Personal Tech History

The craft of writing code is entering its mass production phase. There is no turning away from the lure of faster delivery. AI coding brings us to the industrial age of code production. More software product for everyone — better, faster, cheaper, and produced tirelessly. Hand-coding is diminishing into an artisanal side-pursuit.

Being part of the generation that puts this craft to rest, as we know it, is a existential burden. So much has been put into it, and yet it felt like we started at its infancy ourselves.

• It was the early 1990s, and the middle school had a computer lab with a handful of IBM PC XT boxes with 8086 processors. Two 5-3/4” floppy drives, no hard drive, and the classic green phosphor CRT screen. Mechanical keyboard, because there is no other kind yet. We are taught GW-Basic, which includes an ASCII art game of a gorilla throwing bananas at buildings. In summer, it’s the only room with air-conditioning.

• Sometime around then, another similar machine run MS-DOS 3, but now with a lockbox of floppy drives nearby, some with games. Paratrooper, Zaxxon, and Space Invaders. And an unknown text-only game mysteriously called advent.exe — spelunking via text in a magical cave — which I later learned was the legendary Collosal Cave. Typing xyzzy is my first cheat code.

• My father shows me a small script he programmed in the dBase III+ scripting language that printed my name out, and asked me questions. Mind blown; how does it know me?

• Now, I must learn how to program. But it is Soviet-aligned India, and I have no access to books, classes, or programming languages, other than dBase III+.