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The story of the $500,000,000 error.
In 1996, an unmanned Ariane 5 model rocket was launched by the European Space Agency.
Onboard was software written to analyze the horizontal velocity of the spacecraft. A conversion between a 64-bit floating point value and a 16-bit signed integer within this software ultimately caused an overflow error just forty seconds after launch, leading to a catastrophic failure of the spacecraft.
That day, $7 billion of development met it's match: a data type conversion.12 -
Normal people don't understand this concept; they believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
- The Dilbert Principle (1996)1 -
Don't know what is worst: that they offer to teach Visual Basic on 2018, or that they "invented" Visual Java.
Seriously?
16 -
Me in 1996:
<html>
<head>
<body>My first website! I'm gonna be a website developer!</body>
</head>
</html>
Me in 2021: I have no idea what all that stuff in Node is for. All I know is that my boss says I need Node and gulp to compile this website to add a comma to a paragraph on a page for this client.
gulp
*a metric ton of errors appears*
@%#$!15 -
1996, my colleagues trying to port Chorus microkernel on Cray supercomputer. System crashes every ~5 days with no apparent reason. After weeks of investigation someone notices one of the network cables slightly longer than others ... after ~5 days and speed of light the Cray would miss a clock tick and crashes. Replaced network cable and it works fine!
Don't mess with supercomputers ...2 -
This always makes me smile.
1996 - James Gosling invents Java. Java is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Sun loudly heralds Java's novelty.
2001 - Anders Hejlsberg invents C#. C# is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Microsoft loudly heralds C#'s novelty.
The full article with more funny comparisons is at this link
http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/...9 -
I felt very inspired when I first controlled a LED using QBasic and the LPT1 (printer) port, back in 1996. It just felt like "so much power"!
(Was more or less similar to the photo)
1 -
She: I hate you.
He: I don't care.
She: You are stupid.
He: I don't care.
She: You are ugly.
He: I don't care.
She: Linux is shit.
He: You are f**king dead b*tch.20 -
TIL that TI has no goddamn chill
Texas Instruments released the TI-83+ calculator model in 1996. The Z80 was not at all stock and has the following features:
- 3 access levels (priveleged kernel, kernel, user)
- Locking Flash (R/O when locked for most pages, some pages protected and unreadable as well, only unlockable from protected Flash pages by reading a certain order of bits then setting a port)
- Locking hardware ports (lock state always the same as flash)
- Customizable execution whitelist range (via locked ports)
- Configurable hardware (Flash/RAM size changeable in software via locked ports, max RAM is 8MB which is fucking mental compared to the 64k in the thing)
- Userland virtualization (always-on)
- Reset on violation of security model
- Multithreading
- Software-overclockable CPU
- Hardware MD5 and cert handling
TI made a calculator in 1996 with security features PCs wouldn't see until like 2010 what the *actual* fuck10 -
This isn't really a Dev related rant, more of a life rant. Things have been going pretty badly for me lately, so I apologize if this comes across as complaining or whining.
This morning, I got in a car accident that totaled my car. It was a 1996 Chevy Camaro that I had been fixing up and restoring over the last few years and I had it running pretty well. The accident was my fault and I told the police as much, because I value honesty over screwing over others for my own benefit. Money has been very tight lately because my wife was out of work for the last bit of her pregnancy, so we ended up having to move to a 1 bedroom apartment that I could afford rent on my own. She also has a son who is now 13, so space is pretty tight. Money got even tighter once we had the baby. She's 10 weeks old now.
I've barely made the $1500/month rent on my own here, usually paying 1-2 days late because we're living paycheck to paycheck. Our lease is up at the end of July and they won't let us renew because of this.
The bad part is that I was driving a car that had expired registration because I couldn't fix it to pass the state smog test and my license expired two weeks ago. I haven't been able to afford insurance, so every time I drove, it was a gamble.
I'm now going to have to pay these damages out of pocket for the other car.
We're now having to move into my mother in law's house for about 4 months so we can get out of this financial hole we've gotten into.
I feel like I've failed as a father and a husband.10 -
When I was in college in 1996, one of my roommates had a “Web 101” class. At that same time, the office of a government agency I was working for had asked me to publish a website to let the public know what they were doing. Prior to that I had bought an HTML 1.0 reference and had been fiddling around with some things. I got excited about it all when I realized that just within 2 weeks of using the book I had passed up the entire class my roommate was taking and apparently knew more at that point than the professor. I published the agency site, then went on to build sites for the Uni and freelance clients, and then to apply to teach a more advanced class in the Continuing Education courses the Uni offered to adults in the community. All of that got me a job at a startup which led to the rest of my career. That was pretty dang exciting to me.1
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While trying to learn a legacy codebase, I realize one library supports almost everything. I decide to look it up.
