Nah, those were different times when bits and bytes mattered. Everything was written in assembly/,machine code. Mel's tricks were just how things were done back then. There was no repo, code didn't need to be maintained or added onto. The lifecycle of software was much much shorter.
> Nah, those were different times when bits and bytes mattered.
Obviously not. We're talking about mundane business software.
Also the "optimizing compiler" that couldn't reach such levels of "perfection" wouldn't be a thing if this would really matter.
> Mel's tricks were just how things were done back then.
Obviously not. Otherwise there wouldn't be any point in this story.
It points out, with a lot emphasis, how exceptional Mel's code was!
> There was no repo, code didn't need to be maintained or added onto.
VCS dates back quite some time…
Also maintaining code was of course not any less important for a company as it is today. Simply as companies back than also relayed on their software to operate.
> The lifecycle of software was much much shorter.
No, of course not, as nobody would throw away some very expensive asset for no reason.
If anything, lifecycles of software were much longer than today (when you can deploy changes every few minutes if you please). Stuff written in the 70's is still running on some mainframes today!
As changing software was much more dangerous with much higher risk of breakage, less experts around, and everything much more difficult in general, it was more usual to try to not touch an already running system. (Maybe you even heard some quite similar proverb coined back than ;-)).
But "not touching" it does not work, as there is only one truly constant thing: Change.
>IBM's OS/360 IEBUPDTE software update tool dates back to 1962, arguably a precursor to version control system tools. A full system designed for source code control was started in 1972, Source Code Control System for the same system (OS/360).
The events of the story predate the precursors of VCSs by two years, and the earliest true VCS by a decade.
My guess is that the earliest Code Versioning systems were completely manual, "Duplicate your tape, mark it 1.2, store it in drawer". And these manual processes were brought to and duplicated on computers when code began to be stored on the computers themselves, instead of through cards and paper tape.
Certainly if you were a business, you had an extreme business interest in keeping your "known good" stack of cards in a place, and every revision in code required a new stack of cards.
"Hey, the machine just ate 10 cards from the payroll software, can we get duplicates made?"
"No, those were the originals, guess we're SOL no one gets paid" never happened.
Most likely "Ok, version 1.34 of the payroll software that was updated last week? Cards 1032 to 1042? Duplicate cards will be up to you within the hour"
or "We have to revert to the old payroll processing software, can you create a new fresh copy of 1.33, 1.34 has some bugs and we need to get tonights run in?"
I can't find any definitive info when this computer got actually manufactured ("announced in 1960" doesn't mean strictly the same). But this was the time Mel was met first time by the author.
The story plays likely some time thereafter.
I guess some significant time, because it takes time even for a genius to become familiar enough with a machine to do all this kind of trickery described in the story.
I think it may make sense to assume even some years passed between when the author met Mel the first time and Mel's departure form said company.
So I wouldn't be even so much off with the VCS statement—which actually doesn't state any relation between the usage of VCS and the story. I've only said that "VCS dates back quite some time". Which is obviously true. ;-)
But, all this actually doesn't matter.
The more important statement was the following. Which is a direct reply to "code didn't need to be maintained", which is in my opinion just not true.
I did not say VCS was used back than for that purpose.
I guess they preferred more a sort of solid hard copy. :-)
