| The first programming job I had was programming operating systems for Micom 2000 word processors, back in 1979, two years before the IBM PC was released. The machine had an 8-bit Z80 processors, 128k of bank-swappable memory (64k address space), and two 8" 240kb floppy disk drives. The 8080 assembler source for my module was spread over 14 floppy disks. Compiling involved meticulously swapping floppies in the correct order for about a day and half. Inserting the wrong floppy in the wrong order would cause the build to fail, and you'd have to start over from scratch. Despite that, one had a breathless sense that you were working with a technology that was about to change everything. The implications of the coming technological age were unmistakable. And the only limit was imagination and ingenuity. Having a MILLION instructions a second to play with seemed limitless; but having to fit things into 16kb memory pages felt a bit constraining. For the most part, user data had to fit in a 16kb memory page because that was all that was left over after the operating system was loaded. In retrospect, there's only so much you can do with a 4Mhz processor when you only have 16kb of data to work with, so processing power wasn't the constraint. Probably exactly the same as what it's like to be working with AI technology today. Everything is going to change. And the future is going to be unrecognizable. And you're sitting in the middle of it. So yes, absolutely, it was way cooler back then. Unless you're currently working on AI projects. |