10 ms·

The 90s Developer Starter Pack

226 points by ingve 3y ago

colordrops 3y ago
I could hear disks spinning up just looking at that page.
- brianwawok 3y ago
  10k (I think the fast drives were 10k rpm) SCSI drives were a full time hummingbird.
  - speed_spread 3y ago
    There were even 15k SCSI HDD. Those sounded like having an idling Ferrari parked next to your ankle.
- meepmorp 3y ago
  I heard a clicking Zip drive
fuzztester 3y ago
The 80s Developer Starter Pack: BEGIN Use(TurboPascal); Do(AllWithJustIt); END Why use Pascal? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36646890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36646890
- j45 3y ago
  Starting with Basic, Pascal really was such an accelerant to learn programming before moving to c, c++, Java, .net and beyond. Polyglots were formed quite naturally at one time, with a focus on transferable skills and knowledge.
  - makapuf 3y ago
    How many did basic > compiled basic > turbo pascal + asm > C > C++ > perl/python > ...
    - j45 3y ago
      For real haha. I forgot to include asm and Visual Basic. VB was looked down on back then but look at low/no code now. Perl/Python was at the start for me, scripting was a parallel lane to coding. Highest respect is always held for TCL.
    - indymike 3y ago
      I think almost all of us started with BASIC. Then we all wanted to do more... and with more memory and do it faster... so I needed a compiled language. So, I learned C, then Pascal, then VisualBasic. C forever corrupted me. Then C++ was the future, so I learned that... and then the web came... and with it came CGI scripting with Perl. I really fell in love with Python, though. It was what BASIC should have been, but Python was slow, so I learned Go. Along the way I also learned Prolog, Lisp, Java, Javascript, Rexx and a host of different OS scripting languages. Now, I just look at a problem, and pick something that fits. Mostly. Except when I want to learn something new.
    - tremon 3y ago
      My path was (C64) Basic -> Quick Basic -> (Borland) C++ -> (x86) asm -> Java -> Python. Mostly. There's some Ruby, plain C, Lisp, Haskell, C# in there, and lately Ocaml and Rust. And lots of shell scripting in between. Never needed Pascal, and I stay away from Perl. Clojure is still on my wishlist, as is Scala (because of Spark, mostly).
      - Dwedit 3y ago
        I did Z80 ASM before C and C++, then later settled on C# as the go-to language of choice.
    - LVB 3y ago
      BASIC (GW & Apple) was ubiquitous, but a BASIC compiler was incredibly difficult to find, even illicitly. And 13-year-old me had no hope of purchasing it for $500.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- cecida 3y ago
  Pascal was still the language being taught to first year students in the university I attended in the late 90's. Our "multimedia" professor was very in to Javascript, but assured us that it would be replaced by something more efficient. Neither happened.
  - naavis 3y ago
    We still had programming classes in school with Pascal in the early 00s.
    - jasonfarnon 3y ago
      In fact, my recollection is the AP computer science curriculum was in pascal until around 2000.
pjerem 3y ago
Ah, do you remember when this thing called Windows allowed you to simply create windows with 10 lines of code ? Where have we gone ?
- convolvatron 3y ago
  on the symbolics it was literally (create-window)
- anyfoo 3y ago
  And have a 10000 lines message processing loop? Yeah. It wasn’t exactly Qt.
- enriquto 3y ago
  Ten lines? Why so complicated? Back in my day we did it with just two lines: mov al, 13 int 10 And then you pushed your pixels to the video segment (a0000). So simple and elegant... But my dad still mocked me because it was too complicated! Back in his day, you didn't need to bother with stupid video modes, and could just POKE the pixels to your screen!
  - fb03 3y ago
    oh man, mode 13!!! I still have this line embedded in my head (Turbo Pascal 7) mem[$A000:x+(320*y)] := color
    - NBJack 3y ago
      Don't forget trying to pick a palette, and those sweet, sweet palette cycling effects for things like water.
  - kijiki 3y ago
    Bug, you want: mov al, 13h
  - stevefan1999 3y ago
    Not only this is architectural specific (needs BIOS to map a specific constant range of memory), but this will cause a lot of software interrupts. Interrupts, like exceptions, are _bad_. In UEFI you have VESA Video Mode to handle most of the annoying mode selection stuff and GOP to handle...memory mapped framebuffer in linear address, so that you can just write directly to the framebuffer to push your pixel...that's even simpler. You want double or triple buffering? Just make another memory buffer with the same dimension and strides, and recursively push each level of buffer up on render, easy.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Don't forget a pack of extra jumpers for setting irq's with. Lol.
- nunez 3y ago
  Cuz you'll definitely lose one at the worst time!
j45 3y ago
The best thing about this was the terror of taking apart what was usually a $2-4000 home Pc and putting it together again. Learning all the hardware acronyms set a foundation for software development because you could debug though what the computer was doing. It’s almost an unfair advantage these days in some cases.
- mr_toad 3y ago
  Ah yes, fiddling with jumper switches in inaccessible locations, tiny screws in even more inaccessible locations, trying to get an IDE card into a slot without breaking something, cables that were too short. I don’t miss it.
  - j45 3y ago
    Were there other choices then?
zerr 3y ago
Any experiences using Delphi for Android/iOS (and cross-platform generally) development? Seems like the only cross-platform solution that wraps platform WebView on each platform, has an imperative GUI, RAD IDE and produces a native code.
nemo44x 3y ago
Really nice API. Compare to Mac of that era you needed to create and maintain your own event loop and have a bunch of branches for when a certain thing was clicked. To show a basic dialogue you had to continue to draw it over and over in your loop. Windows took care of devs!
- duskwuff 3y ago
  > To show a basic dialogue you had to continue to draw it over and over in your loop. It wasn't quite that bad. Basic alert dialogs were fully handled by Alert(); event loops for more complex dialogs were implemented by ModalDialog(). Anything non-modal could certainly get hairy, though. (Relevant documentation: https://woofle.net/impdf/TB-06-DialogManager.pdf https://woofle.net/impdf/TB-06-DialogManager.pdf)
  - nemo44x 3y ago
    172 pages for dialog’s lol. Thank god for ResEdit! You’re right though. If I recall because of the single thread certain built-in popups could more or less block. BUT - perhaps you wanted something a bit more tricky. Well, now you’re back in it! :) I always liked that exitToShell() took you to a GUI.
asveikau 3y ago
I think you can skip VC++97 and develop with msys and mingw. I haven't used those to target 9x in a long time, just older NT, so I'm not sure how up to the task it is these days. But I think it can get you more recent versions of C and C++ that route.
- versteegen 3y ago
  I use a recent mingw-w64 with a recent GCC (I'd assume the latest versions could work too) to target Windows 95 (through 11, obviously). I prefer the mxe toolchain to crosscompile from Linux for convenience but do also compile with mingw-w64 on Windows in a VM. mingw.org will probably work too perhaps with a little work. However recently I had to patch mingw-w64 to restore support for Win 95 through 2000, which they'd broken only for the sake of implementing SetThreadName [1]. My experience in general is it's pretty easy to support Windows 95+ as long as you make use of newer APIs optional by dynamically loading symbols, and deal with small issues as they appear. So it helps to have users actually testing occasionally... because I don't. [1] https://github.com/rversteegen/mxe/commit/aa87b55a77a62d4cffa1a893497444ecc615653d https://github.com/rversteegen/mxe/commit/aa87b55a77a62d4cff...
