I expected more from conversation-based UIs, that digital assistants would be much smarter than they are now and easily pass a Turing test.
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?
#92Huh, what is "tech?"
NCSA Mosaic, meh. That will never catch on.
All of the 1990's "Desktop" software projects that failed horribly. I use way better versions of these today on the web and they actually work -- success! I am still not happy with the NCSA Mosaic user interface.
In the 80s, I dreamed of a 1 million pixel monitor: 1024 x 1024. It's 2021, and I am typing on a 1366x768 latop - big fail.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#93I 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.
I thought everyone in the future would spend their free time reading science journals, which I discovered via Usenet (because no one in my physical environment read them). Two decades later we elected a president who has said that climate change is a Chinese hoax and wind turbines cause cancer.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#94Oh 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
We keep on chasing and chasing. I think the closest we’ve come so far is excel and most in programming scorn it instead of revering it.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#95Java everywhere. I'll stretch the timetable into a little into the early 2000s. At my job, Java did run everywhere, from my Sharp SL-5000 Linux handheld to mainframes. We had applets in the server, and J2ME on phones. Sun was on a roll, Java was a good language, had garbage collection and good object orientation.
In 2021 I'd say that JavaScript has taken its place, running all those places, near to or as fast as Java does, adding functional to the repertoire.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#96That visual programming would become mainstream
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#97That everyone would have a personal web page with their own domain name.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#98Oh 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…
I expected RISC to overtake CISC much sooner than it did.
I expected IPv6 to be adopted quickly.
I expected 6GB to be more storage than I could ever fill.
I expected Windows to be quickly dismissed and Unix to become the standard.
I expected to have a screen built into my glasses by now.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right? Tech was going to level the playing field for everything. In a way it did...in so far as it concentrated a lot of wealth and thus 'leveled the playing field' for us losers.
If you're a programmer and in a first-world country I'm not sure I'd count you as one of the losers. I'm thinking of people in the gig-economy and workers at Amazon warehouses etc...
Stores/entertainment venues we've 'lost' (though they've found ways to survive sorta but diminished) that feel like real, societal level losses: pinball halls, arcades, bookstores, music stores. Tech was supposed to make the barrier to be a book author/musician much easier, and it has to an extent, but not without costs. Like would modern media be where it is if newspapers and magazines hadn't gone through the 00s-10s?
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#100That Javascript would not survive and would be replaced by something else