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points by FLHerne 3 days ago | 0 comments

Bear in mind that there's a form of survivorship bias with these stories -- you only read about groundbreaking work by dedicated teams that changed the industry despite that always being the exception.

No-one writes blog posts about a boring and unproductive job they had in the 90s, and if they did it wouldn't reach the HN front page.

[–] mmargerum 3 days ago

Start in 91. It was so much better than it is now. Editor, compiler, and a few books. You built everything : windowing, dbase/ndx support, printer drivers, keyboard handling. It was the best of times. Desqview was peak multitasking ha. Don’t let anyone lie to you it was great.

[–] rigonkulous 3 days ago

Desqview was an awesome early way to get online in one .. or even 4 .. sessions, and still be able connect to the local machine in another couple of sessions. It was truly great.

But if you look closely you can see this editor/compiler/references thing is reviving. Its just, the kids are telling the AI to edit/compile/reference.

[–] cogman10 3 days ago

Exactly.

The majority of jobs from the earlier computing era were doing mindless menial work like fixing the Y2K bug in 1000 COBOL systems doing boring stuff like accounting software.

[–] 0x445442 3 days ago

That was documented in the movie Office Space.