81–90 of 469 posts
Less of a dystopian wealth-inequality driving nightmare for one thing.
Right? Tech was going to level the playing field for everything. In a way it did...in so far as it concentrated a lot of wealth and thus 'leveled the playing field' for us losers.
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.
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.
I expected more VR. Much more VR. From the perspective of early-90s, I was all-in on Plan 9 and expected to see a lot more influence from it. Unfortunately that didn't really happen, with a few exceptions (/proc).
Man I see some really neat concepts in operating systems that were created in the 80s and 90s and somehow we got stuck with a handful of Unix-likes and Windows with small parts of operating systems of the past frankensteined in occasionally.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> chromebooks Huh, that's a name I haven't heard in a while. WSL, on the other hand...
The idea of WSL would have been laughable back then. I'm really curious what other unthinkable things will happen in the next 30 years.
"It's so drag-and-drop and easy you won't even need programmers anymore" about various form builder apps. People still think this today.
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…
“Java was a token threat. Bill knew it would not be performant enough on clients for Applets to succeed. They had to rebuild their language to put every fixed-size object on the stack because sorting an array on a typical machine took forever. That’s why Java still doesn’t have operator overloading. That Java battle would be on the server, and [MSFT] didn’t have a good language to bring to the battle there. Wired and co loved to paint a picture of Microsoft v Java as Goliath v David. Not true - Java was a speedbump.
The real threat was dumb terminals (aka web browsers). Even today, the world could run on Mac OS / iOS and Safari. If Microsoft was okay with sacrificing Windows market share and instead controlled content and services, they would be much more valuable.”
I expected distributed parallel computing to be the norm, for software to get faster , not slower, and for advances in algorithm design to lead to more efficient, robust, advanced solutions to common problems. We still build ETL pipelines to process text files into new text files on a single machine like it's 1995. Oh, but it's a virtual machine now. Progress?
Run Perl in the browser!
How much spam there is.