Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#381

Post by alephu5 » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #263

What many people thought was that the shift to object-oriented development, object oriented RPC systems (CORBA, "JavaBeans", some stuff in J2EE, OLE, etc) and CASE/modeling tools (UML, Rational Rose etc.) would turn the market into more of an automated component oriented system, with a marketplace of ready made components and more reliable systems with a faster time to market etc. Lots and lots of books sold about OO…

In some ways this is how things have panned out. A SaaS is effectively an elaborate object.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#382

Post by handrous » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

blunte wrote: post #284

It's less about what I expected, but more about what I did not expect. The pace of technology change has accelerated dramatically, the complexity of software has grown beyond imagination, and perhaps correspondingly, the fragility and interdepencency has grown out of control. We (myself included) have become so acclimated to complex software as users that we forget how much work is buried under the surface of a "simp…

What's really weird to me is that is sure seems like non-super-famous non-rockstar teams (so not, like, Carmack & friends) in the 90s could accomplish a hell of a lot with maybe 1/5 as many people as the same thing would take today, and I don't know why that is. Today you give me the spec for a program that a team of a dozen, including the office manager and an intern, did in the 90s in a year, and I'll tell you you'll need 50 people and 18 months, and I won't be wrong (if anything, the time estimate will be way too short). And this isn't just me, I look at team sizes for some products and wow, the WTF factor is high. Or there'd be like a five-person team but they'd write a whole damn GUI toolkit or new language or something crazy like that in the process of building their product, and it wouldn't even take longer than doing that today with a huge team and a ton of off-the-shelf software and all our modern "productivity tools".

I'm not really sure what changed, though.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#383

Post by at_a_remove » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

Dracophoenix wrote: post #371

at_a_remove wrote: post #329

Wow, this was calculated to make me feel old. I actually own some of the more speculative non-fiction books on "Cyberspace," in particular the representational aspect. I did expect some higher levels of abstraction to be present when it comes to working with data, browsing file systems, making connections, and so on. I was not necessarily expecting wireframe graphics, but yes, more abstraction. The closest I have see…

Which books would those be? What exactly was your part in your grey hat days?

I would have to dig through my boxes to find those books. They were rather dense and a little esoteric.

The grey hat stuff consisted of things like breaking out of the restrictive policies of my campus to get onto the Internet proper, tricking the equivalent of the (yet to be dubbed) script kiddies to incriminating themselves, and sort of Robin-Hooding accounts back away from a gent who spent a lot of time hacking accounts of various campuses to cause havoc before tying everything up in a neat dossier for someone else to deal with -- there was eventual deportation involved, if I recall, but that may have been just rumor.

I did rather discreetly inform the department of my major that their choices of passwords and PINs were not as clever as they thought they were.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#384

Post by maestroia » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

This fall marks 41 years since my introduction to computers and programming. In the fall of 1980, I got to start using my jr high's DECWriter II teletype terminal (with greenbar paper!) connected to a PDP-11 40 miles away via a 300 baud breadbox modem. BASIC! FORTRAN! Pascal!

But I digress.

Looking back on the three decades since I graduated college in '90 (with CompSci as one of my 3 majors), there were three things which I saw as big game-changers, and became both a user and ardent evangelist for: the TCP/IP Internet, Linux, and Free/Open Source.

Today, it's easy to think of these as a given. But in the 90's they were not, with many battles fought, the outcome of which was not always clear, not always successful. Competing protocols, OS', applications and platforms, business interia and ignorance (not in the negative sense, but unaware/uneducated), and commercial companies protecting revenue flow ("No one ever got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft/Novell/Oracle").

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#385

Post by zozbot234 » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

handrous wrote: post #382

blunte wrote: post #284

It's less about what I expected, but more about what I did not expect. The pace of technology change has accelerated dramatically, the complexity of software has grown beyond imagination, and perhaps correspondingly, the fragility and interdepencency has grown out of control. We (myself included) have become so acclimated to complex software as users that we forget how much work is buried under the surface of a "simp…

What's really weird to me is that is sure seems like non-super-famous non-rockstar teams (so not, like, Carmack & friends) in the 90s could accomplish a hell of a lot with maybe 1/5 as many people as the same thing would take today, and I don't know why that is. Today you give me the spec for a program that a team of a dozen, including the office manager and an intern, did in the 90s in a year, and I'll tell you you'…

> I'm not really sure what changed, though.

Part of it is that "Agile" development methodologies became popular in the 2000s, and well, let's just say they've turned out to be a lot less 'agile' than was hoped for.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#386

Post by at_a_remove » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #372

at_a_remove wrote: post #329

Wow, this was calculated to make me feel old. I actually own some of the more speculative non-fiction books on "Cyberspace," in particular the representational aspect. I did expect some higher levels of abstraction to be present when it comes to working with data, browsing file systems, making connections, and so on. I was not necessarily expecting wireframe graphics, but yes, more abstraction. The closest I have see…

This certainly takes me back. I was a wee teen in the late '90s, but I too remember so many commercials and movies that represented the Internet as a new paradigm for visually-oriented computing. Not really skeumorphic designs of file folders and desktops and 'My Briefcase' icons. I still think about that GUI Tom Cruise navigates in Minority Report. The film is almost 20 years old, and yet GUI design today seems to b…

Exactly. I don't hate the general concepts or anything, they're obviously important for organizational structure, but the static and uninteresting representations do not take advantage of some of the rich bandwidth of the visual channel. We could see a lot of things about a directory, or at least have them hinted -- a sense of age of files, perhaps ... a collage of some oft-accessed files ... a TF-IDF for a document jutting forward only to be subsumed by a video segment washing over it, and so on. File sizes could be represented on some kind of log-scale.

