Before college

My father spent many years as a Teacher in the Universidad Regiomontana (also see this) and he made an arrangement with computer lab to let me go and “practice” with the computers they had a t that time. I spent many hours, when the lab was free, programming in basic and playing in those computers. A game I remember is Karateka; at that time I was at High School and was taking some Karate classes of ShitoKai and that game took my attention.

At high school we had classes of BASIC, I previously used BASIC for my First big program, so this course was not quite exceptional for me, but I took some practice with the programs I created.

Shareware

First Shareware application I recall was DOOM. As a shareware application it only came with a couple of free chapters and if you want to continue playing you must buy the full game. Shareware concept, from my point of view, revolutionize the software industry, from now on, applications came in a shareware mode, where some features will unlock until you buy the full application or if you don’t pay it, some functionality will be discontinued form the installed application.

iPhone and the copy and paste programming

I was reading this post: Resize a UIImage the right way where is mentioned the copy and paste programming.

I agree this is a big problem when downloading code from the web without testing, but, copy and paste make things easier when developing similar functionality. The existence of code libraries makes us copy and paste code snippets to reproduce functionality.

Programs in the big picture are different, but in its internal functionality are similar. Database access is “barely” the same and don’t make sense to rewrite all the database access code, it is easier (and practical) to copy that code from a library or other sample we previously create.

At the bottom line, I really like the article and support copy and paste programming when doing the right way.

When one Diskette was enough

When I start college, back in late 80, I start using more often the PC. In Mexico there were little penetration form PC for an average citizen; most computers were in Companies or Universities. As I decided to study a computer science engineering, part of the homework we were to do requires to be created using a PC.

When I start, the common storage was 5 1/4 inches Diskettes, the available storage was 360KB. Initially those were single sided, but with a notch on one edge you could turn the diskette in the reader to make if double sided, we can naw stored 720KB. Later, diskette reader evolved to read both sides without flipping the floppy disk.

Some common thing was to store all your stuff in the same diskette:

• The Operative System (MS-DOS at that time).
• Word Processor, a common software was ChiWriter I also remember having Professional Write at the same time.
• Personal Files, sometimes you could have all homework from the year

Most of the computer had no hard drive and, consequently, no Operating System, that’s why we should carry on us.

A couple of years later, 3 1/2 inches diskettes appears and replace those big 5 1/4, those had more room for files and eventually replace them completely.

There were no concept of piracy in our minds, but we share programs among all of us to be in the edge of the technology at our reach.

Most of the common software those days had simple interfaces, but soon the graphical applications arrived.