Always love how they have their competitors at the same table - when Stew says "how does your program differ" I have to imagine sometimes they'd say in their mind "well my companies app isn't a waste of disk space".
This sort of happened. One the episode where they were showing off various Windows enhancements, Stewart asked one of the guys "is it true these apps use up a lot of memory?" And the guy was like "yup, most of them do, but not mine!"
So much was going on in the computer field during the 90s. I have so many memories of that time, including this show. Thanks for keeping this tiny part of history alive.
@MichaelKingsfordGray Who cares? You're replying to someone who left a comment showing their support for this series. That comment is 5 years old now. Seriously man... Who cares? Why are you bothered by this? Why do you have to insult that person? I wouldn't exactly call your behavior the pinnacle of maturity either, man... Being offended by a person on CZcams because he's using a nickname really tells more about you, than it does about the other guy.
Wow this brings back so many memories. Can you remember those door stop sized books by publishers like Que? I had no end of them on things like dBase III and IV, DOS etc. Its amazing just how far things have come in a few decades :-)
simple maybe for the visual stuff but very limited in what it can do . . . the frameworks allow us to make anything we want to make (and you dont have to use a framework, just makes it so we dont have to reinvent the same wheel) . . . a visual solution only allows you to make what the visual program allows and nothing more. Take for example in the web field we have stuff like wix for basic stuff or for more custom pages tools like webflow. But you can only make things withing the confines they provide. If you need something unique your going to have to get it made outside of those platforms in code. And programming then was not as easy as it is today . . . nor as many options
I can't believe 30 years have passed since this stuff started. I still remember seeing the photo for Janice Leverling and thinking, wow, I'd sure like to work with her!
@@heno02 I like MFC a lot and have written some cool apps with it. If you want point and click and all that type of stuff there are plenty of other options. But you can use MFC to write powerful and efficient apps.
clunky isn't it funny how they can make the web browser better and smoother but programming not a chance in hell of improving how easy it is to work with over the years gotta stick with the tried and true clunky software can't improve it cause that would be blasphemy
16:17 It's unusual to hear someone talk about "neural networks" in those days. Nowadays it's a huge buzzword that comes up in talks about another buzzword "deep learning," but back in 1993 it was just a statistical data structure that was sometimes used.
AI and Neural networks have always been empty buzzwords thrown around to make software sound more impressive. It's all stolen data from millions of internet users.
Visual Basic won this war. It was the only GUI platform that could easily interface with MS Office products. It toasted all the "office alternatives" also, since NO other vendor integrated their office apps with their programming platforms.
It wasn't really "killed", more abandoned. The Hypercard program was heavily tied to the 68k architecture, it would have been expensive to port to the PowerPC architecture, and Apple does not care about a product that only a few digital artists and hobby developers used. It might have been expanded into World Wide Web 1.0, but Apple (thankfully) was not smart enough for that -- could you imagine the dystopian nightmare of Apple owning a Hypercard-based World Wide Web?
@@cygil1 It wasn't used by a "few", it was widely found in products for Apple's core education market, since the "electronic book" format worked well (see the Computer Chronicles episode on it). What ultimately won the market was Macromedia Director which was cross-platform, more multimedia oriented, and did make the transition to the web.
I think that the only graphical programming language that is still relevant from that era is LabVIEW, though it tends to be buggy and many devices (consoles, multimeters, etc.) still uses old drivers and interfaces. Someone knows if is there a chapter where they mention LabVIEW?
My education was mostly under UNIX. I can remember getting out of college in 1990 and encountering these early "RAD" tools for Windows: they made programming about as exciting as watching paint dry. I'm so glad Linux came along. Incidentally, I still use vi for editing.
@@OpenGL4ever I've been using vim for a couple of decades, but you really show me that I should call it "vim" these days. The bread-and-butter product I work on is on a linux host, and when you are ssh'ing into a remote system, using Microsoft Studio over a ssh -X tunnel is silly, and probably impossible when I'm over a serial console. But vim is there, just waiting like an old friend, and my fingers know the commands. I can't even tell you how to do many of the commands I used regularly: I just think "find a zero over in that column with a zero above it and below it", and magically, the fingers just do it, and all I do is read the results. If it isn't magic, its just that I typed those commands for so many years that the fingers grok my desire. Also, word of advice: avoid up-selling vim/vi to EMACS users. Talk about a Holy War.
What comes over then as still valid now is the skilled complex engineering building components then workflow / semi skilled people using it to make flows. Hate term low code but that what it is.
