The Time Traveling Coder
Watching Life on Mars the other day got me thinking: If I suddenly ended up back in the 1970s what would I do?
The obvious answer is to use my knowledge of future events as a primary source of income. Stock trading and sports betting would be a great source of income, but since I only have a big-picture view of 1970s markets and I know next to nothing about sports, they would be more long-term investments. So, while I am waiting for those investments to go up, what would I do? Would I get a job as a software developer? I’m not sure that I could.
If I suddenly appeared in the 1970s and had to program with punch cards, I think I would go crazy. No automated refactoring. No instant compile. No intellisense. No interactive debugger. No Google. No dual 22″ monitors. No version control systems. No database. I don’t think I could handle it.
I could, of course, know the best companies to work at (and when to leave), but would that be enough? I would get to be in on the creation of apps that changed the world, but I still would not have IntelliJ. Plus, while it would be great to work would be on development of ARPANET, would I be able to get a job in the Department of Defense without a believable and traceable background?
In the end, I think I would skip learning to code in technology of the day and stick to higher level tasks like architecture, spec writing, and consulting until my stocks paid out. Maybe introduce agile and Scrum to the world early and change the course of history. Just think of all the terrible projects that would have never happened if waterfall was killed before it got off the ground. I really could make the world a better place.
This is the kind of thing I think about….
What would you do? Could you hack it as a 1970s coder?
Eric said:
Nov 26, 08 at 1:44 pmFirst of all I would need to eat, so I would have to get a low paid job as quickly as possible because I wouldn’t have the skills for anything else. Then in the five minutes each day between working and sleeping, I would dream about how I would magically take my knowledge and prescience and turn it into wealth so that I could get out of the dead end job. I would do this for 40 years watching as all the things I knew would happen come to pass, then I would die.
Rich said:
Nov 26, 08 at 2:34 pmVery easy: 8 bit video game programming
Ross said:
Nov 26, 08 at 3:38 pmYou said there would be “no Google” which is fair enough. But that in itself is a sneaky oppurtunity to grab on.
Sure, you’ll have to wait a bit for ARPANET to really kick off into the consumer-based market but that leavs you lots of space to develop MSN, Yahoo! and Amazon while you’re at it
bshock said:
Nov 26, 08 at 4:06 pmIntroduce “agile” and “Scrum” early and change the course of history? I don’t think you’d enjoy the sort of new history you’d create. If that flash-in-the-pan garbage managed to take hold in the early days, we might be stuck with even more of it now.
Better to locate the inventors and/or major proponents of these ideas and try to steer them in a different direction before it was too late.
dr hongkongski said:
Nov 26, 08 at 4:12 pmYou could hit it big in advertising, because you’ve seen all the
cool ideas already.
Nathan Voxland said:
Nov 26, 08 at 4:17 pmMy theory, though, is that as a coder and not a marketer or a executive I would not have the skills to bring an idea that I would “know” would go over well like Google or Amazon.
I’ve seen enough instances of great ideas that are implemented well fail because they are being run by an engineer rather than someone that really understands business.
Just because you would know that PageRank will work well and can write up an implementation before Google starts doesn’t mean you will end up where Google is now.
I think the best response would be to latch on to the companies you know will work well and do as much as you can to stay out o the way.
John said:
Nov 26, 08 at 4:51 pmI’d absolutely love it, the most modern language I program is Redcode!
Garrett said:
Nov 26, 08 at 5:11 pmIt wasn’t that bad - but it required careful thought, and an understanding of computers. You didn’t just throw code at the compiler and system and see if it might work. The people I work with now I consider “application developers”, not “computer programmers”. They don’t know anything about actual computers, but they can assemble much more user-friendly systems than we could have imagined back then.
Kragen Javier Sitaker said:
Nov 29, 08 at 3:07 amI have a lot of the previous 30 years of software development already in my head; if this was before 1978 or so, I could throw together a version of VisiCalc in six months or so in 6502 assembly, and use the resulting flood of money to bring things like OCaml, Scheme, Python, TCP/IP, and even HTML to fruition decades early. What would Smalltalk look like today if we had a Smalltalk-80 JIT with a polymorphic inline cache and profiler-guided optimization implemented by 1985?
Maybe I’d also have some knowledge of which local politicians were the up-and-comers, and what scandals to use to bring down the old ones.
What would be *really* handy is if I had a few years of Moore’s Law in my head — semiconductor fabrication techniques and the like. But I don’t.
Jcwaters said:
Nov 30, 08 at 2:31 pmIf John Titor could do it, I think that you would be able to as well.
A lot of the stuff that makes programming a pain (concurrency, networking, graphics, interactive interfaces) simply were not around in the main stream. You also didn’t have to be stuck with IBMs and punched cards, LISP was around, PDP’s of various kinds were around, CDC was around (but the archived documentation makes it seem awfully complicated. Depending on when in the 70’s you are talking about you might be able to get your hands on some UNIX goodness, granted UNIX back then was considerably different (better) than it is today.
Get yourself a copy of simh and start fooling around with these old systems, its actually pretty fun and you might learn a thing or two.