Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979)
sound-photo.com
sound-photo.com
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-1978-photo-2011-1?o...
Some of them have done reasonably well.
Not a great way to phrase things...
I just read it as "it doesn't look like she pursued her career further"
I don't think the author meant to downplay difficulty of child rearing.
...is what I was going to reply with, with examples of how replacing the component parts of the sentence may change how it's interpreted. Then I looked at the source article, and saw that it's a followup sentence after describing how she sued Microsoft for sexual discrimination. Regardless of how it was meant to be interpreted, that's some pretty poor awareness of context on the author's part.
P.S. From what I can understand the site tries to load the page via AJAX on a local domain but is denied access. So while the top URL is www.businessinsider.com the content is being loaded from www.businessinsider.in (at least in my case) which your browser blocks as no 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present. Here is a mirror by the way [1]
At most they would have to learn a new lexicon of programming languages and operating systems which are FAR less complicated than the current range of languages and design patterns software engineers must master today.
A few weeks (days?) of studying and figuring out how to pre-optimize for much smaller workloads and they'd be able to keep pace easily.
Yes, you would manage so long as you can handle a shell prompt and can grok simple assembler.
Imagine spending long hours trying to fit your code into 128k?
Mostly you'd be up against:
- No Intenet to look up reference material. For that you have books. I'm not sure how much of a revolution the online Unix man pages were, but I'd not worked on any other system that had that kind of documentation. Hope you have lots of bookshelf space (I did :-) ).
- No GUIs anywhere. There was Emacs, kind of. Mostly you got along with ed and regexprs.
- Frustrating toolchains; pre-ANSI C, with 7 characters of significant symbols on earlier systems. I don't remember if any Unix debuggers had symbol information, but they were all command-line driven at the assembly level, with no source information. That's okay, you could pretty much tell where you were by the assembly, because the optimizers were terrible.
- Email? Hoo boy. Might as well just go across the hall to talk to somebody, because unless you were on ARPANET that's about all the farther your email would get.
It'd be frustrating, but kind of fun.
Nice things:
- Tinier software. You've got skillz dealing with hundred thousand line programs. Things were smaller back then, mostly.
- No security worries. I don't know whether to laugh or cry, but DES was pretty controversial (the whole 56-bit key thing) and US citizens couldn't say anything to foreigners about crypto. No network, no crypto, right? (Unix passwords were encrypted with a rotor engine similar, and I think that salts came later).
- Boot times are about the same then as now. :-)
Heh. Heh heh.
As if.
Try less than 16k. Less than 8k in may cases. Certainly well less than 64k.
Oh, and it was an absolute blast fitting code into that space.
In fact, my first computer of my very own was a 1802 based single board I wire-wrapped my self. I had loads of fun coding up programs in the 1K of RAM I had at first.
And besides, there are people who enjoy it: the entire 64k and 4k demoscene categories live because it's an interesting challenge.
I'd write a cross-assembler that ran on the PDP-10. That's probably what Microsoft did, as I find it hard to believe that MASM 1.0 could have been used to compile DOS.
I'd also write the DOS clone in C, running it on the 10 with an emulator. Then I'd hand-translate it to assembler.
Remember, DOS 1.0 fit on a 160K floppy, including the numerous utilities thrown in. That isn't much code, even assembler code.
The thing about cross-development on a mini or mainframe that killed you was the download time. I did cross-assembly at Atari, and it was always the download time that took soooo longggg. Wrote a few smart downloaders while I was waiting for dumber ones to finish. 9600 baud sucks hard.
Maybe because computers were not so complex yet so you could actually fit their basic operation/commands in a few hundred pages.
Today, you just focus on the problem and take the underlying platform for granted. Free Software has liberated computing from vendor-reliance.
Whereas today we have Android.
Perhaps cheating, since I started programming in that era, but I'm sure I'm not the only one that still has remembers assembly language techniques (if not even the mnemonics for one or more 8 bit chips), as well as remembering at least a handful of BASIC dialects, the finer points of bumming cycles and bytes to fit in tight spaces, etc.
In fact, though I certainly don't want to give up my curent tech, my primary emotion looking at those pictures was wistful nostalgia.
Think about developing for Arduino with software running on an Arduino.
Odd that you would remember that. I thought I was probably the only one who did.
Oh, were there people in the pictures? The hardware overshadows them!
The text of the link calls it a minicomputer, but the links that I found called it a mainframe.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/digital/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20
The fans of TOPS-20 were nearly as anti-Unix as the ITS partisans. This may help explain why Microsoft has not been so fond of Unix and the Unix way of doing things. At least in its early days.
There was a lot to like about VMS, including early sharding, solid security, and an impressive file system.
NT managed to lose most of it, IMO.
Many many hours were spent in Margaret Jacks Hall and CERAS at Stanford writing code and playing with the "net." Perhaps one of the best articles of the time was in Rolling Stone Magazine, February 1982 entitled "Hackers in Paradise"
http://www.designersnotebook.com/Scrapbook/Hackers_in_Paradi...
It was indeed a rich and yeasty environment in which I learned many things about computers, programming, networks, and friendship. Alas, VMS ruled the roost at DEC and I never really enjoyed that OS, switching to Unix in the mid-1980's and never looking back. That Unix adopted the COMND JSYS style of command completion made one feel right at home.
Oh, and if you have a mind to, you can fire up an emulator with code from http://klh10.trailing-edge.com/
Remember, FisK.
They also did a cut down version of BASIC for the Model 1, Level 1 machine, without floating point and single letter variables A-Z (!) It had just two string variables A$ and B$. It had precisely three error messages: "How?", "What?" and "Sorry". They squeezed that into a 4K ROM.
I saw his photo in the 90s, and it still haunts me. I'm an ex-Windows API programmer. I gave up when they changed their database access APIs too many times.