So... Today was like any other day, I was at school (okey, not normal) and then after I started travelling home.
On my way home I started talking to some nice SU students who apparently knew a lot about emacs and used it alot. All i know about emacs is what I learnt from this picture...
So obvioisly I didn't know that much, but I did know what it was and that it was some sort of war going on (Which I later found out was the "Editor war")
So, anyways!
We we're sitting on the bus, I was listening and they were talking. When suddenly a dark voice came from a fourth person:
You know it all started...
We all turned silent and looked at this man. He sat next to us, and had just been sitting there, playing suduku on his phone. And now... Now he was not a man that just sat there and played suduku. Nonono! This man had been there, he had experienced it.
One of us answered: "Yes I know..."
And the man once again opened his mouth.
I know that back in the days people only wrote commands to the computer, I know that back in the days you did not have a personal computer, the place you worked at had a computer which you could work against. I know all that.
But it's really something else to know about it, and to really hear about it. It's fascinating.
During this short busride he told us about the early days of the internet, how programmers really had to work hard pack all of the creativity into 2KB of RAM. How programming was a very... systematic art-form.
It was very interesting to listen to, and tottally awesome that it happened today since I just started my algorithms and datastructures course. A course that's mainly about making stuff optimized, both in time and complexity.
And he left very nicely by saying:
It's very different now from how it was back then. Now you got your Javas, and your VMs. Instead of having little resources and making the best of it. You get by with all your CPU power, brute forcing.
I'll remember this! Because, what if, what if I as a developer can code non-brute force code? What if I can learn to write code as beautiful as art, code that will not only get the work done. But get it done in the best way possible witout wasting all the power we got today.
They put a man on the moon with a computer running at 0.043MHz and which had 64Kbyte memory. Imagine what we could do today if we fully utilized all the CPU and memory we got?
I'm excited what genious things might come, it might not happen on the PC place, it might happen in the embedded, or cloud?
Who knows! What I do know, is that I'm joining a very interesting industry!
Oh, and who was this man? I have no idea.