A personal history of programming as an experience…
I printed out the assembler on the dot matrix printer and laid out probably eight to ten meters of paper (my memory is probably faulty), got on my hands and knees with a pen and started laboriously tracing through that code, line by line. This was called a desk check and was one of our primary debugging techniques in the 80s.
It’s … Interesting to think about the differences, but …
For me in my early career and sort of paid-for-work today the difference from 1987 to 2022… Not a lot really. I was using vi/make in a windowing environment (Sun3)
Which is how I work today. It’s just slightly faster with more colours.
Programming the old computers hasn’t really changed - I rarely used print outs.
Prior to '87 though - I was programming a variety of different systems (BBC Basic, BCPL, C, some assemblers) and printouts were a way of archiving my work.
Early university - printouts from the batch system was the only way )-:
-Gordon
My first home computer was a CoCo 1, which I upgraded many times (more memory, new keyboard, diskette drives, and eventually a ROM pack which could drive an external 80x25 monitor). I too remember making the transition from BASIC to 6809 machine language, and briefly dabbling in OS9 before I abandoned the CoCo for my next platform, which was the Amiga.
Anyway, I found that blog article to be an enjoyable read. I’ll have to check out more of what he has to say. Things sure have changed in the last 35 years.
For me, what he’s describing in his blog post happened in 1978 - not 1987.
In 1978, the only computers I had access to only had BASIC (TRS-80 Model I and Commodore PET) and I did simple games while learning how to program.
By 1987, I had a computer science degree and most of my programming was in Turbo Pascal at home, or COBOL/IMS on the IBM Mainframe at work. Maybe a little C in there too. I did do some BASIC to convert some programs I wrote for my dad from the Commodore PET to the C-64.
I had a Coco II and a Coco III. At that time I dreamed of a GIMIX system.
Hardware was more expensive to find,but you had a wide assortment
of computers to choose from in 1987. C was still simple and you had easy
to use video displays in C.
Today everything is application driven, so you have a more complex system
to write program in. I would guess programing was best before you had 64
bit code and the C language had not so many standards.
Hardware today is rather complex and often a trade secret, unlike the easy
to find documentation of the 1980’s.
It is hard to tell if programming is better today than yesterday.
As for 1978, programming was still a dream.
Ben.
One afternoon in 1987 I waited until the office was empty for the day, then I printed (on proper listing paper, of course) a program, or functions, a colleague had written - in Pascal. The reason I printed it, and waited until after hours, was so that I could spread the listing on the floor of the long corridor outside my office. The code was so convoluted and had so many if-blocks and the like, many of them very long, to make it unreadable. So I was on hands and knees on the corridor floor, tracing the various if-blocks etc. with differently coloured markers. After I eventually figured out the code I re-wrote it in a slightly more readable form.
At the time I didn’t yet know about Emacs, and it wasn’t available on that platform anyway, but in any case at a later time I could have used outline-mode or something to see the layout.
Other than not-yet introduced coding standards it wasn’t that different from today - Fortran, Pascal, C had started to be used, I wrote assembler when I needed to relax, and we didn’t have Git or the like, and not even SCCS as it wasn’t available for our platform. I wrote a Makefile-like tool for us (on top of a vendor-made system which almost did the job), compilations took a while so I wrote a tool to let us send build jobs to a batch processor, but it wasn’t really much different from today except for details like performance and storage size.
At the end of the seventies though - that was a bit different. At that time I programmed a core-based mini in school, and the AIM-65.
Before 1987 I had already done quite some programming and the workflow changed very couple of years:
At the hobby level I moved from programming on paper (6502 code) to cassette tape based assembler/edit system (MICRO ADE) to CP/M to MS-DOS to GUI IDE’s (Turbo, Delphi, Lazarus).
Nowadays it is all cross compiling and debugging with emulators for my retro SBC’s. The productivity increase is enormous, the stupid errors I still make are so quick to find!
Later IDE’s appeared,