Last updated: 19962 -
The year was 1983. My best friend and neighbour at the time invited me over to see an amazing device that his father had brought home from work, an IBM PC. We played a game called Track & Field, and I was amazed that the machine remembered my name once I've entered it. (Uptil then the only machines with any kind of memory that I've come in touch with, were arcade games and my cousin's video game console, which was also the first electronic gaming device I've ever played, back in 1978). In the early 1980s, computers were anything but commonplace in Åland Islands, but I think that it was in 1983 that people became aware of them, and there was a budding interest to buy one, at least among us kids. It was my sister who wished for a home computer for Christmas, so the same year Santa gave us a ZX Spectrum. It came with a game called Thro' the Wall, an Arcanoid clone(, that has inspired me to make my own clone "Wall" for all the different home computers I've had, ranging from Commodore 16 and Canon V-20 to Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200). Unfortunately, we only managed to load the game (delivered on a C cassette) like once or twice after several attempts. It turned out that the hardware was faulty and dad got a refund after first having had to complain a lot at the dealer (which went out of business some ten years ago), and then bought the Commodore the next Christmas. Anyway, I wrote my first code on the ZX Spectrum. It doesn't really count for programming as all I did was typing examples and running them. I do recall altering one example though, a program drawing the Swedish flag on the screen, by adding an inner red cross thus turning it in the Åland flag. But, with the Commodore 16 (which had an excellent Basic interpreter) I got started with programming almost immediately and by the end of 1984 I had written my fist very own Basic programs. In 1996 I got my first IT job, and am still a dev. So, what became of my childhood friend and neighbour? He runs a successful computer dealership :)
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New web devs don't know the struggle of using spacer.gif, nested table layouts, and vibrant "web friendly" colors out of requirement.5
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Hurricanes that start with the letter F can go fuck themselves.
Fran - 1996
Floyd - 1999
Florence - 2018
All 3 hit (well Florence hasn't hit yet, but it's fixing to) NC and did significant damage.
I wanted a few days off from classes, but not like this man. Fucking hell I hope it doesn't take the power out for too long or destroy anything important (like people).6 -
It was back in 1996, when dad taught me how to run games from DOS it was a mind-blowing thing and for me a black screen and white text was a "wtf it's too hard" thing. Then he showed me how to format and I felt like he was doing rocket science 😂2
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I was 33 and it was 1996 when I decided I was interested in programming. I really enjoyed it and made decent money. Things have been rough the last 3 years in regard to my career. I went from being a top performer to getting bad performance reviews and getting let go from jobs. I have started my own business but it is not making a profit yet. I write good reliable but I am slow because I test and try to write clean code. I have also tried to avoid working with a couple of hot js frameworks because I find javascript frameworks annoying. My husband says it is time to do something else like becoming a project manager. I might get my pmp but continue to work on my side project. I love programming but have some major disappointments lately.2
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i was hired to join a team of old devs (40+) in an unnamed European country "yay goodbye 3rd world it's time to enjoy the quality of life" assist with enhancing already existing software and creating new solutions.
prior to my arrival most things were slow and super buggy, looking at the code base it shouldn't be a surprise, amateur hour everyone, logic implemented that is not needed, comment driven development, last time code review was done back in 1996. lots of anti patterns.
i swear there is a for loop that does nothing but it loops through a 100+ elements list, trunk based development with tfs since git is "not really needed"
test projects are not there.
>enter me an educated fool, with genuine passion for the craft and somehow a decent amount of knowledge.
>spent the last year fixing stuff educating people on principles and qualities.
> countless hours of training and explaining. team is showing cooperation, a new requirement comes in to develop with react.
> tear my ass creating reusable shit and self explanatory code with proper naming etc using git with feature branching, monday is first deployment day.
> today a colleague was working on an item submit a pull request and self approve it
> look at the code..... WTF the dumb fuck copied and pasted the whole code from different kendo components but somehow managed to refractor the name to test component, commented out all the code that he didn't use did the api call directly from the component, has 2 useeffects that depends on the a fucking text box changes for no reason, no redux implementation, the acceptance criteria is not achieved, and it doesn't work it just look right.
> first world country shit cannot scold, cannot complain, lead by example.
