Today I said goodbye to my co-workers at Salesforce.com. After working as a software developer for something like 43 years, I’ve retired!

Most of my career was with three employers: UBC, PeopleSoft and Salesforce.com. At each of them I’ve had the privilege of working with brilliant and friendly people many of whom have become long-term friends.

I took my first computer course in 1966. I started reading the textbook (“Programming and Coding Digital Computers” by Philip M Sherman – I still have it!) and was hooked before the first class.

My first computer was the IBM 7044 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7040 ) at UBC. It had 32K words (36 bits a word) of memory, was programmed with punched cards (80 characters to a card) and filled a largish room.

My first real job, also at UBC, was programming an IBM 360/67 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_67 ) running the MTS operating system. It had 2 megabytes of memory, a string of hard drives (IBM 2311’s I believe, at about 8 megabytes each), and was programmed and used from a variety of input terminals including video displays. It filled a warehouse-sized room with boxes the size of refrigerators and washing machines.
Now I think my iPhone has more memory and more processing power than that warehouse. But a much worse keyboard.

As a student we would create our programs on those punched cards, hand them in to be run by the operations staff, and got back the results as printed output, usually the next day. Now I can create software on my laptop, test it locally using various programming tools to help, rarely printing anything. (After which I send it to the shared system to be merged and tested with the work of several hundred other developers, and, umm, get back the results hours or days later….)

The user experience has changed so much too. Forty years ago most computer users had to learn obscure commands and codes and enter them via those punched cards or input terminals. Now with graphical displays, mice, touch screens, “intuitive” menu systems, it’s much more approachable. Though still the source of much frustration! (It surprises me, however, how many of my colleagues still prefer using obscure 1970’s incantations, even as they develop software intended to implement a great user interface….)

Some things haven’t changed that much. When I was a graduate student in the early 1970s, the hot topics were programmer productivity (or lack thereof) and software reliability. There have been huge gains in both since those days, but the complexity of the software has more than kept up, so we continue to produce buggy products that take longer than planned to develop.

It’s been a wild ride; I do wonder what another 40 years will bring.