In this thread, you went back in time and it's 1989!

wonder

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Let's say you travel back in time into 1989 in a parallel universe.
You can't take any hardware or software with you, except for you memories, skills and knowledge from 2015.


What kind of software would you bring to the world?

PS: Since you are in a parallel universe, there are no time paradoxes. None of your actions will affect our current timeline.
 
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RandomCoder

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A time before B4A and B4PPC, that hardly bares thinking about! :eek:
 
HotShoe

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I'd start a new company, write a new kind of search engine, and name it Google.

-- Jem
 
Cableguy

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wonder said:
PS: Since you are in a parallel universe, there are no time paradoxes. None of your actions will affect our current timeline.
Click to expand...

Dahm!!! I was aiming at creating Bet'n'Clic, but with result insights!!!
 
wonder

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... but would you guys be able to create Google, Bet'n'Click and Facebook with 1989 hardware?

Remember that we'd be working with QBasic, C++ and Pascal on i386 PC's.
Visual Basic wouldn't be out until 1991 and the World Wide Web was still in the laboratory.
The 486 was announced at Spring Comdex in April 1989. At the announcement, Intel stated that samples would be available in the third quarter of 1989 and production quantities would ship in the fourth quarter of 1989. The first 486-based PCs were announced in late 1989, but some advised that people wait until 1990 to purchase an 486 PC because there were early reports of bugs and software incompatibilities.
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In March 1989, Tim laid out his vision for what would become the Web in a document called “Information Management: A Proposal”. Believe it or not, Tim’s initial proposal was not immediately accepted. In fact, his boss at the time, Mike Sendall, noted the words “Vague but exciting” on the cover. The Web was never an official CERN project, but Mike managed to give Tim time to work on it in September 1990. He began work using a NeXT computer, one of Steve Jobs’ early products.
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RandomCoder

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wonder said:
Remember that we'd be working with QBasic, C++ and Pascal on i386 PC's.
Visual Basic wouldn't be out until 1991 and the World Wide Web was still in the laboratory.
Click to expand...
Don't forget good old Assembly :confused:
 
Beja

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I would look around for my PC XT with 10 MB hard disk, 256K RAM and 5.25" Floppy disk drive., then start enhancing Edlin to look make it like Word Perfect.
 
HotShoe

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wonder said:
but would you guys be able to create Google, Bet'n'Click and Facebook with 1989 hardware?
Click to expand...

Absolutely. Back then I was very familiar with the Motorola 68030 and other 68000 series processors. I was working mainly in C and ASM then. The problem with this timeline is that the internet was unknown as far as the world wide web goes. I'd have to wait a few years to refine it and launch it. Maybe I could even talk Larry into coming to work for me hehe.

--- Jem
 
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I think the thing to do would be to do more or less what the successful companies did, but a little bit ahead of them. The technology simply wasn't advanced enough for something truly groundbraking, but it would be possible to be one step ahead, and only go for the successful ideas, ignoring all the bad ideas.
 
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susu

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I will buy shares and stocks of Microsoft, Apple, Nokia... I will make friend with Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Wozniak but not Steve Jobs :D
 
Informatix

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HotShoe said:
Absolutely. Back then I was very familiar with the Motorola 68030 and other 68000 series processors. I was working mainly in C and ASM then.
Click to expand...
I confirm. In the 80's, a lot of developers were able to code in low-level languages. If you open the famous books of this era (I don't know their title in other languages), they were full of ASM routines (e.g. to speed up manipulations of strings). At school, in the middle of the 80's, I learnt to code in ASM and build a programmable automaton although I didn't study computer science.
 
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sorex

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I still have my assembler books with all INTs explained in it (even one from Peter Norton but it wasn't the best one).

move ah,4ch
int 21h

and the likes were daily used back then. fun and speedy but things like Turbo/Borland Pascal opened doors for speedy results/mockups ofcourse while you could still use inline assembler to even improve some nasty routines.

We usually forget that a lot of people were already connected together before Internet becomes popular. We were using BBS (bulletin board systems) and Usenet.
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and shitty mailing systems like fidonet also running on top of the BBSs.
 
HotShoe

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Informatix said:
We usually forget that a lot of people were already connected together before Internet becomes popular. We were using BBS (bulletin board systems) and Usenet.
Click to expand...

I wrote the SuperComm bbs system back then complete with a Fidonet product ID and SCmail mail tosser that would do Fido style and database style messages. It was the "wild west" of inter-networking. :)

http://ftsc.org/docs/fsc-0063.001

--- Jem
 
giga

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No more CRT's
No more "Turbo" buttons
No more SX,DX models.
No more curly cabled keyboards. (Wait I have one on my colecovison controller) Damn.
No more monochrome screens.
No more ozone smelling equipment
No more immediate PC shutdowns from the power button (Goodbye AT Power supplies).

Finally to kick myself in 1990 I paid $500US for this: (in order to scan a complete page you had to go down each side of the page and line both together)
http://www.overstock.com/Electronics/Mustek-CG-8400T-Color-Hand-Scanner/11818/product.html
 
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sorex

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wow, in color.

I remember that handy scanner in black or maybe grayscale where you had to rescan your page or picture a dozen times
because you either weren't going straight enough or the speed was not equal over the entire scanning which lead to stretched/squeezed or curly texts :)
 
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