  - asveikau 3y ago
    Thank you for this. That's a good reply. As for your diff, I'd be inclined to call AddVectoredExceptionHandler etc. through GetProcAddress where available. (Off topic, but I like to use that API for logging access violations.)
    - versteegen 3y ago
      Yes, I guess I could do that, then maybe I can get it upstreamed. However I was misremembering a bit and misspoke before both about how easy it's been to support Windows 95 (it was easy up until a few mingw-w64 releases ago... except for spawning processes) and how recent my mingw-w64 is (I'm using 7.0.0, 3.5 years old, and simply haven't tried anything newer; the GCC version is independent within limits). Also I have no idea the minimum Windows targetted by mingw-w64 actually is, they don't say. I think they don't actually care about Windows 9x support, they just never did anything to break it before 6.0.0. I have doubts they'd accept such a patch. The most important trick was you have to use a build of mingw-w64 with 'win32' rather than 'posix' threading ([1], and the rest of that thread is relevant too): > the 'win32' threading support in mingw-w64 is the original one and supports all 32-bit Windows, while 'posix' threading (winpthreads) is a recent addition which is necessary to support C++11 mutexes and threads, but has higher system requirements. ... That's why mxe switched to posix threads by default in 2019. [1] https://github.com/ohrrpgce/ohrrpgce/issues/1241#issuecomment-1232960187 https://github.com/ohrrpgce/ohrrpgce/issues/1241#issuecommen...
mjhagen 3y ago
My 90s developer setup: - Macintosh Performa 5200 - BBEdit - Fetch
mattl 3y ago
This “real programmer” stuff is just gatekeeping and needs to go away forever
- speed_spread 3y ago
  Well, someone's hurt that their favorite IDE was derided once again 28 years later... :) Seriously, VB was quick and fun to code in but ultimately just contained way too many crazy footguns to build large maintainable apps. It's one of those things I swore never to put on my CV for fear someone noticed and asked me for just one "one quick fix" to their mudball.
  - mattl 3y ago
    It’s just unnecessary to have “real” programmers and everyone else. When you work with computers for long enough you realize there’s a massive grey area between those terms and most people are there.
- projektfu 3y ago
  I applied for a vb6 job circa 2000 and was sent a timed exam that required detailed knowledge of its library. I was like, oh, you actually wanted me to really know it. At this point VB had Intellisense for 2 versions and I couldn't imagine actually memorizing its crazy library. Anyhow, a real programmer definitely got that job.
- NBJack 3y ago
  Ah, don't mistake many of us collectively romping through the piles of outdated software and hardware with rose-colored goggles as something like that. Nostalgia trips aside, I certainly wouldn't be eager to trade my three-decades-refined tooling and easy access to answers so readily. That old shit broke all the time. It may have been fun then, but I wouldn't want to return to days of squeezing kilobytes of RAM via autoexec.bat and config.sys tweaking, or agonizing over the perfect combination to keep my IRQs straight across all of my ISA slots.
corysama 3y ago
I'm not a Windows programmer to a significant degree. But, I did a tiny bit of digging and discovered at WinMain is just a function called by main() in Win32 executables. The implicit main() is pretty trivial and WinMain is largely unnecessary. hInstance can be retrieved from GetModuleHandle(nullptr). hPrevInstance is always NULL. lpCmdLine can be retrieved from GetCommandLine(). nCmdShow can be retrieved from GetStartupInfo() StartupInfo.wShowWindow. And, so you can just do #include <Windows.h> #pragma comment(lib, "user32.lib") #pragma comment(linker, "/subsystem:windows /ENTRY:mainCRTStartup") int main(int argc, const char *argv[]) { MessageBox(NULL, "Hello, Welcome to Win32 Programming", "Hello, World", MB_OK | MB_ICONINFORMATION); } and it works the same as the code in the article. Not a significant difference. But, I like peeling back magic code to make things just a little simpler. Can someone who knows better tell me why this is a bad idea? Or, is WinMain just an idea from 30 years ago that didn't actually go anywhere?
- andrewf 3y ago
  hPrevInstance meant something in Win16, which Win32 tried to maintain source compatibility with. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040615-00/?p=38873 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040615-00/?p=38... As you point out, what really matters is the entry point the linker puts into the executable's header, it's all just convention from there.
- tom_ 3y ago
  WinMain and main are both called by invoke_main: https://github.com/ojdkbuild/tools_toolchain_vs2017bt_1416/blob/d3cdb9a6cb3d92f6081290849f4386a9ff2ce30a/VC/Tools/MSVC/14.16.27023/crt/src/vcruntime/exe_common.inl#L100C37-L100C37 https://github.com/ojdkbuild/tools_toolchain_vs2017bt_1416/b... (that does not look like an official repo, but it's the best I could find in terms of a github link. The file pretty much matches c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Professional\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.29.30133\crt\src\vcruntime\exe_common.inl on my PC.)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- projektfu 3y ago
RobotToaster 3y ago
I still miss VB6 tbh.
- hattmall 3y ago
  You are not alone.
- bluedino 3y ago
  I had a job just a few years ago where I had to use it. Ugh
- api 3y ago
  GUI development has never been as productive as Visual Basic in the 1990s and early 2000s. You would just draw the UI, double click, and add code. Later versions also supported binding to data structures with one click and a few keystrokes. Then we abandoned all that stuff in favor of the web and stuff trying to badly imitate the web like xaml. It’s a bit shocking to me how totally out of fashion WYSIWYG is given how productive it can be. If someone brought back that kind of experience cross platform with something like Go as the language, millions of programmer hours would be saved. Of course it won’t happen because nobody would pay for it even if it saved them thousands of hours.
  - mwcampbell 3y ago
    I actually prefer expressing UI layouts abstractly in some kind of markup. Not necessarily in HTML and CSS, because the CSS box model is crazy, but something like XAML. In fact, last time I did a native application for macOS (many years ago), I decided I'd rather use the dead GNUstep Renaissance library, which is fairly XAML-like, than Apple's Interface Builder. I know I'm in a small minority here due to being legally blind, but drag-and-drop UI building was always a non-starter for me. I wonder how many sighted developers feel the same way for different reasons.
  - NBJack 3y ago
    I think it was the ever-distant promise of "it will be easier to be mobile friendly". Which honestly it rarely is.
Tade0 3y ago
> A real gold mine for a person like me who lives in a developing country with restricted access to old hardware. Interesting, because if anything I would assume that old hardware would be more accessible in developing countries - I mean, that was the case 20+ years ago in my (still) developing country - I got my parts from an open air bazaar, where it wasn't weird to see 10yo items. Personally I was 5 years behind the state of the art. My oldest piece of hardware was a dot matrix printer, which I used for school as recently as in 2007. IIRC the mentioned bazaar was the only place where you could find a replacement ribbon for it. My hoarder relative still had some old crap from the 90s when I was clearing out his cellar a few years ago.
- fuzztester 3y ago
  >a person like me who lives in a developing country with restricted access to old hardware. They probably meant: with access restricted to old hardware.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  There's much more old hardware in developed countries.
