I assume that much of this neat stuff was attempted in the 60’s onward by clever people working with willing hackers with pathetically underpowered hardware (but the rooms were kept warm). Spacewar, Eliza, all of the stuff from MIT and other places, protein folding on a pdp-11/34 in 1978. These people knew of no limitation other than hardware and their programmer’s ego was big enough to code around that.
Hacking is a field that has little awareness of its history. Maybe it’s because it’s so new or maybe because the iron is infinitely better than it was or that programmer’s ego remains strong. But people aren’t smarter now, the sheer mass of developers has moved the talent peak to the left, and too many people code it faster rather than better.
50+ years on, coding languages and environments look the same, system reliability isn’t really different and software still runs slowly. Hell, “the cloud” must really piss off oldies who remember Xterminals, Suns and big iron’s ability to checkpoint and move jobs across the globe to use 2nd and 3rd shift hardware.
Y’all got virtually infinite resources now. Please make sh*t that’s at least as stable as an old Volvo.
Hacking is a field that has little awareness of its history. Maybe it’s because it’s so new or maybe because the iron is infinitely better than it was or that programmer’s ego remains strong. But people aren’t smarter now, the sheer mass of developers has moved the talent peak to the left, and too many people code it faster rather than better.
50+ years on, coding languages and environments look the same, system reliability isn’t really different and software still runs slowly. Hell, “the cloud” must really piss off oldies who remember Xterminals, Suns and big iron’s ability to checkpoint and move jobs across the globe to use 2nd and 3rd shift hardware.
Y’all got virtually infinite resources now. Please make sh*t that’s at least as stable as an old Volvo.