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

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Thomas H Jones II

If you are really old, like Brian, you remember the days when software came on sets of floppy disks. You had to install the software by loading each disk in the proper order.

If you're really old (or started playing with computers as a kid), you remember some software (games, mostly) coming printed in magazines and having to transcribe it to your pre-PC (Trash-80, Apple ][, Commodore, etc) and then save it out to casette if you didn't want to have to type it all back in again. And you still clearly remember having to cue the tape up to just before the screaching so that when you ran the load command, it would actually be able to read data before the load-command timed out. :p

Or, perhaps, like many of us, you didn’t even use version control.

I still remember the pure joy, in 1989, when a college friend pointed me at the most wonderful tool I'd encountered up to that point, rcs. And, in the non-UNIX wastelands of 8.3, you weren't couldn't even engage in:

file1
file1.bak
file1.bak.2
...

In today’s age, it’s hard to remember that just 10–20 years ago the majority of code developers used were closed source.

Though, before the advent of SysV- and then Windows-based systems, things were amazingly open. I still remember the shock of when they upgraded our Sun lab from SunOS 4 to Solaris and, suddenly, cc was something you needed to request access to (because they suddenly needed to buy compilers).

P.s. I'm old, apparently (and starting my computer journey at age 7 has made that journey even longer than just the span of my career).