Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 149 posts

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#31

Let me answer your question with another question. How old are you? Because I'm in my 40s, which means I was in my 20s during the 1990s. And from my perspective, it was not a notably simpler time back then than it is today. It was not some pastoral idyll, it was just a time a lot like now, except it was a little harder to get a hold of people. But I do notice that when I talk to people in their 20s and 30s, they ofte…

I'm in my 40s as well, and I'd agree. It reminds me of the Douglas Adams quote:

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#32
post #5

Yes. The thing I miss the most is the sense that I, and everyone around me, used to be mentally in the same place they were physically. Obviously people were distracted or preoccupied from time to time, perhaps they had a sick far away relative, say, that dominated their thoughts. But those kind of situations were the exceptions. Now literally every single person you interact with is mentally in the middle of several…

Truth. In the 90's, if you went to a party and sat in a corner reading a book, it was usually....odd. The idea was that you were supposed to at least try to be interacting with others. Some of us were geeks, some of us found social interaction difficult, but since there wasn't a real substitute for it, we had to stick it out and learn how to be with people. And then we got the benefits of being with people. Now there…

Usenet. Fandom. CW. I was born in 1991, and there has always been a technical subculture ever since Edison.

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#34

I miss 90s complexity! Sparc, MIPS, and Alpha were still alive. Assembly was a thing. Mobile telephones for mortals were a marvel and technological breakthrough that could let you communicate everywhere. 3D graphics could run in software, and Abrash' Black Book was a black book, and even more, wizards had managed to capture things in hardware for the PC with some sort of voodoo. Now we have 1.5 dominant boring archit…

  > Meh, just double the cores and crank it to 11
Too true. I'm flabbergasted everytime I think about Chris Sawyer having written everything in TTD, then TTDLX and finally RCT with Assembly (!), and yes, that also includes the window GUI system that was built into the game.

[1]: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-03-03-a-big-intervie...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/92zyo/chris_sa...

[3]: http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#35

I miss 90s complexity! Sparc, MIPS, and Alpha were still alive. Assembly was a thing. Mobile telephones for mortals were a marvel and technological breakthrough that could let you communicate everywhere. 3D graphics could run in software, and Abrash' Black Book was a black book, and even more, wizards had managed to capture things in hardware for the PC with some sort of voodoo. Now we have 1.5 dominant boring archit…

I think we are headed back that direction.

Custom hardware is coming again. It's coming because we've hit walls on sequential compute. Multi-core parallel and concurrent models are building nicely, but software lags behind, and those problems are hard.

Some problems do not benefit from either of those things too.

Enter custom silicon.

The combination of software and well realized custom silicon to enhance performance, and that's peak performance.

Always is.

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#36

Things we have now that I would never want to be without: - Amazing browser debugging tools - Source Maps - Typescript - VSCode w/ Liveshare - Mostly standardized CSS - Automated build tools These are solutions to problems we had in the past.

Make has been around far longer then you think.

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#37

Let me answer your question with another question. How old are you? Because I'm in my 40s, which means I was in my 20s during the 1990s. And from my perspective, it was not a notably simpler time back then than it is today. It was not some pastoral idyll, it was just a time a lot like now, except it was a little harder to get a hold of people. But I do notice that when I talk to people in their 20s and 30s, they ofte…

Also the 90s kind of sucked. Otherwise grunge and goth culture would have never taken off. Was a teenager then, but here are some of the things that I can think of: - recessions in many countries '91/'92 - Asian financial crisis '97 - higher crime rates - reunification in Germany (causing massive budgetary/cultural issues) - nuclear testing in the Pacific (was a big issue here in NZ at the time) - threat of nuclear m…

Add:

- Gulf war (unexpected school vacation)

- The most amazing volcanic winter ever

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#38
Yes, very much (I'm 41). The running joke with my friends is that my tag line should be "I miss the 90s".

Some things were much better then than today, for example:

* Children and adolescents had freedom that seems to have been lost today. However, I think that a young person's virtual self extends far out into the aether compared to Gen X.

* The lack of cynicism today concerns me. There are so many very.bad.things happening in the world that I find blind optimism offensive. I just read that 40% of the world's species have gone extinct in 40 years. It doesn't matter if that's precisely true - what matters is that the order of magnitude is likely accurate, and that humans only have about one more generation before Earth's wildlife can only be seen in museums.

