Comment by fcatalan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fcatalan | Hacker News Reader

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I personally remember that couple of years, 95-97, as ripe for coming up by yourself with things that are now considered "obvious" or just the way things are done. Things happened fast: by the start of 1995 the concept of networked computers was a vague thing from the movies to me and by the end of 1997 I was an "experienced" web developer. We had websites, but we didn't have good search, so you still had to learn many things the old hard way.

The biggest thing I remember to have "invented" by myself in early 1996 (at the same time as thousands more) was the database driven website: I was tasked with creating a "virtual campus" kind of website with forums, chat, assignments, calendar, grades, news... and the sparse examples and models I had found for all those functionalities used plain text files as storage.

After completing a prototype I was obviously sick of dealing with those files and suddenly thought: "hey, dumping all this crap on a few tables in a database would make everything so much easier!" It felt a bit mind-bending, because you were taught that databases were for internal "databasey" things: Accounting, addresses, customers, widgets and their prices, that kind of stuff. Using a database as storage for a forum or a public-facing website felt almost like a revolutionary concept.

By the end of the project I was quite bored of writing plain SQL and I had something very close in spirit to many ORMs/ the Active Record stuff from Rails. So I sort of "invented" that too.

Another thing to reflect on is that I wrote all that as plain C through CGI. The database was mysql. I tried to run it a couple years ago and it compiled and ran almost straight on a modern Linux system, after like 20 minutes fiddling with Apache and the makefile, 20 years after the fact. My current projects seem to rot every time I take a short vacation.

To that vein... I invented AJAX :P

I remember it being around 2001 - 2002 and seeing the first implementations of Microsoft for Javascript requests and at the same time the DOM was started to be a thing you could actually manipulate and I started experimenting on doing programmatic page updates for a system I was developing for the office I was working for (I worked for a state office back then).

Then the big crisis of 2002 hit (I live in Argentina), I lost 2 of the 3 jobs I had at the time (And the one that I kept was the one bringing in the less amount of money) and I ended up moving to Spain for a few years.

When I finally managed to land a job coding (2007) AJAX already had its own name and dynamic pages were taking the world by storm (And to hell, via callbacks).

P.S.: That "I invented AJAX" was obviously tongue in cheek. I'm pretty certain that there was a lot of people doing the same thing all around the globe, and very likely that was the idea that got that implemented on the MS side of things in the first place.

I remember using iframes to load data in the background using javascript. Certain actions would have a flag passed via url parameter which would render the content, but none of the page elements (heading, sidebar, footer), and the content was then copied into a div on the visible webpage.

This was like 2004ish.

I think one of the best indicators of "coding on the edge" is when you have to hack things together to make them do the things you want them to do.

Before AJAX, it was DHTML (D for Dynamic). Checking O'Reilly Safari, that term started gaining use in published matter in 1999.

AJAX and DHTML were different things. DHTML was just scripting for DOM, it didn't include making requests back to the server without reloading the page.

Dynamicdrive.com is from 1998, and it's still online! I learned a lot from that site.

I remember “DHTML” with JS

I invented a lot of things for myself... AJAX was one of them but also I used a lot of animated GIFs for transitions

I made dailytutor.com back in 2003 or so!

The domain name expired so I saved the site at http://thetutorbase.com Sadly the hostgator or whatever hosting it made php errors now for sessions But some of it still works Check it out :)

Once I made a streaming gif application that used image maps to asynchronously send requests for how to change the server side rendering.

Cheers, I'm checking that out now :)

Heh. I know Jesse who "invented" the acronym AJAX at Adaptive Path back in 2005 or so... (The technique was fairly well known by then, at least amongst cutting edge webdev people - he only ever claimed to be the one who came up with a name for it that happened to stick...)

I was also doing a similar thing at the same time. It was an account management tool that would load child nodes of the hierarchy as you expanded them. It was pretty slick and even, though some hackery, supported rearranging things via drag-and-drop.

He, I remember what a pain in the ass D&D was when it started being a thing.

I remember doing an internship for a big science magazine around that timeframe. They wanted to launch a sort of online encyclopedia for science. They were puzzling over how they were going to get the content to fill the site. "What if", i suggested, "you let the users write the articles?".

They didn't think that would work.

Oh, and one of the first things i did on the web was help a friend build a fan website for a band. I was writing the pages in a text editor, and it got a bit repetitive updating the links in the footer on each page when we added a new page. So i wrote a little program that read a general template for the pages, written in HTML with some special markup for where the variable bits should go, and then a file full of the content for each page (in something like a key-value format, i think), and wrote out the HTML for it all. It didn't run on the server, because we didn't have the ability to do that. It just generated a static site.

I started PC programming in about 1997 before I had an internet connection at home. I had to either research at school and make notes or get books from the library.

The fun result of that was for a few weeks I thought that I was going to get rich from having invented unit testing.

What we have today is far more efficient, I don't miss it but I definitely look back on those days with nostalgia.

Efficient for what? What are we solving for? Rushing out buggy, complex, unmaintainable, undocumented software? Sure. We are certainly more efficient at that. Hardly anyone takes the time to understand anything anymore, thoroughly, and detail it for others. It feels like all surface-level stuff.

>Hardly anyone takes the time to understand anything anymore, thoroughly, and detail it for others. It feels like all surface-level stuff.

It's a pity that this point will be lost to downvotes.