bluedino 3y ago
1990's? Once it was 1995 you wouldn't be caught dead with a 486. Also, Windows 95 came with a boot disk to run the installer so you didn't need DOS and MSCDEX. I was surprised to see no mention of a Borland product like Turbo C++ or Turbo Pascal, but by the mid 90's those were out of sight. You'd be using Watcom or DJGPP to make DOS games in the early to mid 90's. Also...where was MSVC 1.5? Forgot what version I had before acquiring Visual Studio 4 or whatever everyone else had.
- hollywood_court 3y ago
  I had my Packard Bell 486x up until I graduated high school in 2000. I still remember the one summer I mowed every lawn in my mobile home park so I could finally afford to upgrade the modem from the original 2400. That PC introduced me to BBSs and then the internet. I learned QBASIC and html with that thing. Good times.
  - D13Fd 3y ago
    2400 in the year 2000? You were WAY behind the times. Should have been 56k by then.
    - hollywood_court 3y ago
      Na I replaced the 2400 well before 2000. I simply stated that I had the 486x until 2000.
      - D13Fd 3y ago
        Oooh that makes sense. 486DX ran pretty well all told.
      - IntelMiner 3y ago
        Did you move it to Linux at any point? Back then it seemed to be an easy way to turn aging machines into veritable hotrods
userbinator 3y ago
Also useful, the classic Win32 API tutorial: http://www.winprog.org/tutorial/ http://www.winprog.org/tutorial/ (Discussed previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21459616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21459616)
scovetta 3y ago
I'd add QuickBasic 4.5, though I suppose that was late 80s. I still have the book that came with it around here somewhere. It was the first programming language / environment I used where I felt I could go beyond toy scripts.
Waterluvian 3y ago
I really miss the sound of my computer, a very mechanical machine, coming to life.
- EamonnMR 3y ago
  There's a part that tries to recreate it: https://www.retrokits.de/index.php/hdd-clicker-hdd-sound-simulator-v0-1/ https://www.retrokits.de/index.php/hdd-clicker-hdd-sound-sim...
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    Or you could get a secondary mechanical HDD :-P. Last year i got a 18TB mechanical HDD for extra storage in my desktop and the noises it makes are like as if the platter is made of stone and the headers are digging it to store the data :-P. After 10+ years of using only SSDs - and the HDD being quite more noisier than the HDDs i used for most of the late 2000s - the clonky mechanical sounds were outright nostalgic.
    - TristanBall 3y ago
      Some "new" hdds are absolutely insanely loud.. I got some recently where having 3 in an otherwise quiet case made them very audible from the other end of the house! I sent them back. Looking at the datasets for the WD Red Pro for example, there's idle/peak dBa from 34/38 for the 10TB to 20/32 for the 20TB 34 dBa idle. Are you kidding me? I ended up settling on the 18TB btw, as that's all there was at the time, 20/36 dBa.. and quite happy with them, and they're "normal loud". Noticable sitting next to the pc, more so when active, but not from more than a few metres away - and ZFS doing a scrub no longer sounds like a an industrial accident either, so thats nice.
      - callalex 3y ago
        Most hard drives have a very little known feature called “Advanced Acoustic Management” that allows you to inform the firmware of the drive that you want to prioritize noise over seek speed, and it will gently accelerate and decelerate the moving heads. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_acoustic_management https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_acoustic_managemen...
phoehne 3y ago
Good times... good times...
jeroenhd 3y ago
I've played around with old Visual Studio versions in virtual machines and as much as I like the older Windows aesthetic, dev tools sure have come a long way. For those interested in writing code for old systems using modern tools, you can write Rust code for Windows versions all the way back to Windows 95/NT 3.51: https://seri.tools/blog/announcing-rust9x/ https://seri.tools/blog/announcing-rust9x/
29athrowaway 3y ago
Also, Hungarian notation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation
- kmstout 3y ago
  "Hungarian Notation is the tactical nuclear weapon of source code obfuscation techniques; use it! Due to the sheer volume of source code contaminated by this idiom nothing can kill a maintenance engineer faster than a well planned Hungarian Notation attack." https://cs.fit.edu/~kgallagher/Schtick/How%20To%20Write%20Unmaintainable%20Code.html https://cs.fit.edu/~kgallagher/Schtick/How%20To%20Write%20Un...
intrasight 3y ago
So glad I skipped 30 years of Windows development .
stevefan1999 3y ago
And look at how bloated our development environment is today. Bunch of extensions, themes and language servers. It may sounds oxymoronic since I'm a Zoomer, but I don't want these eye candies and too much nice-to-haves, and I just want to write programs effectively without attractions, while I want to dev environment to be lightweight as well.
- callalex 3y ago
  You may be interested in the field of embedded programming.
  - stevefan1999 3y ago
    I am! In fact, I used to work with FPGA, MCUs (I'm toying with ESP32-C2/C3) and (still is working on) kernel programming.
- jussij 3y ago
  You can still program today without using an IDE. Just ask any Vim or Emacs user.
  - versteegen 3y ago
    As an Emacs user: don't underestimate the amount of code running inside Emacs, especially if you install a lot of packages. I measure Emacs 28.2 as shipping 1.86M lines of elisp (a bit more than is in the source repo), the core is 540 kLoC of .c/.h files, and I have ~273 kLoC elisp amongst a small set of packages. Sure, Electron itself is probably still an order of magnitude more.
  - nunez 3y ago
    Can confirm. Programming in vim is frickin awesome. I was a hardcore notepad++ user before this but decided to spend two weeks using nothing but emacs then, a year or so later, nothing but vim. I had to load up VSCode for a demo I was giving. All of the options and plugins and IntelliType and spurious warnings and stuff was crazy overwhelming.
pan69 3y ago
When I was a starting professional programmer in the early 90s I had 3 books on my desk. The K&R C book, a book on BIOS/DOS and interrupts and a book on Assembler. That's was all the knowledge that I needed at that time to do my work.
kristopolous 3y ago
Watching old videos from the time like the Computer Chronicles, I'm pretty surprised how many people were running OpenStep on Intel hardware. It seems like it really made a dent for a year or two there. Check out the b roll around 5:43 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=340 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=340 And here you can clearly see the login screen on a likely Intel multi core machine, probably from Everex or NCR a similar company https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=284 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=284 It's on the right hand side right before they cut it I've started to notice it a bunch in the 1993/94 timeframe. I had no idea. Next I'm going to find a bunch of people using A/UX and BeBoxes. My old bank, Washington Mutual, was using OS/2 until like 2003 ... Why not?
0dayz 3y ago
I wonder if at some point we will have people see developing the "old school" way as a form of art/hobby or challenge people actively take part in.
- trzy 3y ago
  Folk programming.
- raincole 3y ago
  I don't think so. Collecting CD would never be as fancy as collecting vinyl, and collecting USB sticks would never be as fancy as collecting CD (unless in some Fallout scenario). The tech world is so... transient.
  - 0dayz 3y ago
    Perhaps, I think that a good middle ground could be for is to emulate old envirments and see what modern tools can come up with.
