Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers?
Organize by decade.
'70s, '80s, etc...
'70s, '80s, etc...
I connected two of them with serial cables and spent about 6 months in DOS with Djgpp compiler and dos IDE, I used a chess library and coded in C, and I finally got the two machines to play chess against each other, client / server architecture using a serial protocol I invented - state was held on the server but transmitted to the client and the client made the decision and sent state to server. Pretty inefficient but I was very young and self taught.
The feeling of pure joy when i finally got them working and I watched the moves scrolling down the screen.
I was hooked on programming
* In Ukraine sometime in the 90s we had no computer, but the local arcade did. Sometimes my parents would give us "kapeyki" (basically like pennies) and my sister and I would gather then up and then run to the arcade across the street to stand in line to play The Lion King. We were obsessed with both the Disney film and the game. As soon as you died you lost your spot and the wait back in line could be an hour sometimes. I kept dying on the giraffes.
* Later we had a short-lived computer course at School Number 11. We had to come in outside of normal school days (which were Mon-Sat) to participate. I was too young to remember the specifics, but we had to type in programs to play some car racing game. I was really fast at it and always got to play the finished product first - unfortunately the course was short lived.
* When we got our first computer after moving to Alabama and got AOL dial-up I realized "Holy crap you can make things." My mom thought it was a passing phase, but she dutifully went the library with me to check out stacks of books on HTML, CSS, and PHP and brought back video game CDs she spotted at her trips to random stores. One of those games was Creatures 3 and it was what got me interested in life simulations to this day.
* Later I got to work with one of the guys who helped make The Lion King
Then I got a 9-5 job and my dreams of working in AI faded into the ether. Life comes at you fast.
If you do, I would love to see videos of this in action (not code). Would be absolutely awesome. Seriously! I don't care that it's from 2002, that's what makes me more interested if anything.
Also... people are Very Interested™ in neural networking now. I am 100.0% sure that if you threw this info at a few companies they wouldn't mind waiting a little while for you to shift gears (switch jobs) and catch up to the way things are done now (train, at expense, for a few months). You'd likely take a bit less time than the next person, in any case.
Yes, this would certainly be a major undertaking and not something to be rushed, but I don't think your interviewers would be disinterestedly waiting for whoever they're seeing next, to put it one way...
One thing. I'd recommend a position where you step back and look at the bigger picture rather than drown in implementational/technical details all day - you're clearly already figuring things out for yourself, so bogging yourself down with the ways others are doing everything would be noise you could do without.
Unfortunately, I can't find any of the newer versions of the engine or the FPGA code. I wrote most of the newer versions in college, eight to ten years ago; the hard-drive for my desktop may be around my house somewhere, but it will take some time to find, setup, and search. You've piqued nostalgic interest, so I may just do that...
I'm currently running a small software agency in the Boston area that employs a couple developers. One of our larger clients integrates their AI-based product with larger customers' platforms, and my company does quite a few of the implementations. That has given me enough of a taste for now; hopefully we can pivot completely into that space one day. For now, I'm enjoying working at an arm's reach.
I'm falling over a bit at how the high-bit-finding system actually works (in http://blitzter.atspace.com/documents/game/index.html), along with the rest of the page to be honest. I'd say this is 90% my brain not being great at this sort of thing, and 10% me not knowing chess (shh). I'm very impressed though.
It's great that you're able to keep AI on the radar in a reasonable capacity, even if it's not front and center at the moment. Hopefully the pivot you mention does happen one day, and works out really well. :)
That said, the page definitely lacks the rigor necessary to communicate the concepts used in the chess engine -- another downside of my education. My parents emphasized engineering related subjects over everything else, which held back the development of my writing while accelerating subjects like math. You can see that pretty clearly in the descriptions on the site. Regardless, the terminology is correct, so it's easy to find a more clear explanation by searching for it elsewhere. Perhaps it's better to think of the descriptions as a poorly written glossary.
Talking about this brings me back to a time where I wrote software because it satisfied a burning passion, and not because it paid the bills. I still enjoy it, but with less intensity. Maybe that will return if I can get into AI again.
Thank you for the kind words! I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.
1967-9 accidentally hired at Elliott Automation UK as comissioning technician, finding bad wires/doa components in their 4100 series mainframes as they came to the end of the production line, prep for shipping. Completely discrete hand built machines, right down to hand-woven 48K x 24b main magnetic core memory. No prior experience outside of hobby electronics, only 19, CS did not exist then. This experience probably seeded all my first principles of computing, I had to teach myself in intimate detail how a room sized computer works, and how to program it. Both good and bad.
1969-71 (I know, by decade, but my trajectory does not fit decades easily) design engineer at an EG&G UK subsidiary called Nuclear Measurements. Another accident. Made instrumentation for the two main Nuclear Fusion labs Daresbury and Culham. Got to climb around inside the Zeta Pinch 1MF capacitor and the Tokamac. By chance visited a PCB layout researcher using my old 4130 with vector graphics, thesis on rats nest automatic layout techniques.
