Programmer's Memory Lane – LoadStorm
Below is a fun infographic (scroll down) for us ancient geeks that got our computer science degree before the Web.
Several of the historical computers look familiar. They take me back to the days when hardware was expensive, underpowered, and we had to conserve every byte of memory. Yeah, memory and disk was measured in kilobytes. Remember tape drives? I do. Card punch? Those were NOT the good old days.
Today, LoadStorm is coded mostly in Java. The UI is currently built in Ruby on Rails, but we are writing the next release of our UI in Java and using Google Web Toolkit. The result should be a much more elegant and functional Rich Internet Application.
If you scroll all the way to the bottom, you will notice that Java is the most popular language on the planet today. It’s surprising to me that C is still so popular.
As an old programmer, I have to admit that I’ve coded in most of these languages. Fortran in college was updated to F77. COBOL ran all the financial processing at First Illinois Bank. BASIC to write crappy math problems in high school. C at General Motors for robotic simulation. Pascal was a requirement by my professors for all complex course assignments like writing B-trees. C++ as an understudy to Roger Campbell. PHP for Drupal. And the worst part? I am not (or wasn’t) very good at any of them.
Sorry for waxing nostalgic.
A big thanks to Rackspace for the infographic.