Thinking back on how I started with all this IT stuff, back in my early days, about 15 years ago… Goo’ol time! Back then we had Z80 processors with 64k of RAM, BASIC was a high level programming language. I started programming the hard way, first steps were in BASIC – for about 1 year – and after that I went straight to Assembler. No compilers, just a code table converting the Assembler instructions to plain hex numbers. Performance optimization was done with calculators, simply add the number of CPU cycles needed for a certain part of you code and see if you find a solution which is faster.
Compared to the BASIC code the performance was unbelievable. I think it could even catch up with modern apps because you wouldn’t need as much crap as there is today in the apps. Who knows what the IT world would be like if Novell had been the Microsoft of the 80s. Or IBM. Or Linus Torvalds had been Bill Gates. Never mind.
Looking out to a future 15 years from now, maybe this comic will be reality. I hope not. Not in my airplane. If you click yes, be prepared to be thrown out of the airplane (while up at 35000ft) – no questions asked!
But if I remember back when the Intel Pentium was brand new:
