I genuinely thought using a unix-style command-line was already archaic in 1998, and that GUIs were obviously better in every way.
Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
21–30 of 469 posts
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#22Well, I certainly didn't expect to still be coding for loops by hand in a text editor after 30 years. Guess it could be worse, at least I (mostly) don't have to worry about memory leaks anymore. So that's something I guess.
data.for_each( |x| : x-> map ( blah blah blah )))))))
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#23I thought WebTV was on to something big, in my mind more people would be spending time in interactive environments/encyclopedias and playing with 3d toys in their living rooms instead of passively watching television
now people watch more static video content than ever and are damaged to a point where it will take a generation or two to recover if it all -- whooops
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#24well I was about 10 years ahead of the first app-stores.. lol
Good grief
I was kinda hoping we'd have ubiquitous flying cars by now, but hey Uber right...lol
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#25Better versions of VB6 and Delphi. 100 Megabit symmetric wired internet for $20/month. More CPU, Disk and RAM.
I expected 250 gigabytes to cost less than $4000 by now. ;-)
https://web.archive.org/web/19990220180309/http://www.tsrcom...
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#26I thought that giving everyone in the world access to the sum total of human knowledge via the internet would be all upside.
And I thought that conspiracy theories were harmless fun.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#27Oh god, there were so many boneheaded 90s predictions about computers. 1) We just expected single core performance to double forever every 2 years or so. Many of us were ignorant of single-core performance scaling and the memory wall issues. I want to be clear: Computer Architects were warning people about this in the early 90s but many ignored their inconvenient truth. 2) 2D GUIs would evolve into 3D GUIs - maybe VR…
> We just expected single core performance to double forever every 2 years or so.
I don't get that. Moore's law is about transistor size shrinking, but that has an obvious end — transistors can't be smaller than one atom across. I feel like "everyone" did know that, even in the 90s. Or, at least, it was mentioned in every explanation of Moore's law itself.
> Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs
I mean, they did, but they also created consultant jobs to replace the ones they took away. See: Salesforce.
The need to write source code can be taken away; but the need to do requirements analysis and deliberate architectural design cannot. So you end up with people who do 80% of a programmers' job, except for the coding part.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
With this hindsight, any predictions for the future? 30 years from now?
My prediction is that once the capability reaches contact lenses, it'll become mass adoption. The physicality of wearing a headset while walking or moving is difficult for lots of people, and tiring. Contact lenses weigh a lot less, and are less intrusive to others. Of course, it doesn't come without pitfalls, but that's just my prediction.
I think glasses/goggles are less intrusive than contact lenses. Lenses are irritating and difficult to insert. It's also impossible to share contact lenses. I think VR is already pretty close with the Quest 2, to what it needs to be to get mainstream adoption. A little lighter, a little thinner, maybe 5-10 more years of iterative improvements and we'll be there.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#29So many 'trends' back then. A few that come to mind (from the pre-web days, anyway): * Thin clients: everybody was going to have a 'dumb terminal', and all the computing/storage would happen elsewhere. There were many variations on this idea. * PIMs: Palm Pilots and all the variations. I knew a guy who quit his job to develop Palm Pilot wares, claiming it was 'the future'. In a way, he was right. * Windows: Linux was…
In a way most of these came true.
> Thin clients
The cloud.
> Palm pilots.
Cell phones.
> Windows, Mac, Linux
Windows is still for business/economy. Linux is still for neckbeards. Although Mac is bigger than it was, the same people are still waiting for Apple silicon to catch on.
> Keyboards and mice
Have largely been supplanted by touch or gesture and consumer VR is becoming more and more viable every day.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#30So many 'trends' back then. A few that come to mind (from the pre-web days, anyway): * Thin clients: everybody was going to have a 'dumb terminal', and all the computing/storage would happen elsewhere. There were many variations on this idea. * PIMs: Palm Pilots and all the variations. I knew a guy who quit his job to develop Palm Pilot wares, claiming it was 'the future'. In a way, he was right. * Windows: Linux was…
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.