Lately, I was going through the blog of a math professor I took at a community college back when I was in high school. Having gone the path I did in life, I took a look at what his credentials were, and found that he completed a computer science degree back sometime in the 1970s. He had a curmudgeonly and standoffish personality, and his IT skills were nonexistent back when I took him.

It’s fascinating to see the perspectives on computing and how many of the things I learned in my undergraduate were still being taught way back to the 1950s. It also seems like the computer science degree was more intertwined with its electrical engineering fraternal twin.

Although the title of this post is inherently provocative, I’m curious to hear from those of you who did computer science, electrical engineering, or similar technical degrees in decades past. Are there topics or subjects that have phased out over the years that you think leave younger programmers/engineers ill-equipped in the modern day? What common practices were you happy to see thrown in the dumpster and kicked away forever?

The community also seems like it was significantly smaller back then and more interconnected. Was nepotism as prevalent in the technology industry then as it is today?

This is just the start of a discussion, please feel free to share your thoughts!

  • CyborganismEnglish
    5·
    8 months ago

    Things are much simpler now. Even little things. For instance error messages. They used to be cryptic as hell, but these days there is more of an emphasis on communication.

    I don’t know. I worked with old IDEs like Turbo C, Turbo Pascal or some of the earliest versions of Visual Studio and I was able to know from the output where the error occurred from the error message and could work with a debugger to find the true source.

    The only thing more complex is the volume of choice. There are just soooo many ways to do something that picking a way can be daunting. Its led to a situation where you have to hire based on ability to learn rather than ability with a specific toolchain.

    That’s true though. And also how IT evolved into different other fields, line DevOps for example. Now there’s an *Ops for almost everything. The latest bring machine learning. And each have their own million ways to do things with so many certifications.