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Discussion on: 4 Things Developers Take for Granted That Used to Be Really Hard

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elmuerte profile image
Michiel Hendriks

I'm with you on the first two points. I have installed MS Office 6 from what it seemed an endless series op floppies. Or the horrible commercial software, which even with a student license, was a pain to install.
And I have messed around with the likes of Geocities, Xoom, Lycos, etc. for my websites in the late 90s.

But for #3 and #4 you should look further than 20 years ago. 19 years ago I was using easily available open source software and messing around with CVS. My SourceForge account (and my freshmeat account) is from 2001-09-06 (almost 17.5 years old). That's when I started on my own open source projects which were easily by SF.net with a CVS repo and place for a website.
Even before that I have used free and open source Delphi components which were distributed via people who did set up proper websites.
CVS has been around for 28 years, not easily available on MS Windows though. But TortoiseCVS (2000) dramatically changed this.
Access to internet made access to open source easily available. And SF.net made version control easily available.

An other point I've seen people make in the comments here: Continuous Integration. Back in 2006 I set up a CruiseControl (created in 2001) instance to build a project multiple people were working on. The "only" thing needed for that was a computer which was up and running. Initially we used a simple desktop for this. I don't think it is much easier these days. Getting your CI working correctly can still take quite some time.

One thing that was really lacking 20 years ago was dependency management (and public repos). Apache Maven was only released in 2004. (Note sure if there was an earlier tool for any other platform.) Before that you simply had your dependencies in your version control, and "regularly" checked the websites and mailing lists for new releases.

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elmuerte profile image
Michiel Hendriks

Another thing: system crashes due to bad code. These days your application just crashes, or you kill it. You fix the code and try again. In DOS, and also the earlier MS Windows versions there was a fair chance you might need to reboot your whole system because you managed to lock it up.