41 posts tagged "history"

From the wonderful book by Ian Stewart, here are the equations themselves; read the book to know more about them.

As technology waves come and go, the names of iconic companies follow the movements, first reaching the pinnacle of their glories, and later fading into irrelevance.

I finished reading “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?” an autobiography of Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM from 1993 to 2002, and I can say without hesitation that it’s one of the best business books I’ve read in decades. Here are some notes (quite a few actually!) I took while reading it.

I was talking recently with Graham and an observation came to my mind, one that I hereby state as Kosmaczewski’s Law: “The flow of knowledge is inverse to the flow of fascism”.

Last Monday I released the 59th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, my dear monthly magazine about code, developers, and society, and this month I talked about BASIC in all of its flavors. As part of the preparation of this issue, I dived into the world of Minimal BASIC code, the one with source code line numbers, the one that would start immediately after powering up your computer, and the one that brings endless nostalgia.

For about 4 or 5 years, roughly from 1999 to 2004, Macromedia Flash was a big part of my career. I started making Flash movies for fun around 1998, but by 1999 I was already making them as part of my day-to-day job.

Digging in my archives I found a backup of my personal home page from 2000 to 2003, and through a little work of archeology and restoration, I made it work in our modern world of 2023.

Exploring old backups I came across the links to the oldest websites that I’ve made, between 1997 and 1998, as part of my work at FIS, 25 years ago.

Around 1998, Macromedia Dreamweaver allowed developers to create animated web pages using 100% generated JavaScript code. This was before we were told about the good parts of JavaScript, before script.aculo.us, and without the need for Flash players or Java applets of any kind.

Back in the 1990s, shared libraries were all the rage. Instead of having to ship a 20 MB *.exe file to your customer in various floppy disks, you could cut some code out, put it in a set of *.dll files, and reuse that code across all your products. Every vendor would then install lots of DLL files in your system, and they would be reused by other apps from the same vendor.

Many programming languages have been sold to unsuspecting software developers with enticing descriptions, promising “transformative experiences” that “irrevocably alter their way of thinking” and other ethereal descriptions, seemingly belonging to other categories of products, such as yoga classes, religions, drugs, progressive rock albums, or role playing games.

Early in the morning of Friday, May 5th, 2000, we were starting yet another day of work at our office in the neighborhood of Olivos, north of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Priorities are different for everyone. In my case, it was catching up with the tech news of the day. For others, it was opening their e-mail.

The news recently splashed the demise, disappearance, and final “good riddance” of Internet Explorer. I remembered the first time I encountered the beast. In 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 was soooooo good compared to anything else, it was hard to believe.

I got my first personal computer 30 years ago this month. It was during the summer of 1992; I had just finished my first year of studies at the Collège Sismondi, and it was the first summer after we arrived from Argentina that looked like a real holiday.

The war caused by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is shaking the foundations of Swiss neutrality.

I’ve learnt lately that there are many standards for the BASIC programming language.

There’s been plenty of technology wars in the software industry. Here’s a list of those that I got to witness in the past 25 years.

Looking at the software industry, it appears that most big companies usually share more traits than they would like to admit.

There has been a particular text editor that defined each period of my career as a software developer.

Argentina is currently experiencing a brain drain so strong that it made the headlines on Swiss television.

It might sound incredible to younger developers out there, but there was a time when Git did not exist.

I have had the chance to attend keynotes by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in person; their styles couldn’t have been more different. Here’s some memories from both. Of course I did not meet or talk to them; this is just my experience as another attendee in the room.

I published my first web page in the server of my university.

Around 2002 I found a small website created by a certain Douglas Crockford, in which he claimed that JavaScript was the World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language.

Something very big happened during the last 20 years: The Agile Invasion™®©.

Once upon a time, there was a programming environment made by Microsoft called Visual J++.

In 2002 I moved back to Switzerland, and found a first job as a developer in a company making a super expensive product nobody needed.

Back in 1997 I was earning some cash writing Active Server Pages in that mutant programming language called VBScript.

As far as I can remember, I have always been fascinated by computers.

This is the talk that I gave in the 4th MCE Conference in Warsaw, Poland, on May 8th, 2017 (conference organized by Polidea) and (with updates) at UIKonf on May 15th, 2018 and at NSConfArg on April 20th, 2019.

In this talk, Adrian will provide lots of speculation and highly arguable unverified gossip, about how the design of Swift will lead Apple to redesign Cocoa into new directions, and maybe replacing it altogether.

In 1992, a section of the football stadium at Bastia, in Corsica, fell right before the beginning of a match.

Ya soy un programador viejo. Muchas veces me encuentro delante de otros programadores y les cuento, que cuando empecé creando páginas web en el ‘96…

The keynote is over, and I’m on the 2nd floor of the Moscone Center sipping a coffee and thinking about all the stuff that Steve and his team just presented:

Scripting.com is today 10 years old. It is the oldest running weblog on the web, an incredible source of information through the years.

Cuando AOL (America On Line) alla a fines de los 80, le puso a su sistema de correo electronico una voz de chabon que decia “You’ve got Mail!

If you enjoy Microsoft PR material, you may find this “Get the facts” page somewhat interesting.

what i feared most was that, because of the “terrorist” attacks, your (our) “liberties” might be cut off.

This article is a copy of a research work I did today, to draw a map of today’s development technologies.

‘And through Windows NT, you can see it throughout the design. In a weak sense, it is a form of Unix.’

Al principio fue la hoja A4, que digo, la hoja oficio, que digo, el papiro.