There is a common problem when the work of people that put the time in to really understand, test, improve and document the things we rely upon is undervalued and when that which is rewarded is superficial understanding and gluing together things that barely work is prioritized.

Yes, iterating quickly is important. Yes, it's also important not to waste time making something more robust than it needs to be. I'm not disputing that, what I AM saying is that as things scale up and hundreds of users turn into hundreds of millions of users, it's extremely important to have a culture of rewarding the people that take the time to make these systems robust and continue to ensure they perform well.

As a small anecdote, this was really driven home by a one-on-one meeting I had with an old manager: I'd started working at a small startup which almost completely lacked any kind of documentation and almost everything needed to be figured out by trial and error or (equally common) by pestering the couple of people who had things like passwords and keys and admin access to do things necessary to let a new developer begin development work.

Realizing this was going to be a giant pain in the ass as we scaled, I took the time to write a ton of documentation, checklists, scripts and onboarding docs so that new developers could get up to speed quickly. I then trained the new devs as they came onboard to ensure they got up and running as fast as possible.

Back to the one-on-one: I ended up getting told that my performance was a concern because, unlike myself, the new developers had managed to get up to speed and become productive very quickly and it reflected poorly on me that I had taken so long.

Since then, I've taken a lot more care to assess the culture of a company before doing what I consider to be "the right thing" and do deeper-level work.

I meant in terms of documentation, i.e. stack overflow, youtube, etc. Universities are putting their course materials online for free, that sort of thing.

It's easy to be cynical about modern software, but remember it can still be sold and the economic benefit of being able to quickly throw together something that looks like a finished product to test an idea is hard to quantify.

I developed a product like what you described and started a company using nothing but my laptop and an AWS account. To make the same product in 1997 would be difficult if not impossible without very deep pockets.

> To make the same product in 1997 would be difficult if not impossible without very deep pockets.

And likely 10-100x the quality and reliability, and without needing to sell every bit of your personal information. Has anyone stopped to ask, maybe we just don't need all of this software?

Eheh, I don't remember the software in 1997 being all that good and reliable. And when it crashed, it crashed hard, all the way to BSOD.

The selling of personal data is a good point, though. We surely could use less of that.

Yes I think this person is taking the very best of 90s software and contrasting it with the very worst of the current time. People still do high quality work today.

Now we can just:

`import <a career's worth of work>`

Between the operating system, development tools, compiler, and libraries, a 'Hello world!' web server is several careers worth of work.

Dozens if you aren’t using localhost to test that it works.

We are certainly more efficient at that. Hardly anyone takes the time to understand anything anymore, thoroughly, and detail it for others. It feels like all surface-level stuff

I sometimes feel like every project is either learning a new thing as you go (for no other reason than that it’s new and cool) or maintaining some written be someone who was learning as they went (because now that bug ridden pile of crap is running in production).

Ah yes, in 1991 I "invented" networked pub/sub for real time data sharing from sensors and other systems on a research ship. You could easily just plunk a new networked client on the ship's net and have it start publishing data. Visualizations systems would immediately see and give access to any data available.

Not in that time, but in the vein of the other stories under this -

I saw a group of people in a web community (comics sharing group in a small town) self-organize to collectively fund a couple of them (one artist, one writer) for printing a short story that they'd done and never got payed for. Each person that contributed got a signed copy!

I thought, hey, this could generalize to all sorts of stuff if there was a platform to help organize it! Mused around with it for maybe a couple of hours, became a bit disheartened by the legal aspects of it, and put it on a 'TO-DO' list.

Six months later I heard the first things about Kickstarter and realized I missed the boat

It's kind of cool seeing all these stories of many people coming up with the same ideas at the same time and realizing that the old startup mantra "Ideas are easy - implementation is what matters" continues to be true.

When I was a teen and couldn't afford the latest magazines,so I came up with an idea of buying them up, scanning and putting online for a small fee. I neither had skill to build nor a clue how would I go about dealing with publishers though..

Turns out only one of those was necessary!

I "invented" javascript-based challenge-response authentication so that the user's password didn't have to go over the wire. I later found out that Yahoo and a few others were doing the same thing.

Is that widespread now? I mostly stay out of web dev and this is the first I'm hearing of it

This is mostly a hack back when SSL/TLS wasn't widespread.

It doesn't work against an adversary that can intercept and change your packets ("Mallory"). If properly implemented, it can work against an adversary that can only observe them ("Eve"), but I've seen implementations that just hash your password before sending it on the wire. In that case, you just have the same problem as before, but the hashed version of your password is your "real" password.

https was also way slower than plain http

I "invented" navigation meshes in 1995, along with, I'm sure fifty other people. Then I read about them in Game Programming Gems in 2000. So five years before someone thought "Hey, I should publish this!" (wish I had!) But it was apparently invented in the 1980s for robots.

For games, the catalyst was 3D games consoles.

I had the same experience pulling together personal home pages in chronological descending order from a database of text files.

A bunch of folks online had their own scripts as well. Eventually a few people would release their scripts and it would become known as a "weblog" and eventually a "blog" and many people profited from that.

Wild times.

And that's just the back-end stuff. Around the same time Netscape Navigator was taking off and people were getting their first dose of interactive Javascript on the web. As a child who was used to playing Wing Commander II and Wolfenstein 3D on DOS; I almost fell out of my chair.

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