It's about 9:40 PM here on the east coast so I need to pack up but something just occurred to me as I was shutting things down that I'd like to share.
It was exactly 22 years ago today, 19-October-1984 that I started my very first software developer job. Obviously things were much different then but I have to say that it is so cool to have been a software developer through all of this time.
My first job was working in Fortran and what was really amazing is that some of the software I was responsible to maintain at that time was literally written before I was born (1965). Those old programs actually used Fortran 4. Fortran 4 didn't have block statements so everything was If Not … Then Goto. We didn't even have character data types; all strings were stored in integer*2 arrays and then printed using a Format statement using the Fortran A format specifier.
Most of this work was of course on minicomputers but I even remember using the old Microsoft Fortran compiler to create some very large (at the time) PC programs on the good ol' US$10,000 IBM PC AT with its 4.77 MHz processor and an incredible 512 kb of RAM hard-soldered onto the motherboard.
I won't keep going on about all the back in my day stuff. I know computer software, hardware and development tools will continue to grow and there are many more amazing things awaiting us in the future. That said, I count myself and my contemporaries as some of the luckiest people in the world for having had the opportunity to have been around for so much of this cool stuff and the incredibly rapid change our industry has experienced over the past 20+ years.
Thank you to the Geek gods for giving me the opportunity to be a part of it all. J
Posted
Oct 19 2006, 07:59 PM
by
jim-wilson