Anyone who has ever had to maintain old code will tell you that this more civilized age is right now and that the past was a dark and terrible time.
Seriously, there were no standards, there was barely any documentation even in large organizations and people did things all the time that would get you fired on the spot today. Sure, you had the occasional wunderkind performing amazing feats on hardware that had no business of running these things, but this was not the norm.
I didn’t have to maintain it, actually I haven’t ever worked as a programmer. But I’ve patched a few FOSS things abandoned around 15-25 years before that to work as a hobby activity, some kind of digital archeology.
I think people also do things now for which they’d be fired on the spot 20 years ago. Everything changes.
I suspect what you call “no standards” means in fact “different standards”, but that’s just a cultural difference. Some project from 1995 may use “Hungarian notation” in variable names, well, that was normal then.
That adequate version control and documentation are, eh, a bit more of a norm now, - yes.
Anyone who has ever had to maintain old code will tell you that this more civilized age is right now and that the past was a dark and terrible time.
Seriously, there were no standards, there was barely any documentation even in large organizations and people did things all the time that would get you fired on the spot today. Sure, you had the occasional wunderkind performing amazing feats on hardware that had no business of running these things, but this was not the norm.
I didn’t have to maintain it, actually I haven’t ever worked as a programmer. But I’ve patched a few FOSS things abandoned around 15-25 years before that to work as a hobby activity, some kind of digital archeology.
I think people also do things now for which they’d be fired on the spot 20 years ago. Everything changes.
I suspect what you call “no standards” means in fact “different standards”, but that’s just a cultural difference. Some project from 1995 may use “Hungarian notation” in variable names, well, that was normal then.
That adequate version control and documentation are, eh, a bit more of a norm now, - yes.