you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 16 points 5 months ago* (7 children)

Wow, coding on the worst physical topology/topography for the kind of input you need to perform.

A programmer needs to type fast, navigate the cursor rapidly and with easily attained precision, and needs the information displayed on a large screen so that they don’t go blind working on the code. This machine is a friggin nightmare.

  • source
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    you'd think so as i did, yet people wanted to do it on their blackberry's back when i did front line tech support.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    Wanted to, but how many ppl actually did and were productive?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (4 children)

    it was my job back then to enable them as much as possible, so i looked for their perforce submits for follow up and every single one of them did.

    most of them did it while on ultra long flights to korea/japan/singapore/tiawan/isreal from san francisco too.... on a blackberry. 🤷‍♂️

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    That’s pretty cool. I will say that a little productivity is better than none.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    that was the logic that most of them used and i get it a little bit if you're on 20+ hour flight when laptop batteries lasted less than 2 hours back then, but the thought of writing code in one of these makes my hand hurt:

    old skool

    i supposed it wasn't so bad for the python or ruby guys, but they were in the minority at the time. most were writing in java and that seems painful with all of the non-romantic characters that it requires wo an ide; atleast this lini device has full keyboard w curly braces.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I had to manage with one of these things:

    At least it ran Linux. The one thing the Zaurus had going for it though? Completely readable in sunlight. It was amazing at the time.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    at least w linux, there's a chance you could use and ide -- even if it's only vim or emacs. lol

    the blackberry guys were literally just using a text editor. it ever ceased to be amazed at the level of dedication those people had to their jobs.

  • source
  • parent