- whtrbt 3y ago
  Does the demoscene count?
  - 0dayz 3y ago
    I was thinking of this but I think the demoscene is more of a tradition in competition rather than tradition in tooling.
- xtagon 3y ago
  Why not? I learned programming with QBasic, which included its own little IDE and docs in the form of a help menu system. Years and years later, for the nostalgia of it all I stood up a DOS emulator with QBasic on modern hardware and it was a good time.
- Tijdreiziger 3y ago
  NCommander on YouTube does a lot of this kind of 'software archeology' https://youtube.com/@NCommander https://youtube.com/@NCommander
chx 3y ago
SCSI Zip drive as a Starter Pack? Some people are loaded :D Uh, that was a lot of dough back then. Even an ATAPI 100MB Zip drive was something to heavily consider.
dsnoor 3y ago
Hello, the author here. I don't expect this to be posted on HN. I use the blog to teach myself how to write in technical blog English. Let me clarify two things: - What I meant restricted access to old computers is that it's hard to get old computers that's usable and not being dismantled and scraped. Whenever I searched online it's always from the US or Europe. No local e-commerce market have 486 available. - The Real Programmer™ is a tongue-in-cheek. I got my first job doing VB 6 stuff . The remark is just to make fun of those who look down on VB6 just because you cane do C or C++.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  I'm actually surprised you opted for VS97. I would think, far more developers between '95 and '02 would be more acquainted with VS6. Mostly due to it's exceedingly generous (relative to later) licensing terms and inclusion of VB classic. I don't think I used any Visual Studio environment other than 6 until well into XP and 2000's tenure. It sounds like your own experience was relatively similar.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  For that timeframe I would actually have picked either Delphi or C++ Builder, not VS. As for the COM joke, it is still on us, given how widely it is used as main Windows API nowadays.
  - signaru 3y ago
    Borland stuff are great for getting things done and are also what I'm considering if ever I will have time for recreational retro-programming. But for an article, C++ with WinApi would give more to talk about.
- lproven 3y ago
  > Whenever I searched online it's always from the US or Europe. No local e-commerce market have 486 available. Then you should say that, not embark on a work of fiction. Or use modern 486-class hardware, which is far more interesting. E.g. https://www.embeddedts.com/products/TS-4400 https://www.embeddedts.com/products/TS-4400 or https://github.com/eivindbohler/tinyllama https://github.com/eivindbohler/tinyllama
Dwedit 3y ago
There's a small typo, where PCI slots got called PIC. Both are real tech terms, but PIC is a microcontroller.
grose 3y ago
90s webdev starter pack: - WS_FTP LE - notepad - htmlgoodies.com https://web.archive.org/web/19991008040849/http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/basics.html https://web.archive.org/web/19991008040849/http://www.htmlgo...
creativenolo 3y ago
Beast of a machine with that spec.
_8j50 3y ago
No Borland software!?
azubinski 3y ago
Topspeed Modula-2 Xtree It was a little earlier, but it's still nice to remember. Yeah, today it's still cool and not like anything else :)
DeathArrow 3y ago
>Windows 95 is the first full 32-bit Windows that's built by Microsoft. It's a break from previous generations of Windows which brings 32-bit programming to consumer which previously was only available on Windows NT. I remember using 32 bit extensions for Windows 3.1 at some point in time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s
- lproven 3y ago
  Sure, but that wasn't an OS. NT was an OS and was perfectly end-user ready. I deployed in production. If we were talking about games and compatibility with existing hardware and software, then fine, yes, Win95 was the first consumer 32-bit MS OS. But we are not. The blog post is talking about writing C++ code, which is not, I submit, a "consumer" sort of activity.
DeathArrow 3y ago
I remember learning some Windows programming as a teen from Charles Petzold Programming Windows and wondering what is that strange hungarian notation.
PedroBatista 3y ago
As much as Win32 app development can suck, please make a time machine and get me out of this "cloud native" hell hole..
lproven 3y ago
This is a work of fiction, filled with 75% pure fantasy, and the rest half wrong. All the hardware stuff is pure fantasy; they were using an emulator. So all the pics and all that text, including nonsense like "3 PIC slots" and "two EDO RAM" -- Peripheral Component Interconnect is not even similar to a Peripheral Interrupt Controller; EDO RAM only works on a Pentium, and it's a type of chip, it's not countable -- this stuff is 100% pure fiction. No, Win95 was not the first fully 32-bit Windows from Microsoft. 1. It's not fully 32-bit; it's a hybrid, with 16-bit code. 2. It's not the first; that was NT 3.1, which is fully 32-bit. It didn't bring programming to consumers. Did consumers want programming anyway? This is pure fakery, in broken English, from someone who doesn't really know their stuff -- and probably is not really old, as they claim. It's just playing pretend.
- yankcrime 3y ago
  > All the hardware stuff is pure fantasy That's a very uncharitable take. More likely it's a typo (that board has PCI slots). > EDO RAM only works on a Pentium Not true, EDO was supported on some boards. This is the board mentioned in the article: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asus-pvi-486sp3 https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asus-pvi-486sp3
  - lproven 3y ago
    I know it's a typo! But this is someone saying they are "an old developer" and blogging about running an OS on old kit, in some depth, discussing what adapters they are using... And there is no kit. No CPU, no motherboard, nothing. It's all a total fantasy. They are running a PC emulator on an M1 Mac, as far as I can see. The author, downthread, says they were practising tech blogging. This is the feedback! Write about the real stuff you are using. Don't make stuff up -- EVER. No fantasy, no wishlists, no daydreaming. Use real kit, and if you can't, don't pretend. If you are using an emulator, describe it. Show it. Say how you built it, show what options you picked, what you built it with, and how, and why. Because this person made a bunch of stuff up, without making it clear they were making it up, and then they got the stuff they made up wrong. Even the facts and claims about the contemporary tools are wrong. I have no clue about main loops in the Win32 API and I don't care, but I can't trust that that's right either when the rest of the post can't distinguish between a PIC and PCI, and can't count SIMM slots, and doesn't seem to know about the bits I do know. It it the same issue as this famous Mastodon post from the end of last year: https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/109572674700288958 https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/109572674700288958 « He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius. Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius. Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets. » This is a blog post about software development in early MS 32-bit tools. I know nothing about that. But the blog post talks at length about 1990s hardware, something I know a lot about, and about 1990s MS operating systems, something else I know a lot about... And that stuff is all wrong. So it makes me not trust the bits of it that are about the stuff I don't know about, and since that is the core subject of the post, that matters. Someone was trying to show off their knowledge, and it didn't work, and I am calling it out.
steve1977 3y ago
... for Windows. In the 90s, I was still dabbling in Atari TOS and later FreeBSD. Before I moved on to Mac OS X.