1971-5 Another poach, this time into data communications world. I'll note here that although I was then a hardware nut, programming computers is always an essential skill to have. And also in those days of really tight resources, doing it efficiently was default, whatever Tony had to say about premature optimization - the code has to at least fit before it can be made to work. In this phase I even had to design and write an ASM a custom computer a bit more featured than a Z80, only in SSI 7400 series TTL. And in 8008 days, no Z80 when I started.
Still a big-eyed kid, somewhat bemused that folks wanted me to actually pay me to do all this learning. Learning that even today seems to be missing from CS/CE, at least as I can tell from graduate hires since then even up to today. Got very good at "Making it up as I went". There was no book, really, for what I was having to produce.
1975-89 moved to sister company in LA - poached again - got even deeper into data comms, designing Statistical Multiplexors and protocols for University time share computer centers. Employers made their $Ms but neglected to mention stock options to me. OTOH as a founder and tech lead I had a blast, and seeded a great dev lab culture around me, many of whom are still in touch.
1989-97 This was a really fun time; I and buddy did our own start up (Lone Wolf Technologies) based on a mission critical deterministic protocol we had dreamed up and a product using it to network MIDI synthesizers and controllers in large venues and pro studios. Moto 68HC11 box did 4 ports, glass fiber networking physical layer allowed up to 2 Km separation, multiple boxen, each with a mirrored virtual 16x2 config LCD onto the network as a compound entity (edit any box from any box), full soft topology routing and filtering and remapping. Yet more learning OTJ, and inventing. And the customer base was, well, rarified. Herbie Hancock, ELP, INXS, that rarified. Not actually a Good Thing as it transpired. No volume. But oh what fun. Then Paul Allen invested. A long story not for here. But moved us all to Seattle.
1998-9 designed a FPGA for autonomous isochronous multi-medial FireWire transport (AFAIK the only one that did not funnel channel data through the CPU). Was missing hardware, this was an intense but ultimately successful gig, eventually made its way back into music world as control surface driver/interface.
2000-7 Second time Lone Wolf, soon renamed SingleStep, designing a graphical programming/delivery platform aimed an large scale network management. Again great OJT learning and invention but customer base not so much fun.
2008-present now this one is a fun employer with a fun product. Not just fun to my nerd core - fun is their product. I refer to Nintendo. Worked on Audio engines for WiiU and Switch.
The two big gaps: "Consulting Years". Nail biting, more like. No nostalgia for those.
So, not your typical career path. No front end / back end / full stack crowded job market. I'd have been out of that and unemployable probably 20 years ago if that were the case.
The DEC-20 is under heavy load, all the DECscope VT52's are occupied, as well as the less desirable DECwriter III terminals with fan-fold paper.
Many of the DECscopes are running TECO EMACS sessions, I see some people writing papers in Scribe (Brian Reid's word processing language.)
Suddenly everything stops in the room and everyone holds their breath for a couple very long seconds.
"%DECSYSTEM-20 NOT RUNNING" prints on every terminal in unison. Everybody cries out in anguish.
Good times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4umA3_9YNs
That sound is just so memorable, even more so than hearing the sound of a modem connect to the internet. (You could easily tell the difference between a 28k and 56k connection by hearing the modem responses.)
I've done a lot of things I'm proud of, like patching binaries, reverse-engineering games/tools to get extra lives or registered status, but hearing those noises? They take me back.
Some guy in another country wired his christmas lights to be controllable, along with a few other lights. He didn't get much traffic. A small group of gamers started turning them on and off and emailing him "DISCO". Later we tried to send him morse code (E A T A D I C K) but he didn't figure it out.
I know it sounds mean, but I miss when trolling was cheeky and fun, not mean and weirdly racist.
Back then computers filled huge rooms, and time was allocated by the second. "Nobody" knew how to program then, so it was easy to get a job programming for a contractor at NASA-Ames and later for the U.S.G.S.
The first thing I ever did was a FORTRAN IV program that contoured simulated lunar regolith data. These maps were crude line-printer maps with each character representing a depth.
The last major thing I did before I left the U.S.G.S. was an interactive color geologic map integrated with an ore-deposit database. That was about 1989. Since I left the U.S.G.S. in 1995, I've done website programming and "side projects." I'm currently working on a word processor for professionals engaged in a major writing project, one involving lots of source documents and notes. Like most side projects, the biggest problem is marketing.
I suppose everyone else would point to PCs as the greatest innovation. I disagree. For me it was the hugely powerful APIs Apple provided with the Mac. Before, you had to create nearly everything from scratch. It was revolutionary. As an application-programmer, the Mac's APIs were hugely empowering. I could now do things it would have taken a team a year or more to do.
I realize C is very popular and I mean no offense, but I hate it. It's prominence grates on my nerves. It's lack of discipline appeals to the worst emotionally immature tendencies among very young programmers and can lead to life-long bad habits. That is the perspective of an scientific-application programmer. I'm sure the world seems very different for folks focused on systems etc where C has advantages.
This has been rather long, but there were lots of questions to address. Thanks for the opportunity.
It was written mostly in basic but I also found another assembly language extension that let you load Print Shop clip art from Basic.
My next project was an Eliza (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA) clone. I hacked SAM (Software Automated Mouth) a voice synthesis program to work with the 80 column card and Prodos (long story).
