Allankelly: New page: Once upon a time, in a land far far away, programmers could lock themselves in a room (often a bed room), with a great idea, a Z80, a few kilobytes of ram and a lot of Coke-Cola. A few da...

2008-11-29T18:44:14Z

New page: Once upon a time, in a land far far away, programmers could lock themselves in a room (often a bed room), with a great idea, a Z80, a few kilobytes of ram and a lot of Coke-Cola. A few da...

New page

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, programmers could lock themselves in a room (often a bed room), with a great idea, a Z80, a few kilobytes of ram and a lot of Coke-Cola. A few days (or occasionally weeks) later they would emerge with a great program and change the world.

That land is called: The Past. In so much as it ever existed it is gone and there is no going back.

Today’s systems run on Pentium XVI’s, Strong ARMS and many other advanced processors with more cores by the month. Memory is measured in gigabytes.

The problems programmers tackle are an order of magnitude bigger.

And instead of programming onto the bare metal there are complex OS’s, databases, app servers, transaction systems, etc. etc. to interact with.

The opportunities for the lone programmer to make the difference are few and far between.

(OK Pete, I’ll leave you to finish it.)

Programming is a team sport - Revision history

Allankelly: New page: Once upon a time, in a land far far away, programmers could lock themselves in a room (often a bed room), with a great idea, a Z80, a few kilobytes of ram and a lot of Coke-Cola. A few da...