computer history – Kev's Development Toolbox

July 28, 2023July 28, 2023

What tech stack was I working with in May 2003?

Clearing out some stuff in the home office I came across this CD-ROM of tech tools, products and libraries that I was using at work at this time:

JBoss – the open source Java EE app server of choice at this time
Xerces – Java XML Parsing library (DOM)
Amazon WS Kit – not sure what this was, maybe an SDK for AWS?
Apache – HTTP web server
Caucho Resin – no longer around – if I remember right this was an optimized Servlet runtime
EJ Tech Profiler – I think this was a competitor to JProfiler?
Homesite – HTML editor
IBM WS Kit – SDK for Java XML webservices
IntelliJ – still around today. At the time I don’t think it was as popular as Eclipse or Netbeans, but is probably the best. Java IDE around today

Interesting look back at Java versions in use at the time:

Java JDK 1.4 (at the time, also called Java 2 after JDK version 1.2, abbreviated as J2SE)
Java EE 1.2 and 1.3 – abbreviated to J2EE – the days when J2EE was actually called J2EE before dropping the 2 and just becoming Java EE after Java EE 5 was released in 2006)

January 22, 2023January 22, 2023

Apple and Computer History Museum release source code for the Apple Lisa

The Apple Lisa is probably a great example of tech that was too soon, it was ahead of it’s day and failed to be successful. It did pave the way for the release of the Apple Macintosh however. The Computer History Museum have obtained the source for the Lisa from Apple and you can download it from CHM’s site here.

December 22, 2020December 22, 2020

New BBS documentary: Back to the BBS part 1

There is a new documentary about BBSes posted to YouTube this week, ‘Back to the BBS’. Rather than focusing on the history of the BBS such as Jason Scott’s awesome ‘BBS The Documentary’, this one looks at using BBSes in the current time, and why there is an increasing interest in using BBSes today.

Part 1 is 43 minutes and walks through using telnet based BBSes today, and includes a number of interviews with people looking back at when BBSes were in their height of popularity, and also interviews a number of Sysops of current day active BBSes and their users.

November 18, 2020February 10, 2021

Java Developer’s Journal Resource CD from 2004

I’ve got some weird stuff on my office bookshelf. While looking for something else, I came across this CD from 2004 which claims to have every issue of JDJ published, up until 2004. That can’t be that may so far, but apparently there was 85 issues up until this point.

“The Complete Works”!

Time to crack out the USB CD drive and see exactly what’s on this CD. I’ll post a follow up later with some examples what’s on the CD!