Many of the experiences you shared also remind me of life before the world wide web and universal access to the comp.* newsgroups, when frequent trips to the O'Reilly bookstore in Burlington, MA drew me like a magnet to shelves filled with knowledge. Bittersweet memories... how far we've come! And I wonder where us developers will go...
I also go back to punchcards in 1975 while being an 8th grader at a specialized math and physics school in Moscow, USSR. We used a datacenter with a Soviet clone of IBM360, coding in Fortran IV and PL/I. My first job was programming embedded software in intel 8080 assembly using 8x8 opcode lookup table and punch tape. I also used to frequent O’Reilly bookstore in Burlington, MA - I think they were called SoftPro ? After they went bust I switched to Barnes and Noble on MiddleSex turnpike. Oh good ol’ days!
Great memories about Kodak Picture Disk, Dmitry!
Many of the experiences you shared also remind me of life before the world wide web and universal access to the comp.* newsgroups, when frequent trips to the O'Reilly bookstore in Burlington, MA drew me like a magnet to shelves filled with knowledge. Bittersweet memories... how far we've come! And I wonder where us developers will go...
I remember the O'Reilly bookstore in Burlington - we did a few raids together!
Yes, we did! The days when paper ruled and the number of well thumbed tomes on one's bookshelf was a proxy for the amount of one's knowledge! :)
I really enjoyed reading this. You are quite the living history of coding, Dmitry 😎
I also go back to punchcards in 1975 while being an 8th grader at a specialized math and physics school in Moscow, USSR. We used a datacenter with a Soviet clone of IBM360, coding in Fortran IV and PL/I. My first job was programming embedded software in intel 8080 assembly using 8x8 opcode lookup table and punch tape. I also used to frequent O’Reilly bookstore in Burlington, MA - I think they were called SoftPro ? After they went bust I switched to Barnes and Noble on MiddleSex turnpike. Oh good ol’ days!