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Older Computer Programmers & Engineers (lemm.ee)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Lately, I was going through the blog of a math professor I took at a community college back when I was in high school. Having gone the path I did in life, I took a look at what his credentials were, and found that he completed a computer science degree back sometime in the 1970s. He had a curmudgeonly and standoffish personality, and his IT skills were nonexistent back when I took him.

It's fascinating to see the perspectives on computing and how many of the things I learned in my undergraduate were still being taught way back to the 1950s. It also seems like the computer science degree was more intertwined with its electrical engineering fraternal twin.

Although the title of this post is inherently provocative, I'm curious to hear from those of you who did computer science, electrical engineering, or similar technical degrees in decades past. Are there topics or subjects that have phased out over the years that you think leave younger programmers/engineers ill-equipped in the modern day? What common practices were you happy to see thrown in the dumpster and kicked away forever?

The community also seems like it was significantly smaller back then and more interconnected. Was nepotism as prevalent in the technology industry then as it is today?

This is just the start of a discussion, please feel free to share your thoughts!

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago

The prevalence of FOSS software is amazing.

Linux distros, BSDs, GCC, LLVM, GNU tools… The equivalent stack in the 90s was expensive, proprietary, and rare. I was getting software from magazine CDs, and none of the expensive tool chains were showing up on them.

Free DVCS in Git is also great. No manual versioning schemes anymore. git init for a new repo. There was SVN, but it required a server.