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

We are nowhere near an atom well into 2005 at least, but things were getting pipelined and there was a ton of SRAM on each die, there were improvements to fetch pipelines (well, SPECTRE and friends really), everything was happening as fast as it could with out-of-order pipelines, with prefetch and every other speedup out there including auto-vec.

The "how big is an atom?" is sort of post-2010 thinking, at least the way I saw it happen.

Modems was one place where this sort of thing I saw personally happen - 9600 baud modems to 56kbps happened so fast and it almost looked it would keep going that way (Edge was 115kbps, now I can't even do a page load over it) with DSL suddenly dropping in to keep the same copper moving even faster again.

The Internet would be a lot less centralized than it has become with a lot more peer-to-peer traffic.

The Internet would be very disruptive to political systems and large corporations, promoting a lot more small scale DIY and anarchistic type stuff. (Standard issue 90s techno-libertarianism... we did not understand network effects.)

I thought the Internet would decentralize us physically too, making it possible to do the same work from some 'holler in West Virginia as the middle of Manhattan. (I still don't count this one out. COVID pushed us a little further in this direction. This is more a cultural thing than a technical thing, and culture changes slowly.)

C and C++ would be dead. Nobody would write in memory-unsafe languages anymore and garbage collection would be ubiquitous. We'd probably have type systems that caught a lot of bugs too. Rust is finally delivering on the latter, so this may eventually come to pass.

CPU frequencies would continue increasing, or would at least level off at a higher frequency than they have. I would have guessed 10ghz or so since beyond that the speed of light vs the size of the die becomes an issue.

AI would remain very far off. I did not imagine self-driving cars until ~2050 or so. The 90s was still the "AI winter."

Apple would be dead by now.

X86 would be dead by now. I never would have imagined it would have been possible to get this kind of performance out of that hairball of an instruction set.

Spinning disk would be dead. (It is on PCs and mobile devices, but I mean everywhere.)

I didn't predict mobile at all. I would have said such devices are too small to have good UIs. How would you use something with a tiny screen like that for anything but maybe texting?

I thought we'd all have at least a gigabit (full duplex) at home by now.

I was really pessimistic on space, at least in the near-mid term future. I didn't expect to see humans still in space by 2010-2020, let alone something like SpaceX.

I was really pessimistic on energy. By now I would have predicted we'd be well into a global depression brought on by fossil fuel exhaustion. We'd be deploying nuclear fission as fast as possible to keep the grid up, but cars and airplanes would become extremely expensive to operate (thinking ~$20/gal gas). We would have reduced mobility but we'd all be connected.

I wasn't concerned about climate change because of course we would run out of cheap fossil fuels before that would become a really big issue.

... can probably think of more.

I’ve seen this with tools like Zapier. I know many non-technical people that put together amazing workflows just piecing things together with webhooks and similar tools.

Did anybody have 5 Ghz as the "max" cpu frequency on their bingo cards?

Actually, I remember touring an Intel fab. around 99/00. The guide (an engineer) was pretty sold they were "going to soon max out silicon for CPUs and have to move to germanium" based chips. (Apparently it's too expensive to this day.)

Older, I seem to remember Feynman being pretty optimistic about quantum computers? But that might just have been my takeaway.

Then I would be wrong again, because I would have thought IPv6 would be everywhere...