[elmin]

The vast majority of what you learn in a CS program was published in the 50-70s. Just because it's a little outdated doesn't mean there isn't a lot to learn. Also, don't forget that you can always change schools, as hard as it might seem, it can be the right call.

[sammydavis]

One thing that modern CS programs should give you is more insight into the engineering and craftsmanship side of programming. Also, I think most of techniques we use to build distributed systems today were built way after the 90s. Think of the all the stuff google invented, plus other significant systems paxos, etc. In the 70s they were trying to build scalable relational databases, now we can build things that scale much more, and it's not just hardware, it is the techniques to handle them.

All that stuff might not matter if you are most startups, because they don't need to build that huge shit usually, you can just use someone else's infrastructure.

[semigroupoid]

The article introducing Paxos was first published in 1989.

[jonathan_mace]

I think he means the rise of commodity cluster computing, a la http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...