Way back in the mid-1980s I purchased six Tandy computer kits and assembled them with an operating system running TRSDOS. I put one workstation in each of my five retail stores and the final machine was put in my office. To get them talking, I built a custom point-of-sale network that I proudly coined the Velo-Stores Sneakernet. True to its name, this primitive infrastructure lacked cables; instead, data transfer relied entirely on me physically running floppy disks between locations while wearing sneakers.
The 1980’s were often referred to as the “Golden Age of Computing”. We drank a lot of coffee until the wee hours of the morning back then. In the early days we used “compliers” to assemble our code and close out all our variables. Watching the compiler chugging along like a 500-car freight train was stressful. And then, watching the code fail because of a missing semicolon or a loose variable was excruciating (akin to getting stabbed in the heart by a lover).
Compared to the 1980s, programming with the aid of an AI Assistant feels like pure wizardry. Now, the computer does the heavy lifting instantly while I just sit back and sip my coffee……. (to be continued)