* Politics was better. Everything since 9/11 has been a blind alley on the fractal of possibilities. Young people maybe aren't aware that the world wasn't always this... dystopic.

* One thing was worse - weed was illegal everywhere except like, Amsterdam.

* Video games were better. But the quality was partially due to suspension of disbelief and using one's imagination.

* Grunge/alternative was a revelation that can't be expressed in words or replicated. But, around 2013 I noticed a similar cultural revolution, the rise/return of the Burning Man sentiment and a reconnection with creation via psychedelic drugs which seems to be changing the world like a mix between 60s hedonism and cyperpunk. YOLO might be the only thing Gen X truly envies about today hahah.

* Basement parties, raves, skate and punk culture, underground internet geekdom. Vans. Airwalks. Corduroy jeans. All better, but somewhat make-believe.

* Web metaphors were better (declarative and data-driven programming, UNIX theology). Programming languages like C++ and platforms like Windows set us back at least 10, maybe 20 years. But they were FUN.

I knew a guy from my parents' generation when I was growing up who wore Hawaiian shirts everywhere and would never leave the year 1985. Now I am him, forever trapped between the years 1992-1999 like a character in The Matrix. So while I could go on forever, I'll stop here.

Edit: somehow I left out music. Listen to Green Day or Stone Temple Pilots or Alice in Chains chronologically and you might if you're lucky get the slightest glimpse into what it was like to watch Beavis and Butthead in your friend's trailer home before going out to ride BMX in the gravel pits and then coming home and playing Nintendo until 4 in the morning, staying up all night and then going to a party the next night and getting a ride home with random girls like on Dazed and Confused. I assume all that is even better today (what with your Uber and Tinder), but the shear bleakness and transcendental euphoria that the future was arriving before your eyes and nobody older than 30 knows it yet has perhaps diminished.

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#39
On the other hand, traveling was not so simple - you couldn't just carry your mobile phone and pull up Google Maps once you got there - you had to know where you were going and either buy the maps or print out maps beforehand. Meeting up with someone also involved a lot of planning and sometimes you go to the meeting point and then go home having missed each other because you misunderstood the exact location.

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#40
One of the things I miss about the 1990s is the degree that Microsoft, Apple, and other vendors of desktop operating systems such as NeXT and Be invested in refining the desktop computing experience. I personally believe that the Windows 95 interface is the most usable and most well-designed Windows user interface, with further refinements made in Windows 98 and 2000. For many years I would use Classic Mode in newer versions of Windows such as XP and 7; I wish Windows 10 had a classic mode. And while I love Mac OS X's Aqua interface, I love the Platinum theme that was developed for Copland and was introduced in Mac OS 8.

While there was still an effort in the first half of the 2000s to continue refining the desktop user experience (e.g., Aqua, GNOME 2 [which is personally my favorite Linux desktop], KDE 3), once mobile computing and Web 2.0 technology took off a little over a decade ago, I feel that emphasis has shifted away from refining the desktop experience. Moreover, there has been an emphasis on trying to make the desktop computer experience more mobile-like, leading to products such as Windows 8 and GNOME 3 that, in my opinion, are worse than their predecessors. Even Windows 10 still has mobile-like influences such as its penchant for large title bars and ribbons that take up a lot of vertical space (ever since Windows XP's Luna theme, Microsoft has had an obsession with using a lot of vertical space for bars). In my opinion, Mac OS X peaked in the Snow Leopard era, and while I still prefer Mac OS X to Windows 10, I feel that certain parts of the Mac experience have downgraded over the past decade (some pain points include the transition from iPhoto to Photos.app as well as the differences in font rendering in macOS Mojave that affect users who don't have 4K or higher resolution displays). I'm also very concerned about the implications of Marzipan on future versions of Mac OS X, but I guess we'll find out very soon when WWDC 2019 takes place.

I would like to see more investments being made in desktop computing. Despite some pundits prematurely proclaiming that desktop computing is dying, the fact is many people rely on desktops and laptops to do their work, and tablets and smartphones cannot replace all tasks that we use our desktops for. I still believe that the personal computing revolution is far from over; there is still a lot of room for improvement, refinement, and innovation.

Post reply on HN