Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like? • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by sumtechguy » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 1:14 PM UTC

ianai wrote: post #99

BrissyCoder wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-10…

8-bit guy had a vid on this a few months ago. Basically he opened up an electronic catalog from the 80s and showed how everything in there was items that did 1 thing. His phone now does all of that including buying the one thing.

We expected device convergence. But we expected the PC not the tablet/phone to be that device. We expected that to be an extension of the PC. Not the other way around!

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

#192

Post by skocznymroczny » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 1:14 PM UTC

twox2 wrote: post #149

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

As a 90s kid, I thought the society would be more censorship resistant. The internet is just a reflection of that. Most people claim they are against free speech, except when it comes to their opposite political faction which should be censored.

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

#193

Post by jimbokun » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

I would say no current programming environment has matched the productivity of Hypercard for front end GUI development.

The biggest advances have been distributed version control and dependency management systems.

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

#194

Post by Svperstar » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

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.

I started my CS degree in 2000, I heard the same, companies would rather fly someone from India over then hire you. Also my CS advisor said "Java will be the only language anyone uses in 20 years"

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

#195

Post by ghaff » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 1:16 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #27

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…

> 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…

>Moore's law is about transistor size shrinking, but that has an obvious end

Yes, but by itself that isn't a single core vs. multicore issue. It's a process node question generally.

That said, Intel in particular did try to push single-core frequency at least a beat too far. They demoed a 10GHz prototype at one IDF--and other companies were mocking them for it.

The story that a very senior Intel exec gave me at the time was something to the effect that, of course, they knew that they were going to have to go multi-core but Microsoft was really pushing back because they weren't confident in multicore desktop performance in particular.

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

#196

Post by massung » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

Not a prediction of the future, but rather something I've found quite funny over the years: watching so many things keep repeating themselves in a never-ending cycle. My two favorite have been...

1. Compiled (native) vs. interpreted (bytecode/VMs). It's this forever cycle of "performance required" that shifts to "portability required", which lacks performance, and gradually shifts back, and repeat.

2. Local processing vs. dumb terminals and shared computing. The current "dumb terminal" phase being the idea that you can buy a $100 Chromebook and working entirely online.

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

#197

Post by sharklazer » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

skocznymroczny wrote: post #192

twox2 wrote: post #149

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

As a 90s kid, I thought the society would be more censorship resistant. The internet is just a reflection of that. Most people claim they are against free speech, except when it comes to their opposite political faction which should be censored.

> Most people claim they are against free speech, except when it comes to their opposite political faction which should be censored.

Let's shut up and let the other side speak? It's usually the opposite in my experience =-P, haha. Sorry, couldn't resist, I know you probably meant to write the opposite.

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

#198

Post by manmal » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 1:19 PM UTC

I expected VR, or at least 3D spaces, to become a de facto way of navigating the internet. In hindsight that would be horrible of course, as it would be slower, resource-hungry, and overwhelming to deal with for 10h every day.

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

#199

Post by criddell » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

vidanay wrote: post #115

jbb_hn wrote: post #33

We wouldn’t make applications. Rather we’d deliver components which could interoperate via a binary contract. Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application. I suppose that pieces of this became true with the proliferation and adoption of open source. Rather than a binary protocol, HTTP came out on top. SharePoint brought us WebParts which tried to put the power in the hands of busin…

> components which could interoperate via a binary contract COM still underlies an abhorrent amount of the Windows architecture.

In the 90's COM didn't make a lot of sense to me because I never needed it. Then, around 2001, I needed it to solve some problems and I finally invested the time to figure it out. It's actually pretty neat as long as it isn't in your web browser (ActiveX).

Around that time I too thought I was seeing the future - component-based development that's language and platform agnostic.

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

#200

Post by gameswithgo » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

trashface wrote: post #183

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.

Graduated 2001, everyone I know who wants to still be in CS still is. It definitely takes some willful effort to keep up though, as things change so rapidly. I remember when I first started working is when everything started becoming a web application "so you didn't have to install anything". I remember thinking that seemed like a crazy tradeoff to accept. But then everyone did it. I still think it was crazy.