Today was my first day at a new job, and this morning while I was getting ready my wife asked me, "What did you want to be when you were seven?" When I thought about it, the thing that hit me was that in 1977 the job of software engineer didn't exist. There was probably a few people working in assembly back then, but the idea that I would be spending my day interacting with a build stack that included maven, jenkins, nexus and a container and libraries that had tomcat, camel, activeMQ, spring, junit, etc etc etc. And it all running on virtual hardware! As a seven year old that stuff didn't exist.

If I recall correctly I think I wanted to be a fighter pilot or astronaut back when I was seven. Both noble professions, but one was highly competitive in Australia due to its small military and the latter non-existent as the only space programs have been in the US, Russia and Europe over the last thirty years or so and even those have not had much in the way of people missions.

Sometimes I feel like the steam engineers of the industrial revolution. Some of them made history and advanced the technology in large bounds, but most of them kept some non-descript industrial operation running; far more efficiently than they could have done prior to steam, but they are largely unnoticed and they most likely told their children that when they were seven the profession of a Steam Engineer did not even exist.

Anecdotal I know, but sometimes it takes a little epiphany like that to drive home just how much the world has changed in the last thirty years.

More Reading on History

• History
• Historical Documents from DFAT
• Percy Spender and the Pacific Pact
• Without The Trappings Of Court
• Toward The Better Country
• The Problem And Fun of History
• The Task of an Historian
• Patent Application History
• First Prime Minister of Australia
• Options Trading in 1298
• Book Review: Genghis Khan