The progress: 20000 lines of code to define a window!
Před rokem+1
am wondered why these visual programming languages does not improved over the years and in 2022 we still need to type in 40-50 characters to tell the computer we want to print something to the screen, or we need 10 years to make some complex application
A couple of related reasons might be guessed at. One is that these tools were created and supported by proprietary vendors with limited for extensibility and no source code access. The web was another factor - because the internet is oriented around passing around _text_ files, most people went learning HTML and CSS and the demand for desktop apps evaporated.
With the exception of the Microsoft applications shown off at the end, all of the other things demonstrated were extremely limited. ProGraph, for example, could ONLY do the things that the ProGraph developer thought of. If you wanted an app that needed to do a function, well, better hope ProGraph supported that. The interfaces worked well enough but as applications got more complicated and could do more things, these visual tools didn't scale fast enough.
These tools never took off because the developer was limited by the imagination of the tool's developers. It was difficult, if not impossible to create something that the tool's own developers had not foreseen These tools also used propriety languages and environments which meant they didn't integrate well with others (e.g. source control) and the end user had to wait for bugs to be fixed by the tool's developers. Most modern applications are developed using tools that would look archaic to someone back in 1993 because we've found that dedicated command like tools (like git or llvm) scale better than monolithic graphical IDEs and 'low level' languages like C/C++ provide a better return on investment.
Some of the concepts are still around in visual wizards and screen layout routines, but you are correct, most of these ideas are gone. I still miss somethings from Visual C++ 5/6.
Yep, "Low Code" and unfortunately the hipster have discovered it and are attempting to bring the shit back. It didn't work then because of compatibility issues, it won't work now. Companies think they are saving money but don't think about support. Most companies don't use low code, especially propriety ones because you're then locked in and try getting someone to support it when everyone has left. Oh look, you can't because hardly anyone else uses it so you have to train people all the time. They then realise it's pointless learning as they can't take that knowledge elsewhere so leave. Rinse and repeat.
the serious looks like its not serious. when the record is added, there is no confirmation and adding. new record does not clear the text fields of the previous record. lols
Yeah. I remember an interview with Steve Ballmer, when Microsoft was still working with IBM. He said IBM would pay their developers by lines of code, so IBM software would be extremely bloated. He said "if our developers can make the same application in half the lines of code, so it's smaller and faster, should they be getting paid less?" It was a good example of how code can be bloated, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual application needed to be so large.
It's interesting that Visual Basic was the only one to really take off and it became really successful for about 20 years but now 30 years later, drag and drop programming and WYSIWIG interfaces have been all but abandoned. :( but on the bright side, we are now at the dawn of a new revolution aka Natural Language Programming.
You can still use VisualBasic (the IDE is now Visual Studio) to develop simple apps if you want to/need to. But the main reason has to do with scalability. It was very hard to scale up these more visual languages, and they were limited. You could only do what the developers thought of. What if you wanted to do something other than a database with ProGraph? Well, better hope the developer thought of it first. What if there is an issue with your application? Is it with the language or is it with the tool you used? If the latter, better hope it gets fixed. That's always been the main issue with the more visual ways of doing things. You are limited in what you want to do and it's hard to integrated them into things like CVS and other bug trackers and development tools.
God,, at the time I got so sick of the overuse of the word "Visual". What a crock. Retailers were adding the word "Visual" to any and every product they sold except for dog food just to gain a sale, and morons everywhere were eating it up.
The languages shown are all more or less just gimmicks and are hardly suitable for professional use in a software company, especially in very large projects. Projects that may be intended to be developed on Windows and Mac. For such projects, languages like C/C ++ or Pascal were and still are the best solutions. With Rad Studio from Embarcadero it's possible, to develop applications for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, Android and iOS without using external libraries like Qt. The underlying compilers are also mature and generate optimized code without having to install runtime libraries, as is the case with Microsoft Visual C ++.
I love the fact that the boy in the intro just kept pressing the down arrow key
That's enough to become a professional.
Always love how they have their competitors at the same table - when Stew says "how does your program differ" I have to imagine sometimes they'd say in their mind "well my companies app isn't a waste of disk space".
This sort of happened. One the episode where they were showing off various Windows enhancements, Stewart asked one of the guys "is it true these apps use up a lot of memory?" And the guy was like "yup, most of them do, but not mine!"
This channel teaches me more about programming than traditional programming courses because I get a grasp of the origin and history of languages
So much was going on in the computer field during the 90s. I have so many memories of that time, including this show. Thanks for keeping this tiny part of history alive.
