* * * * *
                                        
                        Programming, up hill, both ways
                                        
> People would come to us with a **problem,** and we would figure out a
> solution. We couldn't just search the web **because the web was still being
> written.** And you couldn't just punt a hard question to the engineer in
> the desk next to you. Why? Because you were sitting alone in a utility
> closet packed with floppy disks and old tape drives.
> 

“I'm a XXXXX­ XX webmaster [1]”

Ah, this takes me back. I got my first computer back in 1984, and if I wanted
to know anything about it I was on my own. Google didn't exist (the public
Internet didn't exist at the time). I didn't have anyone I could ask about
computer related things. I did have books and magazines. So between
experimentation and learning to read between the lines, I picked up
programming.

So when it came time to write a metasearch engine [2], there were no
tutorials. There were no open source metasearch engines to download and use.
There was only the problem of writing a metasearch engine, in a language I
didn't even know [3] (and which itself was less than a year old at the time).

Fun times.

So I always found it odd when people would go online asking for tutorials,
especially for writing metasearch engines (and yes, that did happen back
then). So when something like testing a negative [4] comes up, and I can't
convince the Powers That Be that it's never a good idea to prove a negative,
I can't just look up some tutorial on proving negatives—I just have to figure
it out on my own [5].

[1] https://justinjackson.ca/webmaster/
[2] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/
[3] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp1.html
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2021/06/07.3
[5] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2021/07/29.1

Email author at sean@conman.org

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