[AugieDB]

I loved this episode when I first heard it, but reading your recap of it reminds me of a similar story from my college days. I had a CompSci professor who had worked at Bell Labs, which was all of 10 minutes down the street from the college. I remember he was having problems with printing something in the computer lab one week, so he wrote a driver for the printer over the weekend. This would have been about 1997 or so. And he talked about it like it was nothing, the simplest thing in the world.

It looks like my professor was just taking after the people he worked with. For that level of programmer, writing new drivers for hardware was a weekend project.

One of our CompSci textbooks was written by that same professor -- I just took it down off the shelf and looked at the intro. Brian K. was thanked for being an early reader of "several revisions."

In retrospect, it's really cool to have been only a couple degrees away from that kind of history -- and I probably didn't quite realize how awesome that was back then.

[Liskni_si]

The thing is that writing a printer driver was quite close to being the simplest thing in the world back then. :-)

I remember that when a friend first introduced me to Linux around 2002 (we were both high school kids), I ended up writing a rudimentary printer driver as the printing support in Linux required installing 250MB worth of packages that I simply didn't have enough space for, as I had installed Linux to a 1GB partition that I got after squeezing the Win98 on my father's laptop into 3GB. I used Red Hat Linux—not the most minimal distro but I had no idea what I was doing. So when I wanted to print something and couldn't install the printing packages, I grabbed the paperback printer manual which described all the low-level commands the printer supported, studied it to find the commands I'd need and then wrote a simple program that took an image and sent it to the printer. It couldn't have been longer than a few hundred lines.

The printers back then were simple and came with real reference manuals that documented how to communicate with the printer, so you could really write a simple printing program/driver without being a UNIX legend (I am not).

[TheGrassyKnoll]

Kinda reminds me of the Erdos number (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number)

[vram22]

Could give this one a name. A couple of tries, off the top of my head:

Unix founder number

Bell Labs number

[ssivark]

That’s fascinating. How is it that we seem to have lost that capability to do things in software over so few decades?

[wolfgke]

There is a talk by Jonathan Blow about this topic:

Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

[leoc]

A lot of what Blow says is not entirely accurate. For example he presents a simple picture of declining software quality over time, but anyone who was around at the time knows that both desktop OSes and desktop applications (including web browsers) were certainly much more crashy, and probably more buggy in general, than they are now. Likely quality has started to decline again over the past decade, but it's still not remotely back to where it was. It's hard not to suspect that Blow passes over this because it tends to contradict his "higher-level languages and more infrastructure → declining quality" argument. Section 7.4, "Programming Environments Matter" http://philip.greenspun.com/research/tr1408/lessons-learned.... of Phil Greenspun's, apparently, 1993 SITE CONTROLLER dissertation https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7048 makes the same "we don't expect software to work any more" lament which Blow delivers at 22:17 https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?t=1337 :

> Another reason the "horde of C hackers" approach has worked remarkably well is that, although the resultant software is rife with bugs, most users have no experience with anything better. When an MBA's Macintosh Quadra crashes due to a C programmer's error in Microsoft Excel, he doesn't say "I remember back in 1978 that my VAX 11/780, with only one tenth the processing power of this machine, had memory protection between processes so that a bug in one program couldn't corrupt the operating system or other applications." Rather, he is likely to say, "Well, it is still easier than using pencil and paper."

but places the blame on a switch to lower-level languages and runtime systems. The improvements on the desktop over about the '00s seem to be attributable to (not an expert) the mainstreaming of, and continued development of, the WinNT and OS X platforms, increasing use of memory-managed languages and/or more recent versions of C++ in applications, and adoption of online crash-reporting infrastructure (though probably also increasing use of increasingly effective error-detection tools, which I assume Blow is fine with as they don't create a runtime dependency). So it certainly seems that Greenspun is more correct than Blow, which is certainly not to say that adding more layers of infrastructure has always been an unqualified good.

Also, Blow's talk has a very '90s focus on crashers, error messages, and the like, but many of the worst regressions in software over the last 10 or 20 years don't manifest as crashers or other straightforward bugs at all; and when they do manifest as bugs the bugginess is often intertwined with architectural issues in a way that makes a bug-hunting mentality relatively ineffective. For example, the pinnacle of WYSIWYG rich text editing was probably about Word 4 for Macintosh, which was a slightly awkward but workable mating of stylesheets to the WYSIWYG UI. Unfortunately it was something of a local optimum: further progress on the problem largely requires serious developer thought and/or further user education. So everyone more or less decided to instead pretend that rich text is a solved problem, and things have largely been gently regressing since then. Which is probably part of the deep background to the GMail rich-text jank Blow complains about at 23:47 https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?t=1427 . “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”, as Lincoln said. ;)

[leoc]

*but anyone who was around at the time knows that in the '90s

[agbell]

Thats a great story! thanks for sharing