Do you remember "dBase" ??

[Howardlong]

Thank you ALL again.... for your myriad of interesting & very varied comments !
The main 'upshot' being that originally, things were a lot simpler, and simply worked !
And using MINISCULE resources, on the most basic of systems. Of course, 'we' need to
'progress', and expand/diversify from the 'old', as depicted in many of these responses.
However, even today, we should keep the Adage going...  "K.I.S.S." (Keep It Simple Stupid).
We seem to keep 'Reinventing-the-wheel', though in many languages 

Back around 1990+/- a single individual could know everything they needed to know in the PC arena from cabling up a LAN and upgrading RAM to programming Clipper and Turbo C. They’d probably have some Novell Netware experience in there too.

Nowadays it’s simply impossible for an individual to know their way completely around a single database product such as SQL Server to the same level of depth and broadness we understood the need-to-know PC product space back then.

Regrettably this has led to pigeon holing of roles with limited exposure to technologies outside an individual’s area, particularly in larger companies.

So,e things have improved, though. The first production large sized database I worked on in 1992 was just under 1GB and it took an hoir to backup, and we pretty much had to have users off the system as it was so slow due to disk spindle contention. I can easily back up a 1TB database in that time now, with normal user online operations, thanks to tiered and multi spindle SAN storage.

I do ask myself whether the 1TB database gives a 1000 times better system than the 1GB one we rolled 25 years ago, and the answer is definitely not. The same online performance problems pervade for example, and there’s an extra middle tier or two in there. Developers are so abstracted now from what’s going on under the hood that fixing these problems is that much harder. The end users are definitely not 1000 times more productive.

While you could find developers who could code reasonable SQL and procedural stuff 25 years ago, it wasn’t common. It’s even less common now with expertise being pigeon holed and all the abstraction going on. You now need both a code developer and a development DBA, or more usually fix/hack that pesky database stuff after all the application code’s been designed written.

[shawty]

Thank you ALL again.... for your myriad of interesting & very varied comments !
The main 'upshot' being that originally, things were a lot simpler, and simply worked !
And using MINISCULE resources, on the most basic of systems. Of course, 'we' need to
'progress', and expand/diversify from the 'old', as depicted in many of these responses.
However, even today, we should keep the Adage going...  "K.I.S.S." (Keep It Simple Stupid).
We seem to keep 'Reinventing-the-wheel', though in many languages 

Arguably, that's one of the big draws of SQLite for me.  It's a single file database, much like dBase was, and it's very low on resources, it's app driven (All you need is a DLL or linked library) there is no server, so you can compile it direct into your app, and it's ridiculously simple to use.

In my mind, SQLite is more or less, dBase in it's modern form I guess :-)

[bd139]

It’s also a rather nice bit of engineering as a whole.

I use the author’s (Richard Hipp) VCS as well (fossil)

[DimitriP]

The end users are definitely not 1000 times more productive.

No, but since "then", marketing and croud manipulation in general has become about 1000 times more effective.
As a result, systems can become specialized enough that you need specific "experts" for each one.
It churns the marketing machine, the certification machine, the job market and to some extent the educational system at the university level.
In turn the specialized experts convolute the specialized systems even more feeding the cycle.
So we have IT network experts that can't tell when the drive array has a problem and OS experts that can't tell when the network switch is acting up and the examples can probably go on forever.

"Computer" related fields are not the only ones suffering from this disease.
That's why now we have flebotomists , and automotive technicians with "Brakes" certification
It boils down to having enough specialization and enough of those specilazied "bodies" so there are more bodies to hire.
In real life you better know as much of everything as you can (if you are into that sort of thing).

When  asked to draw seven perpendicular lines,  post the meeting on youtube.
Come to think of it, somone needs to start sending recorded interviews to wikileaks