And you're so painfully spot-on about hiding with GUIs. Microsoft continues to wave the utterly unnecessary 3D Objects in my face, and My Videos, and so on and so forth. One Drive appears to jostle for my attention, but meanwhile I have to do additional work just to see where in a directory tree I am.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#387

Post by specialist » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 5:35 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #263

What many people thought was that the shift to object-oriented development, object oriented RPC systems (CORBA, "JavaBeans", some stuff in J2EE, OLE, etc) and CASE/modeling tools (UML, Rational Rose etc.) would turn the market into more of an automated component oriented system, with a marketplace of ready made components and more reliable systems with a faster time to market etc. Lots and lots of books sold about OO…

re UML & CASE

Yes and:

Executable architectural models & designs.

Round tripping, models to code and back. (aka two-way translation?)

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#388

Post by geocrasher » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 5:40 PM UTC

flyinghamster wrote: post #342

geocrasher wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss genuine differences in hardware. Happy hour discussions about alpha vs sparc vs intel etc. I'm hopeful that diversity will come back around as a thing. THIS. Right now there are three mainstream choices: Win, Linux, Mac And I'm sorry- no matter how diverse your Linux distro is or even what hardware you're running it on (x86 vs ARM etc), it's still just Linux. And again, sorry- Linux just isn't interesting anym…

Haiku OS, maybe? It is under active development. https://www.haiku-os.org/ But a key problem with alternative OSes is that if you want to use them as daily drivers, your software choices may be limited or nonexistent. Haiku, for instance, has a WebKit-based browser, but no Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, or Safari.

I'm more interested in exotic or uncommon hardware than software.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#389

Post by gen3 » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

throwawayzRUU6f wrote: post #262

jasode wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, but I think you are minimizing network effects by simply calling it "easier". The gp is saying the millions choosing the "easier" action is what causes the network effects . E.g. another example that applies to tech-savvy programmers: most developers have the knowledge (or can Google a tutorial) to host their own personal git server but most choose not to . The collective millions choosing not to bother with self-…

it really is much harder to self host than it used to. 90s: ask your ISP for a public IP, register your domain, start Apache and off you go Nowadays: getting a public IP is iffy. All good domain names are taken. Emails from your self-hosted mail server go straight to spam/junk. Fiddling with TLS certificates is close to mandatory. The moment you start your server, you're bombarded by a flood of gratuitous requests, t…

I wasn't part of the "ask your isp" era, but I would say you're painting nowadays a little more bleak then then it really is.

I can grab a cheap vps within minutes from DigitalOcean or OVH, with a public IP included. Both offer images with pre-configured software, and there are ample guides for setting up just about anything. Certbot/Let's Encrypt will literally setup add the generated TLS cert to your nginx config if you ask it to.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#390

Post by ezoe » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

I thought the digital divide will be a serious problem. It is in fact a problem now but not how I thought about it.

I thought, in the future, everybody has a computer so it will be a part of basic literacy. Most of our generation will be obsolete because we can't stand a chance against people who all had computers in their home at their birth.

Then, the smartphone was invented and most people were just satisfied with that. Now there is even less people who know how to use the keyboard than our generation. No matter how hard you try, you can't beat the efficiency of keyboard by palm-size touch screen input device on writing.

In the late 1990s to 2000s, there were so many personal text web sites, public forums and chats in my language, Japanese. Now it's all gone. There is no place in the modern Internet I can enjoy serious text-based communication in Japanese. Because, everyone use the smartphone now and it's so inefficient to write a serious text with it.

I also didn't anticipated the huge rise of SaaS. A software that depends remote server to function. I was the believer of P2P technology in 2000s. I believed future network will work on top of P2P mesh network. It failed for various reasons but mostly too inefficient to scale.

Then I see the rise of cryptocurrency. It's horrible. Nobody really cares about the technology. People relies on SaaS wallet service rather than hosting full node. It's the worst hybrid of server-client and P2P. Inefficient and still has authority. NFT... it doesn't even host data in the blockchain! TITAN... it's not a stablecoin. It's just a ponzi-scheme-coin.

I hate the smartphone. But right now, it's really hard to avoid programming job that doesn't involve the smartphone. Even if I don't directly need to deal with it, it still indirectly support the smartphone, further helping the spread of inefficient input device for the writing.

I lost all hope for the future right now. It will be even more orwellian world. Most of the computation will be done in the server side and our computer is mere thin-client to the server. Everything is censored and regulated. I wouldn't surprise we lost the ability to write freely.