Sometimes I get scared, watching these late at night.
me, too since we're still have nothing more then a text editor to program stuff.
@@RagdollRocket lol.
I just love watching these old series. It's amazing to see how far computers have come in such little time.
+1
I love these too. What amazes me is the elaborate software and companies that were all that for a hot minute and are nearly unknown now.
@MichaelKingsfordGray Who cares? You're replying to someone who left a comment showing their support for this series. That comment is 5 years old now. Seriously man... Who cares? Why are you bothered by this? Why do you have to insult that person?
I wouldn't exactly call your behavior the pinnacle of maturity either, man... Being offended by a person on CZcams because he's using a nickname really tells more about you, than it does about the other guy.
@MichaelKingsfordGray Are you high?
Wow this brings back so many memories. Can you remember those door stop sized books by publishers like Que? I had no end of them on things like dBase III and IV, DOS etc. Its amazing just how far things have come in a few decades :-)
@SteelRodent I remember those Sybex "Comprehensive" volumes - lucky they were paperbacks printed on newsprint
This gave me flashbacks to my high school days having to write databases programs in my computer science classes
It’s crazy how simple it’s, today programming frameworks complicates even small things.
simple maybe for the visual stuff but very limited in what it can do . . . the frameworks allow us to make anything we want to make (and you dont have to use a framework, just makes it so we dont have to reinvent the same wheel) . . . a visual solution only allows you to make what the visual program allows and nothing more. Take for example in the web field we have stuff like wix for basic stuff or for more custom pages tools like webflow. But you can only make things withing the confines they provide. If you need something unique your going to have to get it made outside of those platforms in code. And programming then was not as easy as it is today . . . nor as many options
@@dawsonpate7385Visual Basic made making simple program much more accessible, that’s the point.
Small acorns - how much of a world was built up around Visual Basic they cannot possibly know
You were really spoiled for choice in the 90's if you wanted to build an address book.
I love how things were done back in macOS.
I love how things looked and were done back then in the Mac.
Yes, I want that UI back!!!
I can't believe 30 years have passed since this stuff started. I still remember seeing the photo for Janice Leverling and thinking, wow, I'd sure like to work with her!
Well it's good to see Visual C++ and native Windows GUI development is still as clunky as 1993 :)
Because MFC has always been and always will be a clusterfuck
@@heno02 M.F.C?
@@miles2378 Microsoft Foundation Classes
@@heno02 I like MFC a lot and have written some cool apps with it. If you want point and click and all that type of stuff there are plenty of other options. But you can use MFC to write powerful and efficient apps.
clunky isn't it funny how they can make the web browser better and smoother but programming not a chance in hell of improving how easy it is to work with over the years gotta stick with the tried and true clunky software can't improve it cause that would be blasphemy
16:17 It's unusual to hear someone talk about "neural networks" in those days. Nowadays it's a huge buzzword that comes up in talks about another buzzword "deep learning," but back in 1993 it was just a statistical data structure that was sometimes used.
The "Deep Learning" in my Nvidia shield just puts weird white outlines around every bit of grain in movies.
AI and Neural networks have always been empty buzzwords thrown around to make software sound more impressive. It's all stolen data from millions of internet users.
Um, people were thinking about this stuff in the 1940s (e.g., McCullough and Pitts). New things tend to be less new than is generally believed.
Visual Basic won this war. It was the only GUI platform that could easily interface with MS Office products.
It toasted all the "office alternatives" also, since NO other vendor integrated their office apps with their programming platforms.
sure, as long as you close your eyes and don't look at Borland's Delphi.
What did the parents think naming their poor kid Chub
In one episode there was a guy named Sparky Sparks. 😂
"well it all started when daddy got a chub"
"- Let's just say this is not your father's BASIC..." :D
Unfortunately!
Killing Hypercard was one of the biggest mistakes Apple made.
It wasn't really "killed", more abandoned. The Hypercard program was heavily tied to the 68k architecture, it would have been expensive to port to the PowerPC architecture, and Apple does not care about a product that only a few digital artists and hobby developers used. It might have been expanded into World Wide Web 1.0, but Apple (thankfully) was not smart enough for that -- could you imagine the dystopian nightmare of Apple owning a Hypercard-based World Wide Web?
@@cygil1 Apple owning the Web?? Aww, Hell naw!! :(
@@cygil1 It wasn't used by a "few", it was widely found in products for Apple's core education market, since the "electronic book" format worked well (see the Computer Chronicles episode on it). What ultimately won the market was Macromedia Director which was cross-platform, more multimedia oriented, and did make the transition to the web.
