Technology

59217 readers

2726 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Older Computer Programmers & Engineers (lemm.ee)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

20 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Lately, I was going through the blog of a math professor I took at a community college back when I was in high school. Having gone the path I did in life, I took a look at what his credentials were, and found that he completed a computer science degree back sometime in the 1970s. He had a curmudgeonly and standoffish personality, and his IT skills were nonexistent back when I took him.

It's fascinating to see the perspectives on computing and how many of the things I learned in my undergraduate were still being taught way back to the 1950s. It also seems like the computer science degree was more intertwined with its electrical engineering fraternal twin.

Although the title of this post is inherently provocative, I'm curious to hear from those of you who did computer science, electrical engineering, or similar technical degrees in decades past. Are there topics or subjects that have phased out over the years that you think leave younger programmers/engineers ill-equipped in the modern day? What common practices were you happy to see thrown in the dumpster and kicked away forever?

The community also seems like it was significantly smaller back then and more interconnected. Was nepotism as prevalent in the technology industry then as it is today?

This is just the start of a discussion, please feel free to share your thoughts!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago

The prevalence of FOSS software is amazing.

Linux distros, BSDs, GCC, LLVM, GNU tools… The equivalent stack in the 90s was expensive, proprietary, and rare. I was getting software from magazine CDs, and none of the expensive tool chains were showing up on them.

Free DVCS in Git is also great. No manual versioning schemes anymore. git init for a new repo. There was SVN, but it required a server.