sci FAQs. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_(programming_library) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_(programming_library)
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Only slightly jealous ;) I'd have probably given a kidney for access to a machine like that, it would have moved my skills and career forward by a couple of years in one shot.