111–120 of 469 posts
Personal identification via the internet would be more streamlined - basically government backed digital is cards.
Windows would rule - more or less.
Usenet and IRC would be things.
The big issue was not understanding the importance of ads. Or the impact. We imagined the web would oriented towards machines talking to machines.
But machines don’t consume ads. So APIs are second class citizens.
We also expected a lot more offshoring.
And then we got things that were "good enough" at everything that anybody wanted a PC to do, and we went past that to silly stuff that very few people wanted a computer to do, like CueCat.
And everywhere you looked, there were new things happening. The internet. The web. MUDs. People were just trying things, and just throwing the results out there for the world to look at.
I just kind of expected more and better to keep coming. I didn't see PS/2 and IBM trying to close the ecosystem. I didn't see Windows taking over the world and then Microsoft trying to close the (web) ecosystem. I didn't see the Facebook/Twitter/Youtube silos taking over. I didn't see cancel culture taking over the diversity. I didn't see hostility, nastiness, and hatred taking over the openness and acceptance that used to be there.
Computers failed to create a space dominated by "the better angels of our nature". We not only expected it to, we tasted it. We expected it because it was what we experienced. And then it got overrun by all the worse parts of human nature that we wanted to get away from. Turns out that making people act better takes more than technology.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Robot/bot can mean many things, but typically means a humanoid object. I suppose controlling street lights used to be an entirely human job, but when the automated version of it looks nothing like a human, is it really a robot? Chat bots lack a physical similarity to the human body, but in text mode communications do resemble human activity.
Skynet won't send terminators. It'll use invisible surveillance, and use automated control systems to gradually increase accident rates and pollute the air, water, and food supplies just enough so that death rates exceed birth rates. Skynet can afford to be patient.
Most people theorize that's it's due to access to birth control and education, but what if it's a long ploy by someone to reduce human population?
I guess I count as a 90s programmer? I did technically write programs in the 90s. I thought Java applets (those things you'd embed in a webpage) were hot stuff that would completely reshape the Web someday, but they managed to effectively die before the proprietary Flash. I thought Java as a server language was doomed for performance reasons, but that turned out to be just fine. Basically I completely misunderstood w…
We wouldn’t make applications. Rather we’d deliver components which could interoperate via a binary contract. Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application. I suppose that pieces of this became true with the proliferation and adoption of open source. Rather than a binary protocol, HTTP came out on top. SharePoint brought us WebParts which tried to put the power in the hands of busin…
COM still underlies an abhorrent amount of the Windows architecture.
By isolation I don't mean lack of socialization of course. There was plenty of socializing back then. But the people I met on Usenet, BBS, IRC and phpBB forums were people like me. We worked on tech projects, we talked tech, we had our specific jargon and subculture.
I distinctly remember when people asked me what I wanted to do back then, I'd make up some lie, but knew that my future would be living in a single room with no social interaction but with my online friends. (I did not think this to be bad at all, this was my idea of a good life).
I thought tech would evolve to make the internet more into an alternate reality, more separate from the real world. Maybe I was reading too much cyberpunk sci-fi.
In any case, I certainly did not anticipate social media, dating apps and the digitization of traditional brick and mortar businesses. And to be honest, I'm not sure we wouldn't be better off without them.
It seems there aren't that many "pure internet" projects out there. IRC replacements are all tailored for the workplace and real life interaction (maybe except for discord?). It still feels very strange to me that communication platforms would ask your for your real name (especially when, at this point, there's more "reputation" or "social credit" or whatever you'd like to call it attached to my online persona as to my real world one).
Crypto is perhaps the last bastion of such an autarkic technology (i.e. by netizens for netizens) but even that is slowly moving toward real world asset tokenization and institutional integration.
A lot fewer ads. A lot more paid services. Personal identification via the internet would be more streamlined - basically government backed digital is cards. Windows would rule - more or less. Usenet and IRC would be things. The big issue was not understanding the importance of ads. Or the impact. We imagined the web would oriented towards machines talking to machines. But machines don’t consume ads. So APIs are seco…
This just gave me the most wonderful bad idea ever.
We wouldn’t make applications. Rather we’d deliver components which could interoperate via a binary contract. Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application. I suppose that pieces of this became true with the proliferation and adoption of open source. Rather than a binary protocol, HTTP came out on top. SharePoint brought us WebParts which tried to put the power in the hands of busin…
This is how .net got it's crappy generic name. Back in it's early days it (and SOAP) was sold as the glue that would stitch all this together, just add a web reference and you'd have all this functionality in your project. It was incredibly disappointing to get through all this marketing and eventually realize it was just an MS version of java. Enterprise java beans, CORBA, COM and probably some others were also efforts in this direction. These days it's REST and microservices.
I though VB would grow and mature with building UIs and backing with more robust code, but it just kind of petered out.
If anything iOS storyboards attempted to bring that idea back.
I did not see infrastructure as code being a thing.