I hoped for a future free of Microsoft software, and free of UIs designed by software developers. I hoped for a future with no drive letters. The first two are successful: I use no Microsoft software in my life, and many user experiences are now designed by specialists. Although I don't have to deal with drive letters, it is odd that Microsoft still has them.
Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
31–40 of 469 posts
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#32Definitely did not predict Javascript.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#33We wouldn’t make applications. Rather we’d deliver components which could interoperate via a binary contract.
Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application.
I suppose that pieces of this became true with the proliferation and adoption of open source. Rather than a binary protocol, HTTP came out on top.
SharePoint brought us WebParts which tried to put the power in the hands of business users, but it turned out they were still too technical and not flexible enough.
I don’t see the role of software developer/engineer going away anytime soon.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#34I thought x86 was on its way out in the 90s. It was, but amd64 gave it a new lease on life.
We had search back in the 90s. Archie, Yahoo, Lycos, Altavista, etc. But Google brought better ... advertising.
What did I expect? I expected hardware to get better. I didn't expect the phone to be so dominant. The iPhone 12 to someone from the 90s might as well be a Cray tricorder.
Hardware is a LOT better now. Dunno if software is that different. JITs are crap; they re-invent the same thing over and over. Linux re-invents what VMS and other commercial operating systems have already done. Most progress has been either hardware or enabled by hardware.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#35Oh 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 tak…
The expectation was low/no code tools would put many devs out of work and it would only be a niche job. The idea that we would have a decade+ labor shortage was unheard of until the craziness of the dotcom bubble (which then popped and people moved to assuming dev work would be permanently outsourced like textiles and never coming back due to high US labor costs)
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#36I 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?
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#37Didn't expect FoxPro to die so fast.
Because Visual Basic was the next hot thing.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#38Oh 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…
> Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs
this is still something some of us think about today
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#39Run Perl in the browser!
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#40So 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?
More like VDIs everywhere, rather than SaaS suites, I think.