226 points by ingve 3y ago

colordrops 3y ago

I could hear disks spinning up just looking at that page.

brianwawok 3y ago
10k (I think the fast drives were 10k rpm) SCSI drives were a full time hummingbird.
- speed_spread 3y ago
  There were even 15k SCSI HDD. Those sounded like having an idling Ferrari parked next to your ankle.
meepmorp 3y ago
I heard a clicking Zip drive

fuzztester 3y ago

The 80s Developer Starter Pack: BEGIN Use(TurboPascal); Do(AllWithJustIt); END Why use Pascal? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36646890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36646890

j45 3y ago
Starting with Basic, Pascal really was such an accelerant to learn programming before moving to c, c++, Java, .net and beyond. Polyglots were formed quite naturally at one time, with a focus on transferable skills and knowledge.
- makapuf 3y ago
  How many did basic > compiled basic > turbo pascal + asm > C > C++ > perl/python > ...
  - j45 3y ago
    For real haha. I forgot to include asm and Visual Basic. VB was looked down on back then but look at low/no code now. Perl/Python was at the start for me, scripting was a parallel lane to coding. Highest respect is always held for TCL.
  - indymike 3y ago
    I think almost all of us started with BASIC. Then we all wanted to do more... and with more memory and do it faster... so I needed a compiled language. So, I learned C, then Pascal, then VisualBasic. C forever corrupted me. Then C++ was the future, so I learned that... and then the web came... and with it came CGI scripting with Perl. I really fell in love with Python, though. It was what BASIC should have been, but Python was slow, so I learned Go. Along the way I also learned Prolog, Lisp, Java, Javascript, Rexx and a host of different OS scripting languages. Now, I just look at a problem, and pick something that fits. Mostly. Except when I want to learn something new.
  - tremon 3y ago
    My path was (C64) Basic -> Quick Basic -> (Borland) C++ -> (x86) asm -> Java -> Python. Mostly. There's some Ruby, plain C, Lisp, Haskell, C# in there, and lately Ocaml and Rust. And lots of shell scripting in between. Never needed Pascal, and I stay away from Perl. Clojure is still on my wishlist, as is Scala (because of Spark, mostly).
    - Dwedit 3y ago
      I did Z80 ASM before C and C++, then later settled on C# as the go-to language of choice.
  - LVB 3y ago
    BASIC (GW & Apple) was ubiquitous, but a BASIC compiler was incredibly difficult to find, even illicitly. And 13-year-old me had no hope of purchasing it for $500.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
cecida 3y ago
Pascal was still the language being taught to first year students in the university I attended in the late 90's. Our "multimedia" professor was very in to Javascript, but assured us that it would be replaced by something more efficient. Neither happened.
- naavis 3y ago
  We still had programming classes in school with Pascal in the early 00s.
  - jasonfarnon 3y ago
    In fact, my recollection is the AP computer science curriculum was in pascal until around 2000.

pjerem 3y ago

Ah, do you remember when this thing called Windows allowed you to simply create windows with 10 lines of code ? Where have we gone ?

convolvatron 3y ago
on the symbolics it was literally (create-window)
anyfoo 3y ago
And have a 10000 lines message processing loop? Yeah. It wasn’t exactly Qt.
enriquto 3y ago
Ten lines? Why so complicated? Back in my day we did it with just two lines: mov al, 13 int 10 And then you pushed your pixels to the video segment (a0000). So simple and elegant... But my dad still mocked me because it was too complicated! Back in his day, you didn't need to bother with stupid video modes, and could just POKE the pixels to your screen!
- fb03 3y ago
  oh man, mode 13!!! I still have this line embedded in my head (Turbo Pascal 7) mem[$A000:x+(320*y)] := color
  - NBJack 3y ago
    Don't forget trying to pick a palette, and those sweet, sweet palette cycling effects for things like water.
- kijiki 3y ago
  Bug, you want: mov al, 13h
- stevefan1999 3y ago
  Not only this is architectural specific (needs BIOS to map a specific constant range of memory), but this will cause a lot of software interrupts. Interrupts, like exceptions, are _bad_. In UEFI you have VESA Video Mode to handle most of the annoying mode selection stuff and GOP to handle...memory mapped framebuffer in linear address, so that you can just write directly to the framebuffer to push your pixel...that's even simpler. You want double or triple buffering? Just make another memory buffer with the same dimension and strides, and recursively push each level of buffer up on render, easy.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

Don't forget a pack of extra jumpers for setting irq's with. Lol.

nunez 3y ago
Cuz you'll definitely lose one at the worst time!

j45 3y ago

The best thing about this was the terror of taking apart what was usually a $2-4000 home Pc and putting it together again. Learning all the hardware acronyms set a foundation for software development because you could debug though what the computer was doing. It’s almost an unfair advantage these days in some cases.

mr_toad 3y ago
Ah yes, fiddling with jumper switches in inaccessible locations, tiny screws in even more inaccessible locations, trying to get an IDE card into a slot without breaking something, cables that were too short. I don’t miss it.
- j45 3y ago
  Were there other choices then?

zerr 3y ago

Any experiences using Delphi for Android/iOS (and cross-platform generally) development? Seems like the only cross-platform solution that wraps platform WebView on each platform, has an imperative GUI, RAD IDE and produces a native code.

nemo44x 3y ago

Really nice API. Compare to Mac of that era you needed to create and maintain your own event loop and have a bunch of branches for when a certain thing was clicked. To show a basic dialogue you had to continue to draw it over and over in your loop. Windows took care of devs!

duskwuff 3y ago
> To show a basic dialogue you had to continue to draw it over and over in your loop. It wasn't quite that bad. Basic alert dialogs were fully handled by Alert(); event loops for more complex dialogs were implemented by ModalDialog(). Anything non-modal could certainly get hairy, though. (Relevant documentation: https://woofle.net/impdf/TB-06-DialogManager.pdf https://woofle.net/impdf/TB-06-DialogManager.pdf)
- nemo44x 3y ago
  172 pages for dialog’s lol. Thank god for ResEdit! You’re right though. If I recall because of the single thread certain built-in popups could more or less block. BUT - perhaps you wanted something a bit more tricky. Well, now you’re back in it! :) I always liked that exitToShell() took you to a GUI.

asveikau 3y ago

I think you can skip VC++97 and develop with msys and mingw. I haven't used those to target 9x in a long time, just older NT, so I'm not sure how up to the task it is these days. But I think it can get you more recent versions of C and C++ that route.

