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

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

#61

Post by amalcon »

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 where Java was going.

The expectations around smart home stuff were way off too. E.g. expectations were more along the lines of your house reminding you to go buy toilet paper. What we got was the ability to ask a hockey puck to buy some more when we notice ourselves running low, if you can get past the privacy concerns.

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

#62

Post by derefr »

762236 wrote: post #31

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.

> Although I don't have to deal with drive letters, it is odd that Microsoft still has them.

They don't, really. The Windows NT kernel has a unified namespace — it's just not one with a filesystem at its root, but rather an object namespace, so users (and even developers) are almost never exposed to it.

C:\ is just win32.dll-wrapper-ese for the NT object path \\?\Volume{some-guid}\, where \\? is the NT object (local) namespace root. You can find the GUID of your filesystem in diskmgmt.msc and navigate Explorer to \\?\Volume{some-guid}\ just fine. Look ma, no drive letters!

Perhaps surprisingly, despite \\?\Volume{some-guid} being the name of a Volume object, what you find under \\?\Volume{some-guid}\ is a regular filesystem of Directory and File objects.

It's as if Linux was set up such that / was a hybrid of procfs+sysfs+devfs, and all the filesystems were accessed by going to /dev/disk/by-uuid/... and navigating "into" one of the block-device nodes there.

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

#64

Post by the_only_law »

nofinator wrote: post #60

I used to work in the telecom world back then. I would have thought that by 2021 the meticulously-architected ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) standard would have replaced the ancient TCP/IP protocol. Nope. Then I would be wrong again, because I would have thought IPv6 would be everywhere...

Heh I toy around with a lot of retro networking/telecom stuff. Mostly ISDN and X.25, but a little Frame Relay and I’ve also considered purchasing some equipment to toy with ATM. I find it more interesting than the IP monoculture we have now.

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

#65

Post by diego_moita »

I really believed computers would make people smarter, better informed, able to make more rational decisions. They'd understand and trust science more, make better political decisions.

We even had a slogan for it: "computers are bicycles for the mind": https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-...

I was so naive...

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

#66

Post by derefr »

zelon88 wrote: post #29
stakkur wrote: post #9

So 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.

Linux did eat the world, in the form of Android and all its variations. Every TV, most cellphones, many game consoles, and even your watch, are all probably running a Linux kernel.

(And there's also ChromeOS, eating the education sector.)

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

#67

Post by thangalin »

jbb_hn wrote: post #33

We 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 busin…

Bret Victor alluded to these pieces in his digs on APIs:

https://vimeo.com/71278954

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

#68

Post by mikewarot »

I had hoped by now that computing fabrics would be a thing. Just a grid of 4x4 bit look up tables each loaded from RAM, to allow rapid reconfiguration, and clocked like a chess table, so there wouldn't be any race conditions to worry about. You could scale it to billions of gates, route around hardware faults, and stuff would just work. Instead we got FPGA hell.

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

#69

Post by DougWebb »

zelon88 wrote: post #29
stakkur wrote: post #9

So 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.

Keyboards and mice being supplanted by touch or gesture is only true for phones and tablets, which are new devices that really aren't equivalent to the general computing devices in the 90's: desktops and laptops. If anything, I'd say that tablets are just televisions that became small, light, and interactive, and smart phones are partly that and partly handheld gaming devices with multiplayer capability. Neither are equivalent to a computer (though they have computers built-in.)

Of course, as a software developer, I've always used computers differently than the masses. The computers I need are far more powerful than anything they need.

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