I wrote a few other little programs but those two stand out. I learned some Assembly language and wrote some routines that were too slow for Basic.
90's Scraping every penny I could get to buy a NeXT box so I could download the WorldWideWeb browser and editor so I could check out this new thing Tim Lee had created called the web. Got the money, got a NeXT box, built a page and decided that I wanted to get out of the desktop app development business that day. After the CGI spec I knew I was going to be able to.
A good follow up to this conversation would be what are your biggest technical disappointments by decade:
80's would have been LISP machines not catching on.
90's downfall of Commodore, Apple's handling of Copeland and the purchase of CosmoWorld's by Computer Associates (that might have been early 00's).
I remember not beign able to spot a bug because the machine was so fast. Inside a loop I mistyped extra zero in the counter: Instead of 1000 iterations it did 10000.
After those 9000 extra iterations the program output was wrong and I didn't knew why.
In the Pentium you couldn't tell the difference in speed because the output came instantly... but in the i286 the difference in speed was so big you could tell you iterated too much.
90’s: 486, 28.8 modem which I spent a small fortune on (for a teenager). Programming in C++ and Assembly. Getting a CD-ROM drive for Xmas and installing it. Getting a book on Linux and installing Slackware from the included CD. Finished high school and within a year I began my now 22+ year career as a programmer and it has taken me around the world.
Turns out he was downloading linux for the fist time...
I grabbed another computer and help him download copy the stuff. We could not download the floppies in parallel because the university had a shared 64kbps connection to the Internet.
4 hours and 100 floppy discs later he when home and installed Linux for the first time and opened my first linux account outside the university lab.
In these youthful days, when I didn't have to earn a living and school ended at 3 PM, learning stuff about hacking computers was pure in some sense, maybe because it was purely self-directed out of curiosity.
90s: getting my first Sparcstation on my desk
In high school, we used Apple ][+ and Apple //e computers. I was not able to get into any of the programming classes as a junior, because the classes were all filled by seniors. But they let me into the computer lab in my own time, before and after school and during lunch. After a couple of months had passed, I was already helping the seniors with their work. When I became a senior, I they let me skip the intro class, because I had basically helped teach it the previous year. I went straight into the advanced class, which was Pascal and not Basic. I was on a team of two that finished the class project so fast that the teacher assigned me to a second team where the guy was alone. On that second team, we still finished before any of the others. I graduated in 1984.
In college, my first programming class was in COBOL on IBM 3081 mainframes, using punched cards. Then FORTRAN. Later, I got to revisit Pascal. For my Numerical Methods class, I wanted to learn C. So the grad student who was actually grading the homework for the professor agreed, and we got to learn C together. I was so excited by learning C that every one of my programs executed perfectly, and I turned in all my homework before anyone else. I didn’t even have to take the final, because there was no way I could score low enough for that to hurt my grade. The next major language I learned was Prolog, for what was supposed to be a class in Artificial Intelligence. My senior year, I took a Software Engineering course. I finished my work to graduate in August of 1989, but due to problems with my professor failing to give me a grade before he took a job programming for one of the airlines, I didn’t technically graduate until 1990.
In September of 1989, I went to work for the Defense Communications Agency, in the basement of the Pentagon. My first programming task was helping to port the classified AIRFIELDS database from COBOL-66 to COBOL-77. However, I had learned UNIX in college, and so they also made me the UNIX Adminstrator in the branch. They gave me a diskless Sun 386i soon after I arrived. I got tired of constantly updating the /etc/hosts file from the HOSTS.TXT file from nic.ddn.mil, and so I set up what I believe was the first caching recursive nameserver inside the agency, and learned a lot about bind in the process. Later, when the agency was having a lot of problems with their Internet e-mail service, I got drafted in to fix that, and I learned a lot about sendmail. I did a few other things, including personally pissing off the Director of the NSA with a letter I wrote to the editors of the Communications of the ACM in 1992 (published in November of that year, see http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/cacm92nov.html), but I still managed to become the official Technical POC for DISA.mil, and I convinced the SIPRnet administrators that they should use the DNS and not HOSTS.TXT tables, as well as using real network numbers as assigned by the NIC instead of just pulling random numbers out of their ass. I also turned several Class B and at least one Class A network back to the NIC, because the agency wasn’t using them. By 1995, I had become the sendmail FAQ maintainer, and that lead to a new opportunity to go work at AOL.
At AOL, I helped install their fifth internet email gateway in my first week there. I did a lot of stuff in a short period of time, and became their Senior Internet Mail Administrator. In 1996, I got blamed for taking down all internet e-mail around the world (as a side-effect of the network outage explained at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-day-america-online-went-off...), and I have been told that both qmail and postfix were created as a result of that incident. By 1997, AOL had become a toxic enough place that I could no longer survive there.
I could go on, but although I remember a lot of these details, I find that I’m not really nostalgic for them. I guess the times were pretty good, but frankly I think the times since then have gotten better and better.
Well, maybe not with regards to the recent US presidential elections. But otherwise, I think many things now are much better than they have ever been for many people, and maybe that scares some of the 1%ers at the top.