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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?

#151

Post by derwiki »

ta1234567890 wrote: post #48
spamizbad wrote: post #15

Oh 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 When I was a kid my dad refused to teach me to program, he thought it would be a useless skill to learn because he believed in the future there would be no more programmers, as everyone would be able to program anything they wanted through drag and drop interfaces.

Was your dad a programmer?

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

#152

Post by BatteryMountain »

twox2 wrote: post #149

As a 90s kid, I thought the internet would be more censorship resistant and less corporatized than it is today.

It still is. But nobody is using that feature. People choose to centralize and visit the same 10 sites and to avoid self-hosting.

Nothing is preventing society from using the internet in that way, but it's sooo much easier for the average non-tech person to not self-host an email server versus using something like gmail. It's the same reason I do not own a lift for my car.. sure technically I can install a lift at my house for my car but then I have to maintain it's hydrolics and I'd only use the lift once or twice a year ... who has time for that? Especially if my thing is fixing piano's and not cars. Let the car people handle cars, let the piano people handle piano's... I think we are in the same situation with tech.

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

#153

Post by jazzyjackson »

mcv wrote: post #141
andyana wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Well, Google Glass was launched big some years ago, and everybody mocked it.

The device was pretty slick, which it should be for 1500$ (Typical devkit prices I guess), I enjoyed recoding tutorials where I needed both hands - it reliably captured what I was looking at, and it was lightweight and didn’t get in the way, great tool.

Problem was the only stories about it were about the “glass-holes” walking into bars with a camera on their face. I thought it was an interesting “intervention” style art piece that showed people still expected obscurity, if not privacy.

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

#154

Post by BatteryMountain »

mcv wrote: post #141
andyana wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Well, Google Glass was launched big some years ago, and everybody mocked it.

Yeah and now plenty adults are running around with powered-up Tamagotchi's on their wrists. Probably the same people who laughed at google glass would insist on wearing it now or in the near future.

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

#156

Post by otalp »

GartzenDeHaes wrote: post #155

I thought MS Comic Chat [1] style was going to be the future of UI design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

There is a discord bot which does this with the same characters and previous few messages and everybody who uses it loves it

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

#157

Post by jazzyjackson »

astrange wrote: post #133
diego_moita wrote: post #65

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...

Reading too much science is actually common with anti-vaxxers and other such people, they love quoting renegade doctors and having absolute faith in arxiv papers they misread or quoted out of context. Most published research is false even if it's peer-reviewed, and it may be better to leave it to people who read it full time and understand it's an ongoing conversation.

Hah, so maybe the Catholic Church was wiser than we knew by restricting their libraries to initiated scholars, there’s always talk of how the layman will misinterpret the mystical texts, better protect them from self harm.

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

#158

Post by Eric_WVGG »

simonw wrote: post #26

I 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.

This. At bare minimum, a better-informed population that would be increasingly resistant to gov’t and corporate propaganda.

And in a sense, that kind of came to pass. Nobody believes _anything_ the government says anymore, and skepticism is at all-time highs. It’s just… everything.

I also bet very heavily against the widespread popularity of video on the net, not due to any technical limitations, but simply because reading is so much faster.

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

#159

Post by notsureaboutpg »

twox2 wrote: post #149

As a 90s kid, I thought the internet would be more censorship resistant and less corporatized than it is today.

Somewhat related, I thought the progress of technology would be matched by a moral progress of society. People would become more tolerant. Aided by advanced technology, we would break down the barriers between us and see the similarities between all human beings. Instead we are seeing the rise of populism across the globe. Darfur wasn't the last genocide, we recently had the Rohingya and the Uighur ethnic cleansings... Technology didn't help us see other people like we see ourselves, it helped us distance ourselves further from other people instead.

It was naive to think that just because technology progresses, society progresses too. The 20+ year Iraq and Afghanistan wars really made me realize that advanced technology meant nothing if we were going to regress morally.

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

#160

Post by alexgmcm »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #47
spamizbad wrote: post #15

Oh 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.

In fairness, lots of tech jobs have died out like there are nowhere near as many system administrators, database admins as there were since the cloud has become bigger.

Equally, tools like Wordpress has killed off/deskilled the old 'webmaster' role - I mean sure, there are still people making money doing Wordpress sites for businesses but it's nowhere near as lucrative as it was at the start of the dot-com boom era.

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