versteegen 3y ago
I use a recent mingw-w64 with a recent GCC (I'd assume the latest versions could work too) to target Windows 95 (through 11, obviously). I prefer the mxe toolchain to crosscompile from Linux for convenience but do also compile with mingw-w64 on Windows in a VM. mingw.org will probably work too perhaps with a little work. However recently I had to patch mingw-w64 to restore support for Win 95 through 2000, which they'd broken only for the sake of implementing SetThreadName [1]. My experience in general is it's pretty easy to support Windows 95+ as long as you make use of newer APIs optional by dynamically loading symbols, and deal with small issues as they appear. So it helps to have users actually testing occasionally... because I don't. [1] https://github.com/rversteegen/mxe/commit/aa87b55a77a62d4cffa1a893497444ecc615653d https://github.com/rversteegen/mxe/commit/aa87b55a77a62d4cff...
- asveikau 3y ago
  Thank you for this. That's a good reply. As for your diff, I'd be inclined to call AddVectoredExceptionHandler etc. through GetProcAddress where available. (Off topic, but I like to use that API for logging access violations.)
  - versteegen 3y ago
    Yes, I guess I could do that, then maybe I can get it upstreamed. However I was misremembering a bit and misspoke before both about how easy it's been to support Windows 95 (it was easy up until a few mingw-w64 releases ago... except for spawning processes) and how recent my mingw-w64 is (I'm using 7.0.0, 3.5 years old, and simply haven't tried anything newer; the GCC version is independent within limits). Also I have no idea the minimum Windows targetted by mingw-w64 actually is, they don't say. I think they don't actually care about Windows 9x support, they just never did anything to break it before 6.0.0. I have doubts they'd accept such a patch. The most important trick was you have to use a build of mingw-w64 with 'win32' rather than 'posix' threading ([1], and the rest of that thread is relevant too): > the 'win32' threading support in mingw-w64 is the original one and supports all 32-bit Windows, while 'posix' threading (winpthreads) is a recent addition which is necessary to support C++11 mutexes and threads, but has higher system requirements. ... That's why mxe switched to posix threads by default in 2019. [1] https://github.com/ohrrpgce/ohrrpgce/issues/1241#issuecomment-1232960187 https://github.com/ohrrpgce/ohrrpgce/issues/1241#issuecommen...

mjhagen 3y ago

My 90s developer setup: - Macintosh Performa 5200 - BBEdit - Fetch

mattl 3y ago

This “real programmer” stuff is just gatekeeping and needs to go away forever

speed_spread 3y ago
Well, someone's hurt that their favorite IDE was derided once again 28 years later... :) Seriously, VB was quick and fun to code in but ultimately just contained way too many crazy footguns to build large maintainable apps. It's one of those things I swore never to put on my CV for fear someone noticed and asked me for just one "one quick fix" to their mudball.
- mattl 3y ago
  It’s just unnecessary to have “real” programmers and everyone else. When you work with computers for long enough you realize there’s a massive grey area between those terms and most people are there.
projektfu 3y ago
I applied for a vb6 job circa 2000 and was sent a timed exam that required detailed knowledge of its library. I was like, oh, you actually wanted me to really know it. At this point VB had Intellisense for 2 versions and I couldn't imagine actually memorizing its crazy library. Anyhow, a real programmer definitely got that job.
NBJack 3y ago
Ah, don't mistake many of us collectively romping through the piles of outdated software and hardware with rose-colored goggles as something like that. Nostalgia trips aside, I certainly wouldn't be eager to trade my three-decades-refined tooling and easy access to answers so readily. That old shit broke all the time. It may have been fun then, but I wouldn't want to return to days of squeezing kilobytes of RAM via autoexec.bat and config.sys tweaking, or agonizing over the perfect combination to keep my IRQs straight across all of my ISA slots.

corysama 3y ago

I'm not a Windows programmer to a significant degree. But, I did a tiny bit of digging and discovered at WinMain is just a function called by main() in Win32 executables. The implicit main() is pretty trivial and WinMain is largely unnecessary. hInstance can be retrieved from GetModuleHandle(nullptr). hPrevInstance is always NULL. lpCmdLine can be retrieved from GetCommandLine(). nCmdShow can be retrieved from GetStartupInfo() StartupInfo.wShowWindow. And, so you can just do #include <Windows.h> #pragma comment(lib, "user32.lib") #pragma comment(linker, "/subsystem:windows /ENTRY:mainCRTStartup") int main(int argc, const char *argv[]) { MessageBox(NULL, "Hello, Welcome to Win32 Programming", "Hello, World", MB_OK | MB_ICONINFORMATION); } and it works the same as the code in the article. Not a significant difference. But, I like peeling back magic code to make things just a little simpler. Can someone who knows better tell me why this is a bad idea? Or, is WinMain just an idea from 30 years ago that didn't actually go anywhere?

andrewf 3y ago
hPrevInstance meant something in Win16, which Win32 tried to maintain source compatibility with. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040615-00/?p=38873 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040615-00/?p=38... As you point out, what really matters is the entry point the linker puts into the executable's header, it's all just convention from there.
tom_ 3y ago
WinMain and main are both called by invoke_main: https://github.com/ojdkbuild/tools_toolchain_vs2017bt_1416/blob/d3cdb9a6cb3d92f6081290849f4386a9ff2ce30a/VC/Tools/MSVC/14.16.27023/crt/src/vcruntime/exe_common.inl#L100C37-L100C37 https://github.com/ojdkbuild/tools_toolchain_vs2017bt_1416/b... (that does not look like an official repo, but it's the best I could find in terms of a github link. The file pretty much matches c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Professional\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.29.30133\crt\src\vcruntime\exe_common.inl on my PC.)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
projektfu 3y ago

RobotToaster 3y ago

I still miss VB6 tbh.

hattmall 3y ago
You are not alone.
bluedino 3y ago
I had a job just a few years ago where I had to use it. Ugh
api 3y ago
GUI development has never been as productive as Visual Basic in the 1990s and early 2000s. You would just draw the UI, double click, and add code. Later versions also supported binding to data structures with one click and a few keystrokes. Then we abandoned all that stuff in favor of the web and stuff trying to badly imitate the web like xaml. It’s a bit shocking to me how totally out of fashion WYSIWYG is given how productive it can be. If someone brought back that kind of experience cross platform with something like Go as the language, millions of programmer hours would be saved. Of course it won’t happen because nobody would pay for it even if it saved them thousands of hours.
- mwcampbell 3y ago
  I actually prefer expressing UI layouts abstractly in some kind of markup. Not necessarily in HTML and CSS, because the CSS box model is crazy, but something like XAML. In fact, last time I did a native application for macOS (many years ago), I decided I'd rather use the dead GNUstep Renaissance library, which is fairly XAML-like, than Apple's Interface Builder. I know I'm in a small minority here due to being legally blind, but drag-and-drop UI building was always a non-starter for me. I wonder how many sighted developers feel the same way for different reasons.
- NBJack 3y ago
  I think it was the ever-distant promise of "it will be easier to be mobile friendly". Which honestly it rarely is.

