This must be what it felt like for someone in their 20's in the 1870 to drive a Bugatti Type 35
Posted by GAIllini on February 27, 2026, 8:50:35
in the 1920's.
When I first started programming it was with COBOL on IBM mainframes.
Your source code was a deck of punched cards that needed to be in the correct sequence. In order to compile your program you would fill out a job submission form and give that to the operations people who would run the batch job to compile it and eventually you would receive a printout of the results.
The jump to an interactive editor (ISPF) changed this to something that could be done exponentially easier and faster, not to mention a much better way to store source code.
At the end of my career I was using Visual Studio that offered IntelliSense which provides options to choose code snippets to insert for you and information about objects when hovering which were great improvements.
I retired in 2019 and have been away from it since then. I recently downloaded the Community version of Visual Studio to do some development for fun and mental exercises.
It has AI built into it with CoPilot. Essentially you don't need to know how to code, it will tell you. If you don't understand existing code? Don't worry, it will tell you what its' doing.
It's some amazing stuff, but also extremely scary from a knowledge standpoint.
After seeing the progress from file based systems to databases and all of the magic bullets (CASE Tools, 4GL, SCRUM, etc.) the thing that made the difference between good solutions and overly complex ones was understanding the problem. Now they don't want you to understand the solution.
When I first started programming it was with COBOL on IBM mainframes.
Your source code was a deck of punched cards that needed to be in the correct sequence. In order to compile your program you would fill out a job submission form and give that to the operations people who would run the batch job to compile it and eventually you would receive a printout of the results.
The jump to an interactive editor (ISPF) changed this to something that could be done exponentially easier and faster, not to mention a much better way to store source code.
At the end of my career I was using Visual Studio that offered IntelliSense which provides options to choose code snippets to insert for you and information about objects when hovering which were great improvements.
I retired in 2019 and have been away from it since then. I recently downloaded the Community version of Visual Studio to do some development for fun and mental exercises.
It has AI built into it with CoPilot. Essentially you don't need to know how to code, it will tell you. If you don't understand existing code? Don't worry, it will tell you what its' doing.
It's some amazing stuff, but also extremely scary from a knowledge standpoint.
After seeing the progress from file based systems to databases and all of the magic bullets (CASE Tools, 4GL, SCRUM, etc.) the thing that made the difference between good solutions and overly complex ones was understanding the problem. Now they don't want you to understand the solution.
Let me introduce you to the first 3 paragraphs of a seminal academic treatise on technology:
1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.
2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.
3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.
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in the 1920's.
When I first started programming it was with COBOL on IBM mainframes.
Your source code was a deck of punched cards that needed to be in the correct sequence. In order to compile your program you would fill out a job submission form and give that to the operations people who would run the batch job to compile it and eventually you would receive a printout of the results.
The jump to an interactive editor (ISPF) changed this to something that could be done exponentially easier and faster, not to mention a much better way to store source code.
At the end of my career I was using Visual Studio that offered IntelliSense which provides options to choose code snippets to insert for you and information about objects when hovering which were great improvements.
I retired in 2019 and have been away from it since then. I recently downloaded the Community version of Visual Studio to do some development for fun and mental exercises.
It has AI built into it with CoPilot. Essentially you don't need to know how to code, it will tell you. If you don't understand existing code? Don't worry, it will tell you what its' doing.
It's some amazing stuff, but also extremely scary from a knowledge standpoint.
After seeing the progress from file based systems to databases and all of the magic bullets (CASE Tools, 4GL, SCRUM, etc.) the thing that made the difference between good solutions and overly complex ones was understanding the problem. Now they don't want you to understand the solution.
"Iowa women were better than Illini men" - Potomac
Back in the day, traditional databases were often fairly straightforward, such as employee and financial records, unless they needed high-volume, instant access with updates. The airline reservation system was an early model of something that stretched technology. I know someone who worked on that, and it was very hard on the computers and networks of the day.
Now with millions of people online generating immense amounts of data constantly, system designers must account for massive scalability. Think of what's going on behind Netflix and Amazon retail, for example.
Plus the systems are expected to be up all the time.
In my last job, a part of our system that I did not work on was built on older technology, and to do updates of the software, it had to be down for many hours. And this was customer-facing. Bad, bad, bad.
Regular programming, and particularly database stuff, where his team does intense DB processing on gigantic databases.
Thanks for the tip on Visual Studio. I did not know there was a free version. I used a licensed version as a profession for many years.
My recent programming has been with Python on the job before retirement, and with a little playing around here and there (e.g., I did some traveling salesman code).
Previous Message
in the 1920's.
When I first started programming it was with COBOL on IBM mainframes.
Your source code was a deck of punched cards that needed to be in the correct sequence. In order to compile your program you would fill out a job submission form and give that to the operations people who would run the batch job to compile it and eventually you would receive a printout of the results.
The jump to an interactive editor (ISPF) changed this to something that could be done exponentially easier and faster, not to mention a much better way to store source code.
At the end of my career I was using Visual Studio that offered IntelliSense which provides options to choose code snippets to insert for you and information about objects when hovering which were great improvements.
I retired in 2019 and have been away from it since then. I recently downloaded the Community version of Visual Studio to do some development for fun and mental exercises.
It has AI built into it with CoPilot. Essentially you don't need to know how to code, it will tell you. If you don't understand existing code? Don't worry, it will tell you what its' doing.
It's some amazing stuff, but also extremely scary from a knowledge standpoint.
After seeing the progress from file based systems to databases and all of the magic bullets (CASE Tools, 4GL, SCRUM, etc.) the thing that made the difference between good solutions and overly complex ones was understanding the problem. Now they don't want you to understand the solution.
You can get a free version of SQL Server too. What kind of data bases does he use?
I'd be interested to know what they are using for large scale storage and access today.
I wonder what they are using for AI storage. I've tried several, but have liked Co-Pilot the best and I have had numerous lengthy conversations on various subjects and it jumps right back in where you left off. It's not just retrieving the data, it's processing it at the same time. No wonder we need more data centers.
Some cloud-specific things from Amazon and Google and some things I can't remember
on February 27, 2026, 8:50:35
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