>asked him why you did this, the response was yeah probably i shouldn't have done that, i really didn't understand anything in the training but didn't want to waste time!!!!
> rest of the team created a different styled disaster with different flavors they don't even name their shit the same way.
fellow developers I'm stuck in a spaceship with a bunch of imposters, seriously i never cried in my entire life now I'm teary and on the verge of a break down.
talk with management "improving needs time" and offers me to join a yoga session to release the stress as if reaching nirvana would deliver shit on monday.
i really don't know what do is this a rant, is this a cry for help, I'm not sure, any advice is welcomed.7 -
In 1996 I rewrote the Chorus microkernel from C++ to Occam, so that it would run on the Transputer. This deserves at least 50 +1's!2
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Went to The fruit company (Watch Forrest Gump if you don't know which company I am referring to) to pick an order up for a friend of mine. Showed the girl the email with order ID on my phone, and she tapped "Show Remote Content" without my consent to download the barcode because she was born after 1996 and too lazy to use the keypad on her scanner.7
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Jesus shitting Christ. Do you want to know something by awful. A comment by @tahnik on a post by @yvang has just made me realise I have been fighting CSS to make it do what I want since IE3 came out.
In August 1996. 20 years ago. I'm 40. That's half my life ago. CSS, I salute you. You've been a worthy adversary.8 -
My exact reaction when ,I was researching on legacy programming language and their copyrights for my intellectual property rights subject.
Found that
Python was released before Java did.
But the popularity Java claimed was faster than python
Python first release date 20 Feb 1991
Java first release date 23 Jan 1996
Could anyone explain y python gained is momentum later!?2 -
Hard Drive oddity: the Quantum Bigfoot. 4.3GB, 5", 7200rpm, 1996. (On top is a Seagate Barracuda 40GB for comparison.)
1 -
Family support for becoming a dev?
HA! None at all.
Well, to be fair, my parents bought their first a PC in 1996 for learning how to use it and to write documents for business.
So it was a rather passive support, if at all.1 -
Is this really Sai's website . .
https://www.systemax.jp/en/sai/
> 1996-2022
The only thing that must have been updated is the copyright . .5 -
Finding a lack of courses on Web development at my university (1996) I went out and bought my own HTML and JavaScript books. Then I used my employer's servers to set up three web servers and did a PR site for them. After that, I hung out a shingle and built sites for a private eye agency and an art gallery. The university asked me to teach a continuing education class on Web design. Then I got hired by an insurance startup programming ASP/MSSQL/IIS and the rest is history.
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That day 19th January 1996 . I pooped my ass off whle seeing the world for the first time and continueing to do so everytime i woke up.13
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I had a problem visualizing giant job/schedule dependencies trees a few years ago and basically wrote a program to convert the dependencies so it could be read in by a JS graph program that actually did the work. The output was a Gantt chart but really messed up, overlapping arrows, not very readable.
Today someone asked me for my app and but in a better format/visualization.
I so I was thinking how do I do this... Figure out which nodes are leaves, how to combine visually.
Programmatically you just link all the Nodes together. So I was thinking like how u need to use BFS and Mark when each more is traverse and on its first traversal, add it to a Map<Depth,List<Node>> then print each level, etc.
But not so straight forward.... But finally realized that I'm not trying to draw a Tree (or a tree where the rootams are actually in the middle and the top n bottom are leaves)... But actually a Graph.... A DAG....
SO FINALLY I googled and found GraphViz...
https://graphviz.gitlab.io/gallery/
And in the gallery I opened some pictures and printed at the bottom was like 1996...
And I'm now wondering "how the fuck did they do this?" Calculate where all the vertices should be placed so they can be linked with lines and and not look like a big mess...I guess like a yarnball
3 -
My first close encounter with a computer was with a came called "Skunny: Save our pizzas" in I think 1996 or 1997" and it used to run in dos.
And then next one that I remember was in 98/99 with my uncle ordering groceries on a PC. With a dial up modem.
I got my first machine in 2005 and the first game that I installed was Skunny: Save our pizzas. -
My first interaction with Computers started in 1996/1997 and it was Dangerous Dave, PacMan, Mario, Pre that pulled me in so deep. We had multiple Floppy Disks and each of them used to go awry after a few months of use. Had to keep deleting stuff to fit all my Favourite Games
A year later I learnt the basics of MS-DOS and GWBasic. Looking at seniors do C Programming on Borland Turbo made me feel scared and one of them said it is the real language to make Games, and all types of Animation stuff. I was very intrigued but only for a while. I kept playing Games which was what I was fit for at that time
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