Tade0 3y ago

> A real gold mine for a person like me who lives in a developing country with restricted access to old hardware. Interesting, because if anything I would assume that old hardware would be more accessible in developing countries - I mean, that was the case 20+ years ago in my (still) developing country - I got my parts from an open air bazaar, where it wasn't weird to see 10yo items. Personally I was 5 years behind the state of the art. My oldest piece of hardware was a dot matrix printer, which I used for school as recently as in 2007. IIRC the mentioned bazaar was the only place where you could find a replacement ribbon for it. My hoarder relative still had some old crap from the 90s when I was clearing out his cellar a few years ago.

fuzztester 3y ago
>a person like me who lives in a developing country with restricted access to old hardware. They probably meant: with access restricted to old hardware.
gtirloni 3y ago
There's much more old hardware in developed countries.

bluedino 3y ago

1990's? Once it was 1995 you wouldn't be caught dead with a 486. Also, Windows 95 came with a boot disk to run the installer so you didn't need DOS and MSCDEX. I was surprised to see no mention of a Borland product like Turbo C++ or Turbo Pascal, but by the mid 90's those were out of sight. You'd be using Watcom or DJGPP to make DOS games in the early to mid 90's. Also...where was MSVC 1.5? Forgot what version I had before acquiring Visual Studio 4 or whatever everyone else had.

hollywood_court 3y ago
I had my Packard Bell 486x up until I graduated high school in 2000. I still remember the one summer I mowed every lawn in my mobile home park so I could finally afford to upgrade the modem from the original 2400. That PC introduced me to BBSs and then the internet. I learned QBASIC and html with that thing. Good times.
- D13Fd 3y ago
  2400 in the year 2000? You were WAY behind the times. Should have been 56k by then.
  - hollywood_court 3y ago
    Na I replaced the 2400 well before 2000. I simply stated that I had the 486x until 2000.
    - D13Fd 3y ago
      Oooh that makes sense. 486DX ran pretty well all told.
    - IntelMiner 3y ago
      Did you move it to Linux at any point? Back then it seemed to be an easy way to turn aging machines into veritable hotrods

userbinator 3y ago

Also useful, the classic Win32 API tutorial: http://www.winprog.org/tutorial/ http://www.winprog.org/tutorial/ (Discussed previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21459616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21459616)

scovetta 3y ago

I'd add QuickBasic 4.5, though I suppose that was late 80s. I still have the book that came with it around here somewhere. It was the first programming language / environment I used where I felt I could go beyond toy scripts.

Waterluvian 3y ago

I really miss the sound of my computer, a very mechanical machine, coming to life.

EamonnMR 3y ago
There's a part that tries to recreate it: https://www.retrokits.de/index.php/hdd-clicker-hdd-sound-simulator-v0-1/ https://www.retrokits.de/index.php/hdd-clicker-hdd-sound-sim...
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  Or you could get a secondary mechanical HDD :-P. Last year i got a 18TB mechanical HDD for extra storage in my desktop and the noises it makes are like as if the platter is made of stone and the headers are digging it to store the data :-P. After 10+ years of using only SSDs - and the HDD being quite more noisier than the HDDs i used for most of the late 2000s - the clonky mechanical sounds were outright nostalgic.
  - TristanBall 3y ago
    Some "new" hdds are absolutely insanely loud.. I got some recently where having 3 in an otherwise quiet case made them very audible from the other end of the house! I sent them back. Looking at the datasets for the WD Red Pro for example, there's idle/peak dBa from 34/38 for the 10TB to 20/32 for the 20TB 34 dBa idle. Are you kidding me? I ended up settling on the 18TB btw, as that's all there was at the time, 20/36 dBa.. and quite happy with them, and they're "normal loud". Noticable sitting next to the pc, more so when active, but not from more than a few metres away - and ZFS doing a scrub no longer sounds like a an industrial accident either, so thats nice.
    - callalex 3y ago
      Most hard drives have a very little known feature called “Advanced Acoustic Management” that allows you to inform the firmware of the drive that you want to prioritize noise over seek speed, and it will gently accelerate and decelerate the moving heads. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_acoustic_management https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_acoustic_managemen...

phoehne 3y ago

Good times... good times...

jeroenhd 3y ago

I've played around with old Visual Studio versions in virtual machines and as much as I like the older Windows aesthetic, dev tools sure have come a long way. For those interested in writing code for old systems using modern tools, you can write Rust code for Windows versions all the way back to Windows 95/NT 3.51: https://seri.tools/blog/announcing-rust9x/ https://seri.tools/blog/announcing-rust9x/

29athrowaway 3y ago

Also, Hungarian notation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation

kmstout 3y ago
"Hungarian Notation is the tactical nuclear weapon of source code obfuscation techniques; use it! Due to the sheer volume of source code contaminated by this idiom nothing can kill a maintenance engineer faster than a well planned Hungarian Notation attack." https://cs.fit.edu/~kgallagher/Schtick/How%20To%20Write%20Unmaintainable%20Code.html https://cs.fit.edu/~kgallagher/Schtick/How%20To%20Write%20Un...

intrasight 3y ago

So glad I skipped 30 years of Windows development .

stevefan1999 3y ago

And look at how bloated our development environment is today. Bunch of extensions, themes and language servers. It may sounds oxymoronic since I'm a Zoomer, but I don't want these eye candies and too much nice-to-haves, and I just want to write programs effectively without attractions, while I want to dev environment to be lightweight as well.

callalex 3y ago
You may be interested in the field of embedded programming.
- stevefan1999 3y ago
  I am! In fact, I used to work with FPGA, MCUs (I'm toying with ESP32-C2/C3) and (still is working on) kernel programming.
jussij 3y ago
You can still program today without using an IDE. Just ask any Vim or Emacs user.
- versteegen 3y ago
  As an Emacs user: don't underestimate the amount of code running inside Emacs, especially if you install a lot of packages. I measure Emacs 28.2 as shipping 1.86M lines of elisp (a bit more than is in the source repo), the core is 540 kLoC of .c/.h files, and I have ~273 kLoC elisp amongst a small set of packages. Sure, Electron itself is probably still an order of magnitude more.
- nunez 3y ago
  Can confirm. Programming in vim is frickin awesome. I was a hardcore notepad++ user before this but decided to spend two weeks using nothing but emacs then, a year or so later, nothing but vim. I had to load up VSCode for a demo I was giving. All of the options and plugins and IntelliType and spurious warnings and stuff was crazy overwhelming.

pan69 3y ago

When I was a starting professional programmer in the early 90s I had 3 books on my desk. The K&R C book, a book on BIOS/DOS and interrupts and a book on Assembler. That's was all the knowledge that I needed at that time to do my work.

kristopolous 3y ago

Watching old videos from the time like the Computer Chronicles, I'm pretty surprised how many people were running OpenStep on Intel hardware. It seems like it really made a dent for a year or two there. Check out the b roll around 5:43 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=340 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=340 And here you can clearly see the login screen on a likely Intel multi core machine, probably from Everex or NCR a similar company https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=284 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=284 It's on the right hand side right before they cut it I've started to notice it a bunch in the 1993/94 timeframe. I had no idea. Next I'm going to find a bunch of people using A/UX and BeBoxes. My old bank, Washington Mutual, was using OS/2 until like 2003 ... Why not?

