CODE: 15 Years Ago

In this next installment of the 30 Years of CODE Group” celebration articles, we've now reached the halfway point. I'm looking back 15 years to roughly 2008 give or take a year). I'm approaching a time that start to perceive as modern development.Yes, alot has changed especially over the last year or two), but a lot of things we now take for granted started about 15 years ago.

- Margus Egger

The “Cloud” was in its infancy (but already there). .NET Core wasn’t quite a thing yet, but as we started developing Cloud apps, the early building blocks of Microsoft’s re-imagined .NET ecosystem were being put into place. Web development was already mainstream. Mobile development wasn’t quite there yet but it was starting. Except for Artificial Intelligence, a lot of the things we’re doing as developers today were already in place (although in different forms). But before I get ahead of myself, let’s survey the overall landscape of software development and the technologies we used at the time.

Operating Systems

For developers, the platform the code runs on is where it all starts, so let’s take a look at the operating systems in use 15 years ago. In the last issue’s article that looked 20 years back, I talked about Windows XP. Surprisingly, Windows XP was still a very important platform in 2008. Admittedly, Windows XP was a very good operating system for its time, but it also had serious shortcomings when it came to security. This was a problem Windows Vista attempted to fix as one of its key themes, another being better use of dedicated graphics hardware. As we came to find out, users didn’t want to jump through the hoops required to have a secure operating system. They just didn’t want anything bad to happen to them, while still happily running on Administrator accounts, with their machine’s defenses taking a back seat. As a result, Windows Vista was one of the least liked Windows operating systems up to that point, probably only topped by Windows 8, half a decade later.