Ask HN: How was enterprise software developed in 1980s?

2 points·theanonymousone··4 comments

Hi. This a history question to the older folk here.

We know that VB, FoxPro, Delphi etc were developed in early to mid 90s. Now, for the type of software where e.g. Visual Basic was the perfect development choice in 1990s, what would be the options in 1908s?

(Turbo) Pascal? dBase, Lotus etc? Something else?

Thanks!

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Not from the era, but I suspect serious enterprise stuff (accounts, ERP etc.) in the 80s would generally be on minicomputers and mainframes, so you’re probably getting into stuff like RPG, PL/I, COBOL and myriad other languages that have faded away from common use.

I started coding in the late 70's (not 1908). I suppose I will take the "older folk" label as a compliment :-) I coded with Fortran and "wrote" software on punch cards that had to be compiled by a machine that read the cards and they had to be kept in order (line by line). The code went into a large mainframe computer and was scheduled with other jobs. Sometimes you would wait for hours to get large printed sheets of output. Then review it and start over again with fixes and patches.

Fortran was the 'scientific' language. People in the business schools learned Cobol.

Agreed: Borland was at its peak, and Turbo Pascal or Turbo C/C++ were used all the time. Turbo Vision was the framework under many applications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

Also, Clipper was very popular at that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language)

For me it was Turbo Pascal, Turbo C/C++, regular Borland C++.

Not an enterprise app, but I worked on a project (kind of like a primitive CMS) for a church using PFS:Write and PFS:Professional File. That was a terrible experience.

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