0dayz 3y ago

I wonder if at some point we will have people see developing the "old school" way as a form of art/hobby or challenge people actively take part in.

trzy 3y ago
Folk programming.
raincole 3y ago
I don't think so. Collecting CD would never be as fancy as collecting vinyl, and collecting USB sticks would never be as fancy as collecting CD (unless in some Fallout scenario). The tech world is so... transient.
- 0dayz 3y ago
  Perhaps, I think that a good middle ground could be for is to emulate old envirments and see what modern tools can come up with.
whtrbt 3y ago
Does the demoscene count?
- 0dayz 3y ago
  I was thinking of this but I think the demoscene is more of a tradition in competition rather than tradition in tooling.
xtagon 3y ago
Why not? I learned programming with QBasic, which included its own little IDE and docs in the form of a help menu system. Years and years later, for the nostalgia of it all I stood up a DOS emulator with QBasic on modern hardware and it was a good time.
Tijdreiziger 3y ago
NCommander on YouTube does a lot of this kind of 'software archeology' https://youtube.com/@NCommander https://youtube.com/@NCommander

chx 3y ago

SCSI Zip drive as a Starter Pack? Some people are loaded :D Uh, that was a lot of dough back then. Even an ATAPI 100MB Zip drive was something to heavily consider.

dsnoor 3y ago

Hello, the author here. I don't expect this to be posted on HN. I use the blog to teach myself how to write in technical blog English. Let me clarify two things: - What I meant restricted access to old computers is that it's hard to get old computers that's usable and not being dismantled and scraped. Whenever I searched online it's always from the US or Europe. No local e-commerce market have 486 available. - The Real Programmer™ is a tongue-in-cheek. I got my first job doing VB 6 stuff . The remark is just to make fun of those who look down on VB6 just because you cane do C or C++.

deaddodo 3y ago
I'm actually surprised you opted for VS97. I would think, far more developers between '95 and '02 would be more acquainted with VS6. Mostly due to it's exceedingly generous (relative to later) licensing terms and inclusion of VB classic. I don't think I used any Visual Studio environment other than 6 until well into XP and 2000's tenure. It sounds like your own experience was relatively similar.
pjmlp 3y ago
For that timeframe I would actually have picked either Delphi or C++ Builder, not VS. As for the COM joke, it is still on us, given how widely it is used as main Windows API nowadays.
- signaru 3y ago
  Borland stuff are great for getting things done and are also what I'm considering if ever I will have time for recreational retro-programming. But for an article, C++ with WinApi would give more to talk about.
lproven 3y ago
> Whenever I searched online it's always from the US or Europe. No local e-commerce market have 486 available. Then you should say that, not embark on a work of fiction. Or use modern 486-class hardware, which is far more interesting. E.g. https://www.embeddedts.com/products/TS-4400 https://www.embeddedts.com/products/TS-4400 or https://github.com/eivindbohler/tinyllama https://github.com/eivindbohler/tinyllama

Dwedit 3y ago

There's a small typo, where PCI slots got called PIC. Both are real tech terms, but PIC is a microcontroller.

grose 3y ago

90s webdev starter pack: - WS_FTP LE - notepad - htmlgoodies.com https://web.archive.org/web/19991008040849/http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/basics.html https://web.archive.org/web/19991008040849/http://www.htmlgo...

creativenolo 3y ago

Beast of a machine with that spec.

_8j50 3y ago

No Borland software!?

azubinski 3y ago

Topspeed Modula-2 Xtree It was a little earlier, but it's still nice to remember. Yeah, today it's still cool and not like anything else :)

DeathArrow 3y ago

>Windows 95 is the first full 32-bit Windows that's built by Microsoft. It's a break from previous generations of Windows which brings 32-bit programming to consumer which previously was only available on Windows NT. I remember using 32 bit extensions for Windows 3.1 at some point in time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s

lproven 3y ago
Sure, but that wasn't an OS. NT was an OS and was perfectly end-user ready. I deployed in production. If we were talking about games and compatibility with existing hardware and software, then fine, yes, Win95 was the first consumer 32-bit MS OS. But we are not. The blog post is talking about writing C++ code, which is not, I submit, a "consumer" sort of activity.

DeathArrow 3y ago

I remember learning some Windows programming as a teen from Charles Petzold Programming Windows and wondering what is that strange hungarian notation.

PedroBatista 3y ago

As much as Win32 app development can suck, please make a time machine and get me out of this "cloud native" hell hole..

lproven 3y ago

This is a work of fiction, filled with 75% pure fantasy, and the rest half wrong. All the hardware stuff is pure fantasy; they were using an emulator. So all the pics and all that text, including nonsense like "3 PIC slots" and "two EDO RAM" -- Peripheral Component Interconnect is not even similar to a Peripheral Interrupt Controller; EDO RAM only works on a Pentium, and it's a type of chip, it's not countable -- this stuff is 100% pure fiction. No, Win95 was not the first fully 32-bit Windows from Microsoft. 1. It's not fully 32-bit; it's a hybrid, with 16-bit code. 2. It's not the first; that was NT 3.1, which is fully 32-bit. It didn't bring programming to consumers. Did consumers want programming anyway? This is pure fakery, in broken English, from someone who doesn't really know their stuff -- and probably is not really old, as they claim. It's just playing pretend.

yankcrime 3y ago
> All the hardware stuff is pure fantasy That's a very uncharitable take. More likely it's a typo (that board has PCI slots). > EDO RAM only works on a Pentium Not true, EDO was supported on some boards. This is the board mentioned in the article: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asus-pvi-486sp3 https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asus-pvi-486sp3
- lproven 3y ago
  I know it's a typo! But this is someone saying they are "an old developer" and blogging about running an OS on old kit, in some depth, discussing what adapters they are using... And there is no kit. No CPU, no motherboard, nothing. It's all a total fantasy. They are running a PC emulator on an M1 Mac, as far as I can see. The author, downthread, says they were practising tech blogging. This is the feedback! Write about the real stuff you are using. Don't make stuff up -- EVER. No fantasy, no wishlists, no daydreaming. Use real kit, and if you can't, don't pretend. If you are using an emulator, describe it. Show it. Say how you built it, show what options you picked, what you built it with, and how, and why. Because this person made a bunch of stuff up, without making it clear they were making it up, and then they got the stuff they made up wrong. Even the facts and claims about the contemporary tools are wrong. I have no clue about main loops in the Win32 API and I don't care, but I can't trust that that's right either when the rest of the post can't distinguish between a PIC and PCI, and can't count SIMM slots, and doesn't seem to know about the bits I do know. It it the same issue as this famous Mastodon post from the end of last year: https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/109572674700288958 https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/109572674700288958 « He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius. Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius. Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets. » This is a blog post about software development in early MS 32-bit tools. I know nothing about that. But the blog post talks at length about 1990s hardware, something I know a lot about, and about 1990s MS operating systems, something else I know a lot about... And that stuff is all wrong. So it makes me not trust the bits of it that are about the stuff I don't know about, and since that is the core subject of the post, that matters. Someone was trying to show off their knowledge, and it didn't work, and I am calling it out.

steve1977 3y ago

... for Windows. In the 90s, I was still dabbling in Atari TOS and later FreeBSD. Before I moved on to Mac OS X.