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Totally off the cuff, I would say 1995. As to why? Because developing in production often breaks production, and about that time, we started to care about tha
by Dove 4y ago
Totally off the cuff, I would say 1995. As to why? Because developing in production often breaks production, and about that time, we started to care about that. Before that, we were happy when things were working at all and didn't really expect them to work all the time.
As you say, it doesn't necessarily always work, but that's the notion.
- hinkley 4y agoDepending on industry that might be 1980. Once telecom equipment became computers, those would have been production vs nonprod environments. Erlang is 1986, and it was replacing other stuff.
- anonzzzies 4y ago> Before that, we were happy when things were working at all What nonsense. Before the internet, shipping things often meant no updates ever, so it not only had to work, but it had to work with ‘no bugs’. There was no need for environment, because nothing ran in front of clients until the disks or cartridges were shipped. But there were dev, test and possible release versions. It’s rather the opposite of what you claim; things worked and were expected to work all the time once out the door. You could not fix them, so they had to. They didn’t always, but did surprisingly well and testing feels at least more robust than now, when someone releases a game, and the minute after install, I can download 500mb of fixes, sometimes things that were really obvious and so very badly tested. Seems it is now that no one expects things to work all the time or at all on release. You just patch it later.
- Supermancho 4y ago> It’s rather the opposite of what you claim; things worked and were expected to work all the time once out the door. Software versioning is from the 70s. There's no claim you can make to revise history. What you worked on is not what everyone worked on. I worked on the sole production env for many companies, even into the late 00s (usually e-retailers).
- anonzzzies 4y agoI didn’t say there was no versioning; there was, internal and external. But for consumer or mass produced company software, we didn’t ship updates. Bespoke software (often some type of erp) is another story: that had updates. I was responding to the gp who claimed we were happy if things worked: we were but they did work as much as they do now. There is DOS software we wrote still running companies with very few updates as updates used to be incredibly painful. Physical, going to the company and updating their systems in the night painful.
- Brian_K_White 4y agoWhat nonsense. I worked over 20 years in a shop that sold a saas app that did devel right on production the whole time. It worked because we all knew it better damned well work. Devel also happened offline of course, devel happened all kinds of different ways, merely it also happened right on the live copy that thousands of users were using.
- anonzzzies 4y agoWhich is what I said? Who are you responding to?
- Brian_K_White 4y agoYou said there was no such thing as production. You talked only about shipped static product.
- Dove 4y agoYou're right about all of that. :) I guess I assumed the context of the question was online services. People working on web sites, back in the 90s, often messed around right in production. But if I remember correctly, the mid nineties are when I started to hear about maintaining TWO environments and doing things in "test" first. Seemed really whiz bang at the time. What I'm mainly remembering, I suppose, was that any online service being down was just not a big deal, so it wasn't worth the extra infrastructure to avoid occasionally and temporarily breaking it. Nobody cared, at least not like they do now. And anyway, getting one copy working was hard enough!