I'm So Old: Web Edition
davidwalsh.name
davidwalsh.name
Also I kind of think we old people should shut up about the whole "blink of an eye" thing. I've been guilty of it myself. Of course time didn't go by in the blink of an eye: it went by 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour. And of course you can't remember it all so looking back it seems like the years flew by, which they didn't. So we go around trying to make younger people feel a sense of urgency that they don't really need. What we should be saying is: slow down, take your time, enjoy, think it through, there's plenty of time. Oh, and ignore that old guy in the corner checking the time every 30 seconds.
I endorse the "blink of an eye" thing. My guess is it probably depends on how your life went. For me, I always wanted a family. I was always told "don't rush it, don't worry. You'll meet someone". And in the blink of an eye I'm now ~60 and never did. Why? Because I followed their advice and didn't make enough effort. I kept thinking "there's always tomorrow" until there wasn't.
The point I tell my nephews is if you want to do something, do it now (or ASAP), because if you keep telling yourself "tomorrow" eventually tomorrow passes you by.
Found an example (though not surrounding content in this case): http://boom.shivas.se/natthimmel/natthimmel.htm
RISKS was where anybody active in the emerging fields of computer security and the impact of computers on society met and exchanged ideas (the name RISKS came from risks of computers to society, and was moderated by a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute named Peter Neumann).
I'm sad for future historians of the Internet because it looks like the early days of the RISKS-FORUM Digest have been lost to network topology changes at Newcastle University and SRI. The earliest archives I could find just now went back to around 2000, but the heyday of the RISKS mailing list was actually back in the 1980's.
That was nostalgia also, but the old days with the terminals and line printer output were really something.
I'm so old that when you called a company on that phone, a human answered. Every time. And that human was used to dealing with humans, and empowered to help.
Heck, I'm so old that when the (single, rotary) phone rang "with the wrong ring pattern you left it alone because it was for the other party on the party line.
Computer? At school maybe, and you debugged in your head over a printout you took home with you.
I was taught programming using an obscure language called LOGO that allowed moving a cursor(aka turtle) to draw shapes algorithmically.
128MB of ram was considered decent and if you could afford to plug in another 128MB of ram, you'd be able to use Windows XP for an hour or so before it freezes your computer.
Back in '96 I was browsing a computer magazine and happened upon a listing of useful mailing lists, one of which returned the contents of web pages for a requested HTTP address. Same magazine had an install CD for the free Juno email service.
Being a teenager, the first web page I ever requested was www.idsoftware.com (Doom was big), which returned a gibberish of text to Juno's email client. It was an HTML file full of IMG tags (one of those "Click here to enter" gateway pages), but I had no idea what I was looking at at the time. Somehow figured out to open the file in IE2 and saw... a bunch of broken images :)
I still vividly remember the sense of wonder that the early Internet evoked.
Later our designer would pass us a design built in Dreamweaver Templates and tables, and we’d spend a couple hours converting it into divs, floats and PHP.
Later still, we cut the middle man. The designer would hand us the Fireworks file he’d used to design the site, and we’d break the template into individual images and backgrounds.
What a world. I frankly kind of miss the highly textured, skeuomorphic sites. They could be a fun challenge to figure out the best way to slice and build, unlike these solid color beasts today that for some reason require css frameworks to pull off (har har).
It's funny to see this technique get reinvented/renamed as "static site generators"
"Spacer" transparrent pixels.
10+ years ago I was doing some work for a movie theater company and their POS system didn't have a "real" API except for buying tickets. The website sold tickets and used it to load showtimes. They then said they wanted to show the little screens above the theaters showing what movie it was, the poster, and the show times.
All of that was built with Adobe Air and it worked flawlessly for... years until they changed POS systems and it had that functionality built in.
Today that is achievable by nesting the content inside 10 layers of overlapping divs so nothing of value can be selected and copied to the clipboard. Instagram does this, you have to go into Dev Tools and find the exact DOM node to save an image.
Somehow I managed to upgrade it to Windows 98 and plug a CD burner to it via the printer port, which had a maximum speed of 4x. Did my very first website with it using FrontPage 95.
Dumb me screwed it trying to re-weld the power plug. I still miss it.
Before that, computers were generally not networked at all, or if they were it was netware (A world of suits), to share printers and storage, or possibly some telecom standard connection to run SNA to a mainframe (blue suits), or of course a modem to BBS for home users, or connecting to small business servers etc, which I remember well.
If you've build using tables, spacer was the most used asset.
I got my first job making websites in 98? Somewhere around there. So 2018 was when I reached 20 years, professionally.
I was making websites before then. I was at a hobbyist convention with my grandfather when I first saw the Mosaic demo that showed off the new image tag.
I really miss those kinds of books now. This book distinctly had color and screenshots of all the recommended changes to make.
Know why double deck tape recorders are usefull, what a tape and a pencil have in common, why rotary phones had long cables,....
And I was working then!!
The computer at school was a Philips P2500, sturdy as a brick and about as dumb. It video circuitry was based around a Teletext chip so it could not do anything interesting. It did have floppy drives where my C-64 made do with a 'Datasette' (a cassette player chugging along at about the same speed as the 300 baud modem).
I build an analogue synthesizer based on plans published in the 'Elektor' magazine. It was monophonic and only had a single VCO (oscillator) but I wanted polyphony. I therefore changed the keyboard circuitry to add an interface to the C-64 to which I connected it using a thick cable with two D-25 plugs on each side. With the keyboard on a guitar strap around my neck, the C-64 in an attaché case on the floor running a synth program I could play it live.
Then I went to university where I met the PDP-11 and VAXen. Tried to produce a book using RUNOFF [1] but gave up after getting bored of waiting for the terminal to respond, instead using a system comprised of an IBM Selectric connected to a box with a cassette player in it which recorded what was typed and could regurgitate it line by line or character by character. A stack of tapes later the book was typed in upon which we needed to print it out to paste the output on stand sheets so of course the motor in the Selectric broke down. I managed to source another motor and eventually got the device running again after fighting the furiously complex mechanism for a weekend or so - realigning the thing so the correct letters appeared in-line without documentation was, let's just say, an interesting puzzle.
University is also where I got on the 'net, it is where I started off in forestry (it was an agricultural university) but ended up in IT.
Perfect alignment of text and images every time!
wait...
I've programmed PDP-11, Z80, 8086, 68HC11, i386 all in assembler.
I've programmed in a few varieties of Basic, Turbo Pascal, Fortran, PL/N, Forth, Excel (a declarative programming environment), and SQL.
I've repaired everything from 3 phase 480 SCR packs through Atomic Clocks.
I wrote a multi-tasker for Turbo Pascal, just because I needed one... back in the days of MS-DOS.
I wrote a Forth in Assembler for OS/2, just because I was told you COULD NOT write assembler programs for OS/2.
And yet.... it was only yesterday[1], I learned about Stack Frame Pointers, and their use.
There's always more to learn, and it's amazing. 8)
For those not familiar with bangs (exclamation points) in email addresses, there was a time when you had to include routing information in the address so your server would know how to find the destination server.
Each hop in the routing path was separated by a bang.