I was a part-time, student programmer at BYU in 1991. I wrote software in 4th Dimension on a Mac II with a color monitor. In 1992, I was helping our office secretaries to adopt email to send interoffice memos. In the fall of 1992, I took two years off to be a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I spent most of that away from a keyboard. When I returned, the world had changed.
Everyone had email, and the advent of the PowerPC gave us vastly faster Macs than the old Mac II and we were using FoxPro to write our software. There was a new technology: NCSA Mosaic. I didn’t know if I’d be able to catch up with all of the changes, or if I could handle sitting in a chair for 8 or more hours a day.
I acclimatized to the office, and eventually “caught up”, if one can ever truly catch up in the world of technology and software. I bought a PC with an ample 32 MB of RAM and installed Linux on it.
I graduated in December of 1997 and went to work for small software company, creatively named Software Development Corporation. That’s a joke — it wasn’t a creative name, but it was a great place to work because my coworkers mentored me and cared about me. We ported new versions of WordPerfect to UNIX systems… or rather, other people did. I added an LDAP address book for the import and merge feature. Everything was written in C. We used the Internet, but not to find answers about APIs and coding… we still used books for that.
Fast forward to today, and nearly everything, technologically, has changed. Computer hardware, Linux is everywhere, open source software, new frameworks and programming languages have become staples of our lives.
Yet people are similar. We rely on each other, help each other, and strengthen each other.