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Archive for the ‘History’ Category

Why SVN Still Makes Sense for Most Development Teams

Posted in History, Still-coding, tagged , , , , , , , on December 23, 2025| Leave a Comment »

After retiring 15 years ago from professional software development, I had a clear picture of what source control should provide for a commercial development team:

  • Prevention of simultaneous edits – avoiding the chaos when two developers unknowingly work on identical code
  • Real-time visibility into who’s currently working on what files
  • Version metadata embedded in code files – a lifesaver when you find a piece of code and need to know what version it is
  • A comprehensive audit trail showing who modified which files and when
  • Automatic version incrementing for every modification
  • A single authoritative codebase representing the current production state
  • The ability to roll back to any previous version

When a business opportunity pulled me out of retirement and back into managing a development team, I naturally asked about source control. The universal response? “We use Git.”

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Evolution of a website – part 2 : Why just a directory?

Posted in Fintech, History, tagged , , , on January 10, 2025| Leave a Comment »

In part 1 I described the somewhat chaotic way we got the bobsguide website started and how it was turned into a business. We had a lot of advice that we needed editorial content to attract the visitors we needed for a really successful site. A lot of people obviously believed the same thing. The web now has a number of financial technology sites with news items, interviews and and opinion pieces1.

So why did I ignore that and focus on a product directory?

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My take on Python and other languages

Posted in History, Still-coding, tagged , , on February 11, 2024| Leave a Comment »

I have been using JavaScript (Node) for the last few years, but I have pretty much come to the end of my hobby project. I see that Python is very popular for server side systems., so I thought would take a look.

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Remember Usenet?

Posted in History, Technology, tagged on December 11, 2023| Leave a Comment »

I was looking at the page telling you about Moving to Python from other languages and it referenced “comp.lang.python” without any explanation of what it was. That took me back. It is referring to a Usenet News Group. They were the first social media dating back to the 1980s. This was before Facebook, before Reddit, before online forums, before the World Wide Web. I thought they were long gone. But no – they are still alive and well.

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IT Pioneers: Charles Bachman – Database Pioneer

Posted in Database Management Systems, History, tagged , , , , on September 19, 2023| Leave a Comment »

If you are asked to name the most important pioneer in database development, the name Edgar Codd is probably the first name that comes to mind. He pioneered the concept of relational database. But another person deserves credit as well. Nearly a decade earlier Charles Bachman did fundamental work, developing the first database management system.

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Betamax, ISO Networking, CP/M: When the “best” technology is not the best.

Posted in History, Technology, tagged , , , , , , , on August 28, 2023| Leave a Comment »

You are in a pub and you hear someone say “that is Betamax vs VHS all over again”. What is that about? It is an interesting story which might effect your next career move, so listen up.

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IT Pioneers: Structured Design (circa 1974) – the cornerstone of modern coding practice

Posted in IT Pioneers, Still-coding, tagged , , , , on August 5, 2023| Leave a Comment »

I learned to code in 1963. Things were different then.

There were some obvious things, like 24 hour turnarounds on tests, and storing code on paper tape. Oh – and the computer had about .000000001 of the processor speed on my watch, but at the time we thought it was pretty cool.

I am beginning to sound like one of the four yorkshiremen so I will move on. I want to talk about the pioneers of structured programming and structured design,

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Why do we need JSON when we have XML?

Posted in History, Technology, tagged , on July 8, 2023| Leave a Comment »

For decades, software developers had to struggle with getting computers to talk to each other. Businesses developed systems to do different things at different times on different hardware, and integrating the data was rarely on peoples priority lists. Customers would tell the bank about changing their address and still get mail about their mortgage sent to an old address because the mortgage system had it’s own address file.

Then came XML. A standardised way of exchanging information, with formal standards for different types of application. For example: FIXML – Financial Information Exchange and BEERXML – Brewing information. There is a list here. There are about a thousand of them.

XML is human-readable and similar to well-know HTML so easy to use if a little long-winded.

Well, I am glad that is done and dusted. A major problem for IT systems has been solved. Then came another standard.

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TypeScript. I quite like it.. plus a bonus rant about languages

Posted in History, Technology, tagged , , , on July 2, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Over the years people have developed an unbelievable number of coding languages. They all do pretty much the same job in pretty much the same way. Personally I have coded in Mercury Autocode, COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/1, LISP, Assembler, PERL, basic, C, C++ and JavaScript plus probably some others I have forgotten. Check the list of popular coding languages and you won’t find any of these except C variants and JavaScript1. That is because I have been out of the business for a while and coding languages are items of fashion. Every couple of years a new language becomes the latest hot language. Right now that is Python for reasons that totally escape me.

To make this clear. The world only needs a couple of coding languages, one for regular applications and another (maybe) to write operating systems in. None of the languages for general coding discussed here are a significant improvement on PL/1 which was invented in the 1960s2 , except for support for object orientation, which at the time had not been invented. Had a PL/2 been developed with Objects supported we could all just get on with coding.

But we are where we are.

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IT Pioneers: Hats off to Gary Kildall (who?)

Posted in History, IT Pioneers, Technology, tagged , , , , , , , on June 25, 2023| 1 Comment »

I started coding in then 1960’s on a Ferranti Mercury. It was as big as a house and had less computer power than my watch. But at the time we thought it was pretty cool. Over the years, Moor’s Law turned out to be pretty accurate. The most powerful computers doubled in power about every two years. Commercial systems got smaller. From as big as a house, to the size of a room, to the size of a desk, then a largeish box in a rack.

But in the mid 1970’s something happened off the Moore’s Law track. They managed to fit all the components of a low-power computer on a single chip. They were mass produced and relatively cheap. The engineers that built it had in mind using them for process control, calculators or computer terminals.

Enter Gary Kildall

Gary Kildall

But a genius called Gary Kildall saw another potential use for these devices.

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