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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?

#181

Post by jimbokun »

JohnWhigham wrote: post #174
bcrosby95 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

dead end minimum wage type job Don't worry, the big tech companies are spending ungodly amounts to make this happen.

Will probably be about as successful as last time.

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

#182

Post by jimbokun »

alexgmcm wrote: post #160
bcrosby95 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

Yes, now they are all Cloud admins.

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

#183

Post by trashface »

nasir wrote: post #165

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.

As an inverse anecdote, when I graduated with my CS degree in '97, I didn't expect to be unemployed 23 years later, as I am now. It's partly health related, and partly a result of my own bad decision making. But my impression after a ~20 year career is that continuous tech employment is quite fragile. Maybe different for those starting out now, and certainly different for those at FAANG.

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

#185

Post by notum »

rbanffy wrote: post #78
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...

I never imagined the Great Machine that wiped out the Krell would be a social network…

Come to think of it, FaceBook does give form to monsters from the Id.

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

#186

Post by jimbokun »

mcv wrote: post #98
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…

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.

> I expected Windows to be quickly dismissed and Unix to become the standard.

If you count iOS and Android having a Unix core...

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

#187

Post by mgkimsal »

mcv wrote: post #98
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…

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.

I remember talking in mid 99 about ipv6, while I was at a web company. Immediately on seeing it I said "this is crazy, and isn't going to take off". "Why not?" I got from some of the network folks there.

My response then is mostly as it is now - it's just too confusing to read and write. The UIs - even at the time - telling people to put in a dotted quad - were... manageable. 4 is an easy number to understand. Numbers only is easy to understand.

I still maintain that had some intermedia come out adding 2 (or possibly 4) more spaces and we transitioned from

187.43.250.198 to 0.0.187.43.250.198, and defaulted most UIs to just prefixing with the 0.0 then grew from there, we'd have had much faster adoption, and still given ourselves 64k 4 billion address spaces.

But... I'm not a network technician, nor am I on the committees... I'm just someone who's had to live with the last 20 years of "ipv6 is coming, we're running out of ipv4 addresses!!" and... the last 5-10 years of trying to mess around with ipv6 and realizing it's still mostly out of my control (home ISPs, ime, do not, support it still).

tldr, I never expected ipv6 to be adopted quickly. I'm surprised it's made it this far.

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

#188

Post by kbsspl »

Didn't realise it in 1995 when I started programming. By 2000, during the bust, many were talking about global disintermediation and empowering of individuals.

And I kept arguing that in a decade and a half, there would be a consolidated monolith and individuals would loose power for a long time to come.

Whenever there is a power tool, expect the power hungry to want to control it. My personal motto. Proves right every time.

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

#189

Post by codingdave »

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 - I believe this did happen much more than people realize.

In the 90s and 00s, every company with more than 1-2000 employees would have an internal dev staff. I worked in some companies with 20 devs, some with half a dozen, but there was always a dev team in the IT group.

Today, companies do low code via SharePoint and Salesforce. The do BI with Tableau and Power BI instead of internal BI teams. Their external web presence is done with Wordpress instead of a custom site. Sprinkle in some SaaS, and the internal dev teams of corporations are way smaller than they used to be, with some companies not having any internal devs.

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

#190

Post by forbiddenvoid »

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.

I think fewer people would have mocked it if it were in anyway accessible to ordinary folks. They set the wrong price point, which made it an easy target for ridicule because only 'rich' people with sufficient disposable income even had them.
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