WED Fan's Journal: History of Microsoft Programming Environments

Rico Mariani has posted a very interesting and excellent blog entry that is essentially a history of Microsoft programming languages and environments. In it, I learned that C# is actually a recycled name.

So where am I? Ah yes, 1988. The project I'd been hired to work on was cancelled after a few months (I expect I'm in good company on that score), that project by the way was a cute variant on the C language designed for incremental compilation - it was called, cough, C#. Strangely, through the lens of 2009, it looks remarkably like what you would get if you tried to make C.Net.

I must have blocked some traumatic memories because he reminds me about working in some very tight memory space.

Now the thing about having only 640k of memory and trying to have an IDE is that you can't actually expect the thing to be loaded and running while you're doing something like a build, or debugging, or basically anything other than editing really because you simply don't have the memory.

He tries not to drop names, but I remember working with the Borland products, Power C, and dabbling in Modula-2 in my off-time.

For those of you that can't stand the old, smelly, bearded guy, that drops by your cube to tell you about programming with punch cards (guilty), this may not be the post for you.