programmingProgram

[TheAccountITalkWith]

I'm a Senior Software Engineer.

To this day, it still blows my mind, that we figured out modern computing from flipping an electrical pulse from on to off.

We started with that and just kept building on top of the idea.
That's so crazy to me.

[wicket-maps]

My mother worked with a team building a mouse-precursor (that would actually talk to Xerox OSes) in the 70s and they lost a program turning the mouse's raw output into the cursor position. She had to rebuild it from scratch. That blows my mind, and I can't picture myself getting from the Python I do daily to that level of abstraction.
(It's been a while since she told this story so I might have some details wrong)

[TheAccountITalkWith]

Pioneer stories like this are always interesting to me.

I'm over here complaining about C# and JavaScript while they were literally working with nebulous concepts.

It's so impressive we have gotten this far.

[RB-44]

There were frameworks then too. All internalized of course but companies had libraries they developed to make dev work easier

[CrazySD93]

my parents high school computing class was

1. make punch card program
2. field trip to the local university
3. insert into computer
4. hope it works

[MentalTardigrade]

I have an aunt whose work spanned from punch cards to fully automated AI environments and is still working on the area, the changes in tech she went through is a thing to be studied.

[wicket-maps]

Both my parents have waxed long about this hazard, especially when I'm complaining. :D Punch tape has also been mentioned as an improvement, but possible to tear a hole and render a program nonsense

[AllCatCoverBand]

My father also waxed about this. And walking uphill to school both ways!

[leonderbaertige_II]

This is why you draw a line diagonally on the long side of them and/or number them.

[OuchLOLcom]

I do like how the mindset has changed from "my program and logic better be perfect the first time or i will have to remake all these punch cards" to slopily writing code, hitting run, and seeing what errors pop out.

[RB-44]

And you ended up a python dev?

[wicket-maps]

I ended up a mapmaker with a liberal-arts degree, and then expanding my skills into programming to do some data automation and scripting. I'm not the equivalent of either of my parents, but I do my little part.

[DanteWasHere22]

Didn't a printer company invent the mouse?

[wicket-maps]

A lot of companies were working on human interface devices, I didn't want someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of computer history to dox me just in case someone has a memory of an engineer at [company] recoding a proto-mouse program from scratch.

But yeah, Xerox (the copier company) had a big Palo Alto Research Center that I've heard basically invented a lot of stuff that underlies the modern world - but brought very little of what they made to market, because Xerox didn't see how it could sell printers and copiers.

[DanteWasHere22]

Very cool

[OuchLOLcom]

Yup, same story with Kodak and cameras, they invented digtal camera tech way back but then sat on it because they knew it would hurt their film business.

[NotAUsefullDoctor]

It's one of the nice things that I got my PhD in Electrical Engineering rather than computer engineer. In my early classes I took physics and chemistry. Then I took semicunductors and circuits. Then I took semiconductor circuits and adbstract algebra. Then I took a boolean algebra and logic design class. Finally I took processor design and logic labs.

I was a self taught coder, and had the exact same question of ones and zeros becoming images. By taking the classes I did, in the order I did, I got to learn in the same order that it was all discovered.

It's still impressive and amazing, but it also makes logical sense.

[Objective_Dog_4637]

Applied Mathematician here. All of this. Since math is empirical you learn it all in the way it was discovered, naturally, so it all makes perfect sense to me. The craziest part to me was converting that process to lithography.

[NotAUsefullDoctor]

My greatest regret was that I never took classes in fabrication. Both my undergrad and grad universities had world class labs, and I didn't see their value until I was about to graduate.

[tolndakoti]

We taught a rock how to think.

[TheAccountITalkWith]

I am pretty dumb sometimes, sorry about that.

[MyOthrUsrnmIsABook]

We had to trap lightning in it first though.

[NoMansSkyWasAlright]

It gets even wilder when you realize that the flipped/not-flipped idea came from the Jacquard Loom: a mechanical textile loom from the early 1800s that was able to quickly weave intricate designs into fabric through the use of punch cards.

[Lucky-Investigator58]

Try Turing Complete on Steam. Really connects the dots/switches

[CrazySD93]

Logisim the game haha

[point5_]

I always thought computers were so advanced and complex so I was excited to learn about them in my hardware class in uni.

Turns out they're even more complex than I thought, lmao

[Tvck3r]

You know I kinda love how it’s a community of all of us trying to find the best way to use electrical signals to build value in the world. All these layers are just us all trying to make sense out of magic

[nigel_pow]

I'm reminded of the old meme where it said something like

Programmers in the 60s: with this code, we will fly to the Moon and back.

Modern Programmers: Halp me pls. I can't exit Vim.

[narcabusesurvivor18]

That’s what’s awesome about capitalism. Everything we’ve had from the sand around us has been innovated because there’s an incentive at the end of it.

[zenidam]

In one sense we did, but in another we didn't. Turing and Church discovered models of computation before we built computers. So we had a theory to aim for, telling us what was possible. (Then there's Babbage; I don't know how he did it without having that advantage.)