Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
121–130 of 469 posts
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#122I am still kind of surprised Microsoft has not switched to the Linux kernel yet.
Not much else has surprised me.
I have been programming full time since the 80s.
Still using vi with a shell when I need to get stuff done quickly. My own use of visual tools as come and gone multiple times.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#123Oh 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.
Regarding screens in glasses: where is the hold up? I've been thinking of prototyping something for the past few weeks (only thinking, hence my question).
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#124Oh 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…
> 3) Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs I started programming as a kid in the early 90s, and went to college in the late 90s/early 00s. It might sound crazy in hindsight, but between these tools and outsourcing, everyone I talked to thought being a programmer was going to be a dead end minimum wage type job, and I was strongly advised by many to pick a different major.
During my college internship (2010) I was told that my CS degree would be totally worthless and I should focus on electrical engineering (though that would've been fine too tbh)...oh, and that I should put all the money I could into gold and guns...the dude was a nut is what I'm saying.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#125I remember software reuse was worshipped.
We thought everything could be abstracted away into a perfect library and no duplication of functionality should ever need to occur. In the end, we could even drag and drop (or write XML) to connect all those components together.
We thought multitasking was possible and even a good thing to design for. Hence the very noisy and distracting desktop OS designs we still have today.
We thought in terms of a much smaller handful programming languages. And anything “serious” would end up in C (or C++, maaaybe Java)
We thought Apple was kind of a weird thing, surprising company that barely hung on, the computer only shown on movies.
We thought democracy “won” so the future could only be one full of enlightenment, right?
We thought CLIs were so passé and every dev tool needs a GUI.
Merges were done with a diff / merge tool and often manually.
Software libraries were bought for big $ or provided by your OS/compiler vendor, not downloaded. Maybe the “reuse” vision of the past actually WAS realized. Instead of and XML file, it’s my packages.json :).
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#126another Ask HN? that aside,
Doesn't get much more 90s than Bill Gates
https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/The-Road-Ahead-a...
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#127I’m embarrassed to say this on HN, but straight up I thought 9600 baud connections were the shit in the late eighties - who would ever need more bandwidth than this?!? Now I get pissed off when the 4K video on my phone stutters for a second.
I made fun of my friend for buying a 9600 baud modem. Because, _duh_: nobody can read faster than 600 baud.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#128"90s" programmer only by the skin of my teeth, but I didn't the internet centralizing. It just seemed like every company and person would have their site (and possibly domain) and they'd use that to communicate in their own way. My peers went to college before facebook and even friendster- we communicated by personal websites and blogs. These aren't technologists, but that was what was available to us so they picked…
Yeah I was big into the idea of how the Internet was going to completely democratize information and education and knowledge. Not everyone predominantly choosing to plug into a few different major ecosystems run by giga corporations.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#129- Automatically generated unit and integration tests
- Useable VRML (Minority Report was 2002!)
- CPUs that could directly run Java bytecode (Sun never shipped it, but everything had a "powered by Java" sticker on it back then)
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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)
People seem to be in a permanent state of lump-of-labor fallacy and not understanding comparative advantage. The current one is thinking we'll run out of jobs because of AI. (Their scenarios seem to end up with a few rich business guy types owning all the AIs and trading with each other while the rest of the world is somehow unemployed - which I'm pretty sure was the plot of Atlas Shrugged.)