Old Days
Old Days
[Cueball and Hairbun are standing together and Cueball is talking to her.] Cueball: What were things like in the old days? Cueball: I hear that you had to ... compile things for different processors? Hairbun: Yeah
[Same setting in a slimmer panel, now Hairbun is replying.] Hairbun: To compile your code, you had to mail it to IBM. Hairbun: It took 4-6 weeks.
[Close-up of Hairbun from the waist up.] Hairbun: Before garbage collection, data would pile up until the computer got full and you had to throw it away.
[Same setting as in the first panel with Hairbun gesturing toward Cueball raising one hand  palm up.] Hairbun: Early compilers could handle code fine, but comments had to be written in assembly.
[In a frame-less panel Hairbun is seen from the front, with both arms out to the side with both hands held palm up.] Hairbun: C could only be written on punch cards.You had to pick a compact font, or you'd only fit a few characters per card.
[Exactly the same setting as the first panel, but with Hairbun doing the talking.] Hairbun: C++ was big because it supported floppy disks. Hairbun: It still punched holes in them, but it was a start. Cueball: Wow.

This comic is showing a conversation between (young) Cueball and (old) Hairbun about computer programming in the past, specifically the compilers . Cueball, having a faint idea of just how difficult and byzantine programming was "in the old days", asks Hairbun to enlighten him on the specifics. Hairbun promptly seizes the opportunity to screw with his head. This later became a series when 2324: Old Days 2 was released more than 3 and a half years later. While her initial agreement that code needed to be compiled for multiple architectures is correct, Hairbun's claims rapidly grow ridiculous.
Hairbun tells Cueball a tall tale about how hard it was back in the old days , making it sound like some of the programming languages used today (C, C++) were written on punch cards and that you had to ship your code in the mail to a computer company ( IBM in this case) to compile your code, which would take from four to six weeks. If there was a simple error, you would have to ship it again for another compilation.
This is factually incorrect, but is plausible to those who do not have the knowledge or context to challenge it, similar to a Snipe hunt , or several other cultural myths told about things like the Tooth Fairy . It is clear from Cueball's final Wow that he falls for it. She then continues to explain more and more implausible so-called facts from the the olden days.
What she says is true in that it was tough and slow to program on punch cards, which were actually used for an extended period of time. However, there is very little in the rest of Hairbun's story that  accurate, except that it was a big deal when the floppy disk was invented. The comment about punching holes in floppy disks is true. However, the nature and purpose of the holes punched this way was dramatically different than in punch cards. 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks had holes or notches in them to indicate the data capacity and it was common to punch additional holes into cheaper, lower capacity floppy disks to trick the computer into writing more data on them than specified by the manufacturer. With punchcards on the other hand, the holes themselves encoded the data so punching them was itself the act of programming. It is unclear if this was a coincidence, or intentionally included as a humorous aside to the readers who know the history as a misinterpreted truth in a sea of falsehoods.
In the title text, Hairbun continues her musings on the old compiler days, stating that there was a lot of drama in those days . Specifically she references Reflections on Trusting Trust a famous 1984 paper by UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson in which he described a way to hide a virtually undetectable backdoor in the UNIX login code via a second backdoor in the C compiler. Using the technique in his paper, it would be impossible to discover the hacked login by examining the official source code for either the login or the compiler itself.  Ken Thompson may have actually included this backdoor in early versions of UNIX, undiscovered. Ken Thompson's paper demonstrated that it was functionally impossible to prove that any piece of software was fully trustworthy.
Hairbun claims that one of the dramas she refers to was that people tried to force Ken Thompson to retire, so everyone could stop being so paranoid about compilers.  In reality, any coder who created the first version of a compiler (or a similar critical component) could inject a similar backdoor into software, so it would be false safety. Even if no one else had thought of this, then Thompson's paper was there for any future hacker to see. Though the problem was (claimed to be) solved in David A. Wheeler 's Ph.D dissertation " Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) ".
[Cueball and Hairbun are standing together and Cueball is talking to her.] Cueball: What were things like in the old days? Cueball: I hear that you had to ... compile things for different processors? Hairbun: Yeah
[Same setting in a slimmer panel, now Hairbun is replying.] Hairbun: To compile your code, you had to mail it to IBM. Hairbun: It took 4-6 weeks.
[Close-up of Hairbun from the waist up.] Hairbun: Before garbage collection, data would pile up until the computer got full and you had to throw it away.
[Same setting as in the first panel with Hairbun gesturing toward Cueball raising one hand  palm up.] Hairbun: Early compilers could handle code fine, but comments had to be written in assembly.
[In a frame-less panel Hairbun is seen from the front, with both arms out to the side with both hands held palm up.] Hairbun: C could only be written on punch cards.You had to pick a compact font, or you'd only fit a few characters per card.
[Exactly the same setting as the first panel, but with Hairbun doing the talking.] Hairbun: C++ was big because it supported floppy disks. Hairbun: It still punched holes in them, but it was a start. Cueball: Wow.
