4 ms·

Wild guesses off of the top of my head: * Time. A lot can happen in 40 years, new techniques are discovered and popularized, etc. * Better tooling all around

by luma 4y ago

Wild guesses off of the top of my head: * Time. A lot can happen in 40 years, new techniques are discovered and popularized, etc. * Better tooling all around. Better languages, better IDEs, better libraries, etc. Anyone working today on a platform that has been hacked on for 40+ years is the beneficiary of all that work. * More and better contributors. The number of people who had both the interest and the means to purchase an Atari computer in 1979 was necessarily limited. Since then, we've added another 3.7B people to the planet and a hell of a lot of them now have access to something resembling a computer. Most of them have grown up with the notion of a "programming language" being present in their world, something which wasn't necessarily commonplace 40 years back.

PaulHoule 4y ago
Back in the day the most advanced software developers used minicomputers: for instance Gates and Allen used an 8080 emulator on a PDP-10 to develop the original Microsoft BASIC. Infocom similarly used a PDP-10 to develop games like Zork. A modern computer is a much more powerful machine than a 1970s minicomputer and would be great support for writing complex software today.
- Lio 4y ago
  In the same vein, I believe John Carmack used a NeXTStation to develop Doom for the PC[1]. Matthew Smith also used a TRS-80 model III to develop Jet Set Willy for the ZX Spectrum. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    The closest I came to this was using a PC AT clone to develop some software for a teacher at my school when I was in high school. (Unless you count using a PC today to develop for Arduino) I thought the teacher had a PC clone so I wrote the first draft of the software in Turbo BASIC, but then I found out she had a CP/M machine but I wasn't fazed very much because there was a good Z80 emulator that ran on my machine so I was able to port the code to run under (I think) MBASIC or CBASIC in CP/M. In this case I was using an emulator to run the same dev tools I would have used in CP/M, I just didn't have a CP/M machine. It ran considerably faster than any real Z-80 machine thanks to the power of a 12Mhz 286 with zero wait states.

by luma 4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago

Back in the day the most advanced software developers used minicomputers: for instance Gates and Allen used an 8080 emulator on a PDP-10 to develop the original Microsoft BASIC. Infocom similarly used a PDP-10 to develop games like Zork. A modern computer is a much more powerful machine than a 1970s minicomputer and would be great support for writing complex software today.

Lio 4y ago
In the same vein, I believe John Carmack used a NeXTStation to develop Doom for the PC[1]. Matthew Smith also used a TRS-80 model III to develop Jet Set Willy for the ZX Spectrum. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  The closest I came to this was using a PC AT clone to develop some software for a teacher at my school when I was in high school. (Unless you count using a PC today to develop for Arduino) I thought the teacher had a PC clone so I wrote the first draft of the software in Turbo BASIC, but then I found out she had a CP/M machine but I wasn't fazed very much because there was a good Z80 emulator that ran on my machine so I was able to port the code to run under (I think) MBASIC or CBASIC in CP/M. In this case I was using an emulator to run the same dev tools I would have used in CP/M, I just didn't have a CP/M machine. It ran considerably faster than any real Z-80 machine thanks to the power of a 12Mhz 286 with zero wait states.