I go back to '81, and the bigger pix missed is the staggering homogeneity and low cost. "What? The compiler is free, not $299.95 mail order? And the same com

I go back to '81, and the bigger pix missed is the staggering homogeneity and low cost. "What? The compiler is free, not $299.95 mail order? And the same compiler runs on your desktop as on your server? What manner of sorcery is this?" "The worlds best programming editor is free?" "Wait, you mean the same kernel and similar OS is on my phone and my settop box and my desktop and my server?" The lack of "NIH" and pounding square pegs into round holes is spectacular. There is a bit more attention to security now that everything is interconnected. When the default is never to be connected to anything, you only need security slightly better than physical security which usually isn't much. Subjectively, error messages are staggeringly more verbose yet contain less content than ever. I'd like to see an AI system for error messages that provides more useful error messages. AFAIK this has never been implemented. Another subjective annoyance is believe it or not in the 80s we knew all about no silver bullet and all that, and we were dumb enough to think the industry would implement the lessons and workarounds instead of making the same old mistakes over and over. In the 80s, Brooks had published his MMM a decade ago about experiences two decades earlier and sure, software projects in the modern mid 80s sometimes did dumb things right out of the pages of MMM, but surely in the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s no one would be that stupid. Another interesting 80s point of view is recent CS research topics like sorting was more or less applicable to line of business programmers. The red black tree data structure was only a decade old. People were researching performance bounds on slightly older stuff like the quicksort right up to the 80s. In the 10's its very unusual for any fundamental CS discoveries from the last 30 years to cross the desk of your average IT drone other than cryptography (which is usually misapplied such that the average IT drone doesn't do crypto correctly anyway), which was not the case at all in the 80s. We may have been working out of couple year old books instead of minutes old web pages, but we were working within a decade of the cutting edge, not redoing stuff from decades ago but now on a webpage instead of CICS.