"To predict the future does not mean knowing what will happen. A good futurologist ought to know that the future is what we forgot to imagine whilst we were making plans."
Note: The phrase above is a paraphrase inspired by the line “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” (John Lennon – “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy),” 1980).
Estimated reading time: 3–4 minutes
This technology entered my life before anyone thought to call it “IT.”
In those days, we called it “information technology,” “the computing centre,” “the machine” and sometimes “the listings are coming.” This was not poetry.
It was simply reality: a world in which mistakes were paid for with paper, time and the long stares of the computer operator.
I had the good fortune (and the misfortune) to have lived through the beginning: when computers “knew” nothing, but obliged you to know everything.
I was there when Romania was developing at an astonishing pace, in an era when speed was measured in punched cards, not in downloads.
You will see my story leaping from school to university, then to a prestigious research institute, continuing through computing centres and, later, to serious projects. Life is not divided into chapters by nature.
It flows.
But if you put it online, you must make room for it on the screen: smaller pieces, more frequent pauses. And then a hook to keep the reader captivated after the first paragraph.
I wrote code “for real” until 1992. After that, I left the keyboard, but not the world of IT.
I stayed close: I managed teams, I monitored technologies, I pushed projects forward, I learnt from mistakes and I lived long enough to see how, time and again, the “impossible” first became expensive and then became ordinary.
And then, in 2024, I returned to writing code. In a period when artificial intelligence had ceased to be merely a conference topic and had become a fully-fledged machine. I used it at full power to generate code and I am astonished by the leap in quality: if you formulate your objectives correctly, the generated code is incredibly good — that is to say, correct.
In the 1970s there existed so-called assistant programmers. Most of them were experts at carrying the boxes of cards containing programmes to be run. After the run, they brought back the listings, and if they did not mix them up they were very highly rated.
Now I find myself with an assistant programmer who writes code better than I do, does not drink coffee and does not go out for a cigarette. He is extremely polite and you can ask him almost anything. He gives me the code I have asked for, and I run it. You might say the roles have been reversed, but that is not quite so.
When I was young, producing an error-free programme on the first attempt required obsession. Now, you must articulate clearly what you want the programme to do. The difference is almost philosophical.
If you are young and work in IT, you may find it amusing how manual everything once was.
If you too lived through the era of listings and punched cards, your joints may ache a little just from reading this.
Whoever you are, I hope that one thing remains constant: curiosity. Of all the technologies I have mastered, this has proved the most enduring: a human being who asks “why?”