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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?

#161

Post by orzig »

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.

A friend's mother, the only professional programmer I knew, told us that all the US programming jobs would be done remotely from China/India.

He: Civil engineer, ending up working in China (stealing their jobs!)

Me: MechE, but fell into data science, and now work with a local team that's plurality 1st gen Indian, and majority 1st gen non-US.

How would I grade her prediction? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#162

Post by loph »

I attended a meeting on the future of computing in 1992. The speaker discussed the end of the corporate data center, and the rise of "utility computing."

Also discussed was remote storage, globally available file shares.

It looks like this is happening with what we now call "Cloud Computing."

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

#163

Post by LightG »

That the immense, infinte pleasure I obtained from using the internet as an academic would continue, instead of the commercialised, centralised silo's we have today.

Sure, the web is infinitely more useful today, but I feel like a corporate web slave when using it ... dodging trackers, VPN's myself against XYZ ... etc.

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

#164

Post by sbarre »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #152
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…

> Nothing is preventing society from using the internet in that way

You are _technically_ correct, but I think you are minimizing network effects by simply calling it "easier".

These days you are pretty much required to use those same 10 sites if you want to interact with anyone, do business, or find useful information.

Those 10 sites have effectively captured the Internet.

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

#165

Post by nasir »

When I was choosing my university major, everybody was telling me don't choose computer science. The job market is saturated and everybody is a software engineer, choose electronics. I chose CS.

Fast-forward today, most of the people I know who were in electronic have switched to software.

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

#166

Post by sumtechguy »

CodeGlitch wrote: post #144
paxys wrote: post #16

Definitely thought that consumer software (the thing sold in boxes on store shelves) would continue to get bigger as a category rather than die out completely. Anyone remember that famous photo of the guy jumping with joy after snagging a launch copy of Windows 95? No one knew what the internet really was and what it would become. Not Bill Gates, not anyone else. Developers believed that processing power, RAM, storag…

> guy jumping with joy after snagging a launch copy of Windows 95? I was pretty excited about it too... And I was a kid in the 90s. I once worked with a guy who got excited about new releases of directx... Which I also admit could be a little exciting

Its funny I used to get excited about new API stacks coming out. They enabled such amazing things. Now I look at them as this thing we drag around, (hope you know the latest ones to get a job, and spend 4 months figuring it out). I look at them as this thing that will be quickly abandoned in 4 years and something I will end up supporting once the cool kids have wandered off to something new.

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

#167

Post by dave_sid »

At university were told that we were running out of ip addresses as in the future even fridges would have an ip address so it could have a web cam to see what you needed to buy at the supermarket. I wish they had told us about cryptocurrency instead of the fridge-cams.

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

#168

Post by sanderjd »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #152
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…

I dunno, I think this could have gone a different direction. It never really worked to self host things, because of IP address scarcity. Maybe if IPv6 had actually rolled out in the 90s, everyone could have had an IP address. Maybe then it would have made sense for people to make software targeting self-hosting. DreamWeaver web pages that you don't have to figure out how to deploy to a server somewhere, mail clients that run truly locally, maybe other different stuff that we never thought of. The earlier versions of these would have still had security and usability problems, but maybe they would have been compelling enough that the effort to fix those issues would have made sense.

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

#170

Post by fouc »

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

I thought 3D avatars-based chat would become the prevalent means of communication over the internet.
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