Why? No-one used it.
I think that the only graphical programming language that is still relevant from that era is LabVIEW, though it tends to be buggy and many devices (consoles, multimeters, etc.) still uses old drivers and interfaces. Someone knows if is there a chapter where they mention LabVIEW?
Honestly, I dont listen to half of what they're talking about but the content and aesthetics of this show is super nostalgic
I remember this show, lol.
My education was mostly under UNIX. I can remember getting out of college in 1990 and encountering these early "RAD" tools for Windows: they made programming about as exciting as watching paint dry. I'm so glad Linux came along. Incidentally, I still use vi for editing.
Just for your info, there is now vim. You should try it.
@@OpenGL4ever I've been using vim for a couple of decades, but you really show me that I should call it "vim" these days. The bread-and-butter product I work on is on a linux host, and when you are ssh'ing into a remote system, using Microsoft Studio over a ssh -X tunnel is silly, and probably impossible when I'm over a serial console. But vim is there, just waiting like an old friend, and my fingers know the commands. I can't even tell you how to do many of the commands I used regularly: I just think "find a zero over in that column with a zero above it and below it", and magically, the fingers just do it, and all I do is read the results. If it isn't magic, its just that I typed those commands for so many years that the fingers grok my desire. Also, word of advice: avoid up-selling vim/vi to EMACS users. Talk about a Holy War.
@@donaldwycoff4154 I know, i was just kidding. 😀
Fast forward and the power platform has gotten me two promotions
3:04 Now here's a really funny name! I laughed out loud on the bus.
When put picture in a button is your dream and an achievement 😂
hey I cant do this on my macbook pro.
and im here still using java swing in eclipse for a school project
Oh that "Kid's zoo" kitten already existed!
Det sämsta operativet någonsin, ser ut som Windows 1.0 men med punkten borttagen.
Joe Firmage made a few billion then went on to give Alien intelligence the credit for developing this software. No joke, google his name.
What comes over then as still valid now is the skilled complex engineering building components then workflow / semi skilled people using it to make flows. Hate term low code but that what it is.
1:11 Windows
4:35 Mac
From this to unreal blueprint, it was long journey to make VPL good, even then it's still not perfect.
a button with an image inside it, it's a big deal back then
5:25 As an IT person. This shit is would have been too hard for most of people. LOL
Back when Peach was called "The Princess". (:
3:10 Chub Dietz
what a name, he looks chubby and needs to diet
@@VAX1970 Yeah, but go easy, he probably knows way more than both of us about Computing and GUI Programming..... ;)
@@blackneos940 He now works as a Director of Administration for a church, i work as a software engineer.. so no.
@@VAX1970 Well... Wow. :) I myself am trying to learn Qt Creator. :)
I had the compaq presario of the adv!
The progress: 20000 lines of code to define a window!
am wondered why these visual programming languages does not improved over the years and in 2022 we still need to type in 40-50 characters to tell the computer we want to print something to the screen, or we need 10 years to make some complex application
A couple of related reasons might be guessed at. One is that these tools were created and supported by proprietary vendors with limited for extensibility and no source code access. The web was another factor - because the internet is oriented around passing around _text_ files, most people went learning HTML and CSS and the demand for desktop apps evaporated.
With the exception of the Microsoft applications shown off at the end, all of the other things demonstrated were extremely limited. ProGraph, for example, could ONLY do the things that the ProGraph developer thought of. If you wanted an app that needed to do a function, well, better hope ProGraph supported that. The interfaces worked well enough but as applications got more complicated and could do more things, these visual tools didn't scale fast enough.
4:25 wanted to? What happened?
This is so serious
These tools never took off because the developer was limited by the imagination of the tool's developers. It was difficult, if not impossible to create something that the tool's own developers had not foreseen
These tools also used propriety languages and environments which meant they didn't integrate well with others (e.g. source control) and the end user had to wait for bugs to be fixed by the tool's developers.
Most modern applications are developed using tools that would look archaic to someone back in 1993 because we've found that dedicated command like tools (like git or llvm) scale better than monolithic graphical IDEs and 'low level' languages like C/C++ provide a better return on investment.
Some of the concepts are still around in visual wizards and screen layout routines, but you are correct, most of these ideas are gone. I still miss somethings from Visual C++ 5/6.
