Frodebro
Well-Known Member
I learned to program Basic on the family TRS-80 color computer. It was maxed out on RAM-8k. Oh, and Gen X (1969).
Explain your username.
- Thread starter DirtySteve
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I learned to program Basic on the family TRS-80 color computer. It was maxed out on RAM-8k. Oh, and Gen X (1969).
XTRXTR
Well-Known Member
But your pronouns would have to have a pre tense, prepronouns...sounds all waked upI'm going with this "Generation Y" thing. That sounds a lot nicer than millenial.
I wonder; it's 2026, can I simply identify as another gen? Or would I then be appropriating someone else's date of birth?
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Pronouns are too often possessive for my tastes…kinda narcissistic (imo).
PelliX
Well-Known Member
Yes, as opposed to a pro-bono-noun which performs the task for free.
JeffB
Active Member
I'm always watching retro stuff online and reminiscing/being nostalgic/wishing it was the 70s again. I came across an ad for some "super new powerful" TRS 80 computer circa '79. It was $3500 ...which was the price range of a brand new Honda Civic.
Our first machine was a Tandy1000SX. Somewhere around 1986. As memory serves.... which at my advanced age can be sketchy at best..... did not come with a lot of RAM. I added chips to max it out at 640K. Came with a 5.25 floppy drive and and open drive slot. Eventually I added a whopping big 20MB harddrive. Bought a Tandy Dot Matrix printer at the same time. We thought we were pretty cool. And that was our machine till somewhere in the early 90s we moved up to a Pentium with a Gateway computer. Our first intro to Window 95/98.I'm always watching retro stuff online and reminiscing/being nostalgic/wishing it was the 70s again. I came across an ad for some "super new powerful" TRS 80 computer circa '79. It was $3500 ...which was the price range of a brand new Honda Civic.
What sometimes blows my mind is. Fast forward to 2026 and I have a hand held device called an iPhone which has way more computing power than did that first Gateway. More RAM. Power storage.
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PelliX
Well-Known Member
When people writing software still used to consider system resources as a constraint. Oh the days...
JeffB
Active Member
What blows my mind is that many modern flip phones have more computing power than the lunar module/lander.
Those guys had balls of steel.
Heck.At work we had an IBM Mainframe that was taller than me. Had an 8" floppy drive for updates. The workstations were those huge keyboards with the Green screen monitors. We're talking 1980. And even at that, it made the parts department tasks way easier than doing everything manually. All that to say. That Tandy we bought had more capabilities than did that IBM. I could play games on the Tandy. Monitor was in color. Couldn't even do Pong on the IBM.
For sure. When full on Programs were measured in KBs and could be loaded from a single 5.25 floppy.
PelliX
Well-Known Member
A few years ago the company I was (and am) working for had the glorious idea of introducing lots of workshops and hackathons. One of them, interestingly, was titled "extreme programming". While I write code and have worked as a programmer/dev before it's never been my main focus in this company apart from a few small side-projects, really. This piqued my interest and I visited the workshop to see what it was about. I casually asked the guy doing it what the term referred to as I may have missed the odd term or buzzword come past. He then explained to me, and I kid you not, that it's about writing code while considering resource constraints instead of focusing purely on functionality. I have a very good pokerface, but my inner jaw dropped at the notion that this inherent practice was so lost in the sea of time that courses are being given to remind devs of it.
While I understand that devs typically don't sit down, analyze (or even know) the systems where their code is likely to run and optimize it for the architecture and so on, this explains some of the absolutely monstrous Java kludges I've seen in my time. At one point we needed a little piece of middleware to display some data on dashboards in semi-realtime. Out rolled a Java application, just the JAR itself hundreds of megs. To display what would amount to ~500kb of data, it would use close to 12GB of RAM without even manipulating the data, only sorting it. I replaced this behemoth with a Perl script of <1000 lines. It ran fine until the underlying requirement was decommissioned.
CoyotesGator
Ambassador of Reptilian Rum Bar Affairs
Reboot please, English has been corrupted.
Format user and try again.Reboot please, English has been corrupted.
Conversations like this will soon be ancient history. AI is the new kid on the block and will soon place all programmers out of work. Checkers at the store being replaced by self check out. Self checkout will be replaced by Amazon delivery. Currency will be replaced by crypto. Elon's chip implanted in your brain will replace internet. 15 minute cities will negate going away for vacation or even out of your 15 minute city. You will own nothing and be happy if the WTO has their way. Welcome to the New World Order!
Geeze
Active Member
Dammit, yuns roont mah Monday, according to the chart I'm either a Boomer or a Boo2 - Boo² sounds a bit better [1960]. Mah brain hurts now...
Back in the early 80's I shared a college radio show with another Russ. Since it was an engineering school the manager dubbed us the Russ² show...
Russ
Back in the early 80's I shared a college radio show with another Russ. Since it was an engineering school the manager dubbed us the Russ² show...
Russ
PelliX
Well-Known Member
Bit harsh, no? I'd go for the reset button first. It's just underneath their forehead...
Nah, it's just moved the responsibility of the dev to QA. Decent devs that check their work end up spending more time debugging the mess chatbots make than writing the code in the first place OR deliver an extremely subpar result. It's already flopped and those crazy notions will be gone in not too long. If computers could replace actual intelligence, why are there still mathematicians despite the abundance of pocket calculators? I got a fair deal of stick for suggesting it's not the end-all-be-all solution to every problem, certainly in IT. Now people are telling me I was a bold visionary. In reality I just used [what should be] common sense.That's the WEF slogan, not the WTO but I get your point.
When I was programming in the late 70s in assembly I used to count clock cycles. A 1 MHz 8 bit processor and 4KB of RAM.
PelliX
Well-Known Member
Quite honestly, I think something like that should be part of whatever education it is that these modern devs attend. "You have X bytes of memory and a handful of NAND gates. Build a calculator that can do a square root."
Frodebro
Well-Known Member
Don’t forget eating bugs. And maintaining a healthy social credit score.