How The 1980s Shaped Modern Programming
We live in a world surrounded by programming. Where did it come from? How did it start? Learn the important history here.
Think of the 1980s and you probably imagine shoulder pads, Porsches, breakfast TV and bulky mobile phones. You might not instantly recall the boom in home computing or the development of modern programming languages. But this was the decade that shaped programming as we know it, and its legacy lives on in many of today’s software and languages…
Home Computers
Home computers in the 1970s were primitive affairs typically assembled from DIY hardware kits. Closed-system consoles like the Atari 2600 provided the only gaming entertainment. The 1980s changed all that with the launch of affordable home computers including the VIC-20 and Sinclair Spectrum. Both were underpinned by BASIC, which used plain-English terms like PRINT and LOAD alongside more technical descriptors such as INKEY$ and PEEK. With magazines publishing complete program scripts that could be typed in from scratch, an entire generation of amateur programmers was born. BASIC lives on in Visual Basic.NET, still one of the world’s most common programming languages.
Windows
Microsoft had been around for a decade when they launched Windows in November 1985, but this GUI operating system transformed Bill Gates’ company into a global behemoth. Windows might have borrowed stylistically from Apple’s Mac OS, but Windows offered far greater compatibility with the personal computers that were launched in astonishing numbers. Even in today’s Android-dominated world, Windows is standard on as many phones and computers as Apple’s Mac OS and iOS combined.
HTML
After spending the 1980s working as a contractor at CERN, a physicist named Tim Berners-Lee began developing a hypertext system for sharing documents. HTML wasn’t completed until 1990 and much of its groundwork occurred in the preceding decade. It’s impossible to overstate HTML’s significance in modern society, and is a 21st century equivalent of BASIC. Millions of people have learned to code through HTML’s plain-English instructions, though WYSIWYG editors provide a degree of automation.
Programming Languages
Many of the programming languages we use today were developed and launched in the 1980s. Foremost among these is C++, which was specifically created to run flexible operations on systems of almost any size. Other breakthroughs during the decade included Perl, long before it became a cornerstone of the LAMP programming stack. Objective-C was launched in 1986 and went on to underpin Apple’s OS X and still forming an active development environment today. Even 1991’s launch of high-level general-purpose language Python followed extensive development throughout the late Eighties.
Mobile phones
Motorola’s 1983 launch of the first mobile telephone began a slow-burning revolution that has transformed our world in parallel with the internet. iOS and Android were unimaginable back when mobiles required brick-sized batteries, and Java has subsequently become the basis for all Android apps. Objective-C’s dominance across Apple phones and tablets is only now challenged by the more powerful Swift language.
Society continues to favor smartphone apps and technology over desktop computers and browsers, and the mobile phone’s development is arguably the greatest technological legacy of the 1980s. Similar to HTML and Windows, it’s hard to imagine a world without it.
Computers represent the dominate method we use to communicate with one another, programming languages have essentially become our languages. We may not speak them fluently, but we use them everyday. HTML is behind the scenes bringing the letters you are reading to you right now. Without programming, we would all be lost. But the exciting perspective is, what’s next? We can only imagine…