The definitely seemed limited to enterprise/corporate administration work. You can still do this today with C# and .NET
Or even in Mono ;-)
Yep, "Low Code" and unfortunately the hipster have discovered it and are attempting to bring the shit back. It didn't work then because of compatibility issues, it won't work now. Companies think they are saving money but don't think about support. Most companies don't use low code, especially propriety ones because you're then locked in and try getting someone to support it when everyone has left. Oh look, you can't because hardly anyone else uses it so you have to train people all the time. They then realise it's pointless learning as they can't take that knowledge elsewhere so leave. Rinse and repeat.
Well, Android Studio is still applying these pronciples.
Holy smokes $100 for that CD Rom?!
C.
C Play.
C Play View.
View, Play, View!
the serious looks like its not serious. when the record is added, there is no confirmation and adding. new record does not clear the text fields of the previous record. lols
9:40 "Twenty thousand lines of code behind that icon" That.. That's impressive.. But like.. Impressively bad.
Yeah. I remember an interview with Steve Ballmer, when Microsoft was still working with IBM. He said IBM would pay their developers by lines of code, so IBM software would be extremely bloated. He said "if our developers can make the same application in half the lines of code, so it's smaller and faster, should they be getting paid less?" It was a good example of how code can be bloated, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual application needed to be so large.
What about Delphi? Magic? CA Visual Clipper?
@MichaelKingsfordGray Because I like using a handle, that's why. Now, WHY do you need to know my real name?
@MichaelKingsfordGray What's your problem??
8:05 looks like Unreal Engine blueprint script 😂
1:07
I thought you knew better.
+Smeddy Too I floppied all over the place so much back in the day that I gave a few computers STDs, 'MonkeyB' was one of the most common STD I gave..
I just wish flash player had a virtual language because no one wants to learn action script "still a good language and I do want to learn it"
I first heard it nearly 30 years ago, but the saying of SQL as "sequel" still bugs me.
what about GUI as "gooey"?
Nothing wrong with calling it "sequel" server, things like this should not bug you.
The opposite bugs me. ES CUE EL just sounds like you're trying hard. Like people who say ES TEE DEE STRING, ES TEE DEE VECTOR, etc.
I'm sorry, did he say 20,000 lines of code to display an empty window?
ಠ_ಠ
Yeah really. Gtfo
Can anyone help me access Compuserve? My modem seems to have an IRQ problem. Thank you.
lol
Try adjusting the dip switches.
VB3!
Hockey!
It's interesting that Visual Basic was the only one to really take off and it became really successful for about 20 years but now 30 years later, drag and drop programming and WYSIWIG interfaces have been all but abandoned. :(
but on the bright side, we are now at the dawn of a new revolution aka Natural Language Programming.
You can still use VisualBasic (the IDE is now Visual Studio) to develop simple apps if you want to/need to. But the main reason has to do with scalability. It was very hard to scale up these more visual languages, and they were limited. You could only do what the developers thought of. What if you wanted to do something other than a database with ProGraph? Well, better hope the developer thought of it first. What if there is an issue with your application? Is it with the language or is it with the tool you used? If the latter, better hope it gets fixed.
That's always been the main issue with the more visual ways of doing things. You are limited in what you want to do and it's hard to integrated them into things like CVS and other bug trackers and development tools.
i think hypercard become applescript. it's still around and criminally under utilized.
we have javascript now, so...
Chub Dietz.
They were lightyears behind Borland.
Apparently they didn't have a long game.
LOL I love how they Included Visual Basic and Visual C++ which aren't nearly as visual as the Mac based ones.
Microsoft Visual is overused back then, now what? none of us gonna use it right?
Or, you could just use Vim on a TTY.
hahaha... serius development :D
Visual Basic was a HUGE hit in the way one could build software. Too bad it was backed by an weak programming language.
M A R I O
T E A C H E S
T Y P I N G
God,, at the time I got so sick of the overuse of the word "Visual". What a crock. Retailers were adding the word "Visual" to any and every product they sold except for dog food just to gain a sale, and morons everywhere were eating it up.
"to handle buttcoup" ?
And this is why modern "apps" in Windows 10 take over half a second to respond. Terrible design.
The languages shown are all more or less just gimmicks and are hardly suitable for professional use in a software company, especially in very large projects. Projects that may be intended to be developed on Windows and Mac. For such projects, languages like C/C ++ or Pascal were and still are the best solutions.
With Rad Studio from Embarcadero it's possible, to develop applications for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, Android and iOS without using external libraries like Qt. The underlying compilers are also mature and generate optimized code without having to install runtime libraries, as is the case with Microsoft Visual C ++.