The advancement of computer programming and personal computer technology

If you really know one programming language, you can learn others too. The most important part is to understand the concept of computer programming. All languages are built on similar type of instructions, some of them require a semicolon at the end of the line, others don’t. Some of them use curly braces {} to group instructions, others use indentation.

All of them allow you to make decisions, usually with the keyword IF, assign values to variables with =, read the keyboard, write to the screen, read and write the disk, and the network. Loop through items with FOR, FOREACH, and WHILE, address array elements with [1]. You only have to learn a few English words and the syntax to use them.

The internet, and especially Stack Overflow, is a great resource to find sample code that does what you need. Avoid assembling your program by copy-pasting code from the internet. Try to understand the examples, and write your own lines to be able to really understand and maintain it.

Today’s AI assistants (copilots) can quickly assemble programs together based on requests (prompts) from the developer, using multiple sources. If you ask an AI assistant to write most of the code in your applications, those will look like as each function was written by different people with different programming styles. Even if it works, the danger is, that it can be hard to understand and maintain, and there will be nobody in the team who really owns the code. The entire brand new application can look like being abandoned by all developers on the first day of testing. AI is a great tool to write the boylerplate code, that you would copy from the internet anyway, but write the logic yourself to really understand it.

The list below shows the advancement of personal computer technology. I have added the usual hardware specifications, the most popular operating systems, and important programming languages. The dates are not when the technology was announced, but when the average user started to use it.

1981

IBM Mainframe, magnetic tape and large format magnetic disk storage

  • Fortran

Homemade personal computer with no permanent storage

  • Basic

“Midrange” computer (16 KB solid state or magnetic-core RAM, large format magnetic disk storage )

  • Basic

1984

ZX 81 (3.25 MHz processor, first 1 KB, later 16 KB RAM, compact audio cassette storage)

ZX Spectrum (3.5 MHz processor, 16 KB RAM, compact audio cassette storage)

Commodore 64 (1 MHz processor, 64 KB RAM, 5.4″ floppy disk)

  • Basic for data processing
  • Simon Basic for graphical user interface

IBM PC ( 4.7 MHz processor, first 128 KB, later 256 KB RAM, 5.4″ floppy disk, later 10 or 20 MB 5.4″ hard drive )

DOS

  • dBase
  • Clipper
  • FoxPro

1987

IBM XT ( 4.7-12 MHz processor, 16 MB RAM)

DOS

  • Lotus 123 spreadsheet for engineering calculations
  • LISP for AutoCAD menus

1994

IBM 386 ( 40 MHz processor, 256 MB RAM)

DOS, Windows 3.1

  • FoxPro
  • Visual FoxPro
  • Visual Basic
  • SQL

1998

IBM clone ( 40 MHz processor, 256 MB RAM)

Windows 95

  • PowerBuilder
  • Jaguar for web application server
  • ASP for web UI
  • SQL databases

2000

IBM clone ( 150 MHz processor, 512 MB RAM)

Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000

  • ASP for web UI
  • Visual Basic
  • SQL databases

Linux Debian

  • Bash

2003

( 1 GHz processor, first 1 GB, later 4 GB RAM)

Windows Server 2003

  • C#
  • C++
  • Java
  • SQL databases

2008

( 1 GHz processor, first 4 G, later 32 GB RAM)

Windows Server 2008

2015

Windows 7 laptop (2 GHz processor, 6 GB RAM, 500 GB HD)

Windows Server 2012 R2 virtual machines in the cloud ( 2 GHz processor, 4 – 32 GB RAM)

  • PowerShell

Linux RedHat 7 ( virtual machines in the cloud 2 GHz processor, 4 – 32 GB RAM)

  • Bash

MacBook Pro laptop (2.5 GHz i7 processor, 16 GB RAM, 1TB SSD storage)

  • Packer
  • Terraform
  • Ruby
  • PowerShell ( on Windows 10 virtual machine )
  • Chef
  • ServerSpec
  • InSpec
  • Chocolatey

2019

MacBook Pro 15″ (5 GHz i9 processor, 32 GB RAM, 1TB SSD storage)

  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Golang

2025

MacBook Pro 16″ (4.51 Ghz Apple M4 Max processor, 36 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD storage)

  • C#
  • TypeScript
  • React, Remix (React Router)
  • Python
  • PostgreSQL
  • MSSQL
  • AWS Workspaces (VDI instance) for Windows 10 virtual machine

Install Windows from a USB drive

Modern computers don’t have DVD drives anymore. To install Windows on a new system you need to place the Windows installation media on a bootable USB drive. To prepare the bootable USB drive you need a working computer with Windows.

Create the bootable USB media

Install Windows

  • Restart the computer and enter into the BIOS settings
    • On Toshiba laptops press the F2 key while the Toshiba logo is shown
  • Set the USB drive as the first item in the boot order and save the new BIOS settings
  • When the computer boots from the USB drive follow the instructions to install the Operating system
  • When the computer automatically reboots during the OS installation, remove the USB drive to let the machine boot from the hard drive and complete the Windows configuration.

Microsoft SQL Server clients

To connect to an MSSQL database

on Macintosh

on Windows

Connect the Portainer Server to an existing Portainer Agent

With Portainer we can monitor multiple Docker Swarms from one Portainer Server. To connect an existing Portainer server to an agent

Configure the Agent

  • For security reasons, by default, the Portainer Agent only accepts connection from the first Portainer Server it encounters. To enable the Portainer Agent to connect to multiple Portainer Servers, add the AGENT_SECRET environment variable to the docker-compose.yml file of the Agent. This is necessary if you launch a Portainer Server on the Docker host and connect to the local Agent to test it. Without specifying the AGENT_SECRET, another Portainer Server cannot connect to the same agent.
  • Publish the Agent port on the host network
    environment:
      # REQUIRED: Should be equal to the service name prefixed by "tasks." when
      # deployed inside an overlay network
      AGENT_CLUSTER_ADDR: tasks.agent
      # AGENT_PORT: 9001
      # LOG_LEVEL: debug
      AGENT_SECRET: my_secret_token
    ports:
      - target: 9001
        published: 9001
        protocol: tcp
        mode: host

Configure the Server

  • Add the AGENT_SECRET environment variable to the docker-compose.yml file of the Server
    environment:
      AGENT_SECRET: my_secret_token

Add the endpoint to the Portainer Server

  • Log into the Portainer Server
  • Navigate to the Endpoints page
  • Click the Add Endpoint button
  • Select the Agent endpoint type
  • Enter the IP address and the port number ( by default 9001 ) of the Portainer Agent

Portainer troubleshooting

The Portainer server restarts every 5 minutes before the admin account is created

When the Portainer server starts, waits 5 minutes for a user to create the admin account. If no account created in the first 5 minutes, the server stops with error code 1, message:

No administrator account was created after 5 min. Shutting down the Portainer instance for security reasons.

To keep the Portainer server running, with your web browser navigate to the web UI on port 9000 and enter a password for the admin account.

Troubleshoot stopped containers

The stopped Docker containers are still available for troubleshooting. You can create an image of them and run them as new containers to inspect the log files and execute commands in them.

View the standard output of the failed container

docker logs MY_CONTAINER_ID

Run a failing container with a Bash terminal

If a container exists with an error within a few seconds, it can be beneficial to start a terminal window in it to view the log files and execute commands. We will override the entry point of the container to start a Bash terminal.

Create an image of the stopped container

docker commit MY_STOPPED_CONTAINER_ID MY_NEW_IMAGE NAME

Run the saved image as a new container and start a Bash terminal instead of the original entry point 

docker run -it --entrypoint bash MY_NEW_IMAGE_NAME