Comments on: The Time Traveling Coder

By: Jcwaters

Jcwaters — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:31:33 +0000

If 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.

By: Kragen Javier Sitaker

Kragen Javier Sitaker — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 10:07:17 +0000

I 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.

By: Garrett

Garrett — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:11:35 +0000

It 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.

By: John

John — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:51:04 +0000

I’d absolutely love it, the most modern language I program is Redcode!

By: Nathan Voxland

Nathan Voxland — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:17:26 +0000

My 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.

By: dr hongkongski

dr hongkongski — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:12:37 +0000

You could hit it big in advertising, because you’ve seen all the
cool ideas already.

By: bshock

bshock — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:06:56 +0000

Introduce “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.

By: Ross

Ross — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 22:38:20 +0000

You 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

By: Rich

Rich — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:34:27 +0000

Very easy: 8 bit video game programming

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 20:44:15 +0000

First 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.