251–260 of 469 posts
A lot more visible (i.e. on the street) robots. We see robots in manufacturing plants (e.g. cars), but not too many visible when you walk down the street. Of course, they're there, but hidden inside various normal looking objects. Automatic street lights, driverless trains, boom gates for public transport.
I really believed computers would make people smarter, better informed, able to make more rational decisions. They'd understand and trust science more, make better political decisions. We even had a slogan for it: "computers are bicycles for the mind": https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-... I was so naive...
As a 90's kid who grew up online, this was my thought at the time as well. Turns out computers were more like an op-amp for the existing inadequacies of human nature, rather than a bicycle for the mind.
Not quite in the 90's but a bit later I was sure that when Moore's Law would stop we would see the trend move to cores. I wrote an article[1] about this change and how we should all prepare for it :-D If I could tell my young self that as of 2021 we are not talking about kilo- or mega-cores but that my new M1 which I am very excited about is a mere 8, I would have been severely disappointed. [1] https://www.gamasutra…
That's kind of what GPUs became, wasn't it? They do have thousands of cores, just not in the mega range
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdote from a mid-90s grad. I found that in the late 90s/early aughts my friends with the coolest jobs had degrees in something computational but not CS. Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics. They all had to learn to code in school and had background domain knowledge in some specialty. In contrast myself and my CS friends had, well, we had knowledge of Turing machines with infinite tapes. As the…
> In contrast myself and my CS friends had, well, we had knowledge of Turing machines with infinite tapes. Yeah. Going to school for Computer Science is probably the biggest regret in my life. I could have spent that time & money learning something useful/interesting instead, or better yet, not waste my time in University at all.
For me, CS was largely a waste. Most of the real, required-for-job programming skills I learned were self-taught anyway. I just used CS as an on-ramp to industry. Maybe nowadays CS is required for "signalling" but it definitely wasn't in the 90s.
Wish I had done physics or hell even math. Now I'm middle-aged and the only things I "know" relate to this stupid pile of silicon on my desk.
Not quite in the 90's but a bit later I was sure that when Moore's Law would stop we would see the trend move to cores. I wrote an article[1] about this change and how we should all prepare for it :-D If I could tell my young self that as of 2021 we are not talking about kilo- or mega-cores but that my new M1 which I am very excited about is a mere 8, I would have been severely disappointed. [1] https://www.gamasutra…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When it comes to thin clients, a lot of computing does happen via web services these days, albeit mostly video streaming and REST-based applications. Did you envision things a little differently?
I think he probably imagined it being a little thinner. The box on the desk hasn't changed size much. But certainly the majority of "stuff" people do at home now takes place in data centers. And as a percentage of all computing cycles day by day, data centers do effectively all of it.
I relatively painlessly can work both from Windows and Linux - most of what I need is in web browsers and remote systems..
certainly a success of "thin clients" - especially the browser.
Like a number of other commenters mentioned, folks like me who were in STEM majors all had to learn how to code in some form or another, though I don't think I ever took any classes as such. A popular joke then: "what do mechanical engineers do when they graduate?" "they learn to code and become programmers"
In my case, I had a part-time job in a lab writing programs in C++ to get various lab instruments to be remote controllable from a terminal and had to learn on the job how to do it. One of the professors in the lab gave me a copy of "Numerical Recipes in C" to help me with the C++ code I was writing. It didn't help at all!
I was also part of the generation that learned basic programming on a TRS-80 (aka "trash-80") in BASIC, then in HS some Pascal and FORTRAN in an informal computer club. My family never owned a home computer, but the school had a bunch of windowsOS machines curious students could play with.
Looking back now, it seems like I was really primed to be part of one of the first waves of professional programmers, and indeed a number of my friends did go that route. But by the time I graduated from university, I kind of hated coding! Recall that in the 90s there was no stack overflow, no google, no way to see how others might have solved the problem. If you couldn't figure out how to get something to work, you had to just grind away at it no matter how long it took.
At the time, I honestly thought whatever future there might be for professional programming I sure didn't want to be a part of it. And I also didn't think it would take over the world like it did. I left uni and I spent a number of years traveling abroad and teaching ESL before dusting off my coding skills and getting a series of coding jobs in various industries.
I am extraordinarily grateful that I learned "the hard way" how to code, but more than once I wish I had gotten my degree in CS instead of ME.
Then the momentum shriveled up with Perl 6 and it has just become completely irrelevant. Pretty insane trajectory. It's almost as bad as like ColdFusion lol
Calls us fools, but we thought Linux on the desktop would happen. I guess it finally did, in a way, with chromebooks.
Work laptop is a Dell, works fine.