Listening to a podcast episode on the evolution of virtualization and cloud computing it occurred to me that the origin of the term ‘full-stack developer’ probably stems from the time when batch processing came into being. Back then computers went through an entire ‘stack of cards’ when handling requests. At least that what I think. Does anyone have another explanation?
1 Like
@Torsten would you mind listing the podcast and perhaps the portion of the video where you heard this, so I may have some more context on the phrase?
2 Likes
Sure, here is the passage: (Unfortunately, it’s not a 100% accurate since it was created by a software program.)
It became clear that the limitations were a liability and so you had companies like IBM researching ways to get around these limitations. Once that way was an approach later called batch processing that dates from the time when programs were represented on physical cards with holes punched in them known as Punch Cards for obvious reasons, so and an early computer,
00:03:24 You’d have a stack of cards representing a single program and you would feed those cards into the computers Hopper which is essentially it’s intake for cards and the computer with analyze the cards which would have instructions on them. They could be there within follow those instructions and produce a result and either print out or create a new punch card or stack of punch cards or later on it would display the results on a monitor IBM developed computers that could accept stacks of cards that represented more than one process. The computer would be able to read out the stacks and complete each process intern so you could feed batches of cards to the computer thus batch processing it cut down on the amount of time people had to spend babysitting a computer or waiting for their turn to run a processed bring them up to work on other stuff but was still a limitation and you were still stuck running just one process at a time use…
1 Like