Mfw when programming on a high end machine

>mfw when programming on a high end machine
>can keep any number of editors open
>any number of tabs
>any number of monitors
>nanosecond compile times
How the fuck did they program shit in like 1975? Did they just have iron patience? Single monitor, probably monochrome, shitty resolution, no multitasking whatsoever, docs were a pile of books on your desk. How did they do it?

ZIMBABWE

I'm mostly fascinated by the state of some desks. How do people work with all the random shit cluttering their desk?

>focusing on your surroundings rather than what you're working on

It's being used as a storage shelf except both useful and garbage items are stored.

But software wasn't as complicated back then.

They did it because they were much smarter than you.

They probably did more thinking and working out of stuff on paper, then only wrote code once they were sure it would work.

Cont. I could be talking out my ass, though.

you "programmed" and "compiled" in your head and on a piece of paper. you had a lot of time to do this, because it took days to get access to the mainframe's card reader. all the low- and mid- hanging bugs were already squashed.
unless you were a brainlet that it.
but if you were... everybody knew. since they saw you fumble with punch cards again and again at the mainframe. you had incentive to not make errors.

It was plenty complicated. You could argue it was more complicated to write code because you had to code your own everything. Today you go online, find the 7 libs you need for your shit to work, read some stack overflow answers and 3 pages of docs and call it a day. In those days, guess what you had to do? That's right, code every little thing yourself. Most programs that delivered solutions to your problems were proprietary. Internet and information wasn't as widely available. This meant you had to either become an expert or find one to implement your hard shit. And you couldn't rely on some freelancer across the globe to code it for you, you had to physically find an expert and bring him into your project. Factor into this that often times info simply wasn't available and for example if you had something that interfaced with some hardware you used, you had to reverse engineer it to use it efficiently at all. All things considered, it's a miracle anything got done at all.

Makes sense

back then you either programmed in academia or a megacorp. both had lots of in-house libraries (duplicated most often) for doing trivial things and greybeards you asked for crumbs of their knowledge. there was no internet, but sneakernet and old fashion socialization was used extensively.

BAZINGA!

back then they program in their heads.... so they can just write it slowly and works.... these days people don't know how to program for efficiency. Most software these are bloatware.

Yeah but if you were an independent, you were fucked. How some people managed to develop stuff on their own is beyond my understanding.

That's because modern hardware is simply too forgiving to enforce any sort of good behavior on programmer's side of things. Unless you're writing high performance software, you can safely ignore all performance issues and worry about them in the final stages of the project. Old software was designed from ground up to be as tightly optimized as possible, because old hardware was simply orders of magnitude weaker and therefore it was either this or nothing. We're incredibly wasteful with everything we do with computers today by those standards.

Kek xD my fav show, litrally

>tfw I unironically program in an 80x24 character terminal window

such is the life of a laptopcuck.

BULGARIA

Best viruses in late 80's and early 90's.

I am guessing similar like when you (we) were kiddos with slow prebuilt pcs trying to play computer games.

If a person with wills of steel really wants to do and achieve something, they will get by.

The equipment at the time was sufficient for the task. Programs were nowhere near feature rich as they are now.

ARJ... haven't heard that one in a while.
Haven't heard about ACE compression in a while either. What happened to these?

>Programs were nowhere near feature rich as they are now.
And chock full of botnets

desu vim and tmux work better than some big bloated editor. A high end pc for programming is a meme.

>How the fuck did they program shit in like 1975?
By not suffering from ADHD

...

We just got less done ultimately in terms of deliverables

90s compile times were painful

having a stack of books was comfy

multiarch/platform solaris/linux/win16/win32 was a pain

>women

>How the fuck did they program shit in like 1975?
I feel like the limitations imposed by hard- and software actually helped getting shit done.
Nowadays there's just too much shit to choose from. Ask any musician / producer, you have to impose constraints on yourself if you want to finish something instead of tinkering with shit unproductively.

PKZIP getting integrated into Windows killed basically everything else until RAR and 7z. On the *nix side it was a steady progression from Unix Compress(.Z) to gzip, to the current gzip/bzip2/xz trifecta that exists depending on workload today.

Compare the contents of Einstein's desk to the one in the OP.

BAJOONGA

It was acceptable to a project take years back then, nowadays good luck saying to your PM a feature might take more than a week. So they had lots of time.

>A bunch of napkins
Lel, Einstein was messy!

Order is for idiots, qenius handles chaos.

>Depending on fast compile times for development
Back then we used printouts, books, and keyboard macros to keep information at the ready, and thumbing through a book or binder isn't any slower than using a search engine and going through the results. Really the only change today is really fantastic fast compiling and interactive debugging. Those are whiz-bang conveniences though, not required tools. If you can't write at least a few dozen lines of code between compile/debug cycle then you're probably a beginner anyway and should try to not rely on short debug cycles.

Developers who have been around a while can generally "run" most code in their head and reliably predict functionality and output. Once you start doing that, the slick debugger and fast compiler become rarely needed.