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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?

#201

Post by jghn »

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.

Anecdote from a mid-90s grad. I found that in the late 90s/early aughts my friends with the coolest jobs had degrees in something computational but not CS. Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics.

They all had to learn to code in school and had background domain knowledge in some specialty. In contrast myself and my CS friends had, well, we had knowledge of Turing machines with infinite tapes.

As the years played out it normalized between the two groups as each filled in their own weak spots with experience. But in those early days I was pretty jealous.

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

#202

Post by scandox »

Overall, I got everything wrong. Technically, commercially and socially: wrong, wrong and wrong.

I thought things would develop along lines that were of interest to me or which appealed to my personal aesthetic of computing (textual). And that viewpoint turned out to be the most myopic possible in terms of predicting what would actually happen.

If I predict something then almost certainly it will not occur.

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

#203

Post by zozbot234 »

massung wrote: post #196

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 processin…

> watching so many things keep repeating themselves in a never-ending cycle

Hacker culture calls this the Wheel of Samsara.

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

#204

Post by pydry »

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…

Self hosting is a monumental pain in the ass. Even if you have the technical capability it's still a pain in the ass.

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

#205

Post by red_trumpet »

lamontcg wrote: post #128
topkai22 wrote: post #5

"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.

> democratize information and education and knowledge

Wikipedia is still up and running ;)

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

#206

Post by Insanity »

chrisco255 wrote: post #28
haser_au wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction is that once the capability reaches contact lenses, it'll become mass adoption. The physicality of wearing a headset while walking or moving is difficult for lots of people, and tiring. Contact lenses weigh a lot less, and are less intrusive to others. Of course, it doesn't come without pitfalls, but that's just my prediction.

I think glasses/goggles are less intrusive than contact lenses. Lenses are irritating and difficult to insert. It's also impossible to share contact lenses. I think VR is already pretty close with the Quest 2, to what it needs to be to get mainstream adoption. A little lighter, a little thinner, maybe 5-10 more years of iterative improvements and we'll be there.

I've been wearing lenses for 15 years and do not think they are difficult to insert or irritating. But it does take some getting used to.

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

#207

Post by prometheus76 »

otalp wrote: post #156
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

What is the name of that bot, and do you have a link? I run a small discord server for friends and family and this would be a funny addition.

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

#208

Post by k__ »

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.

In high school (2003) my class mates said, I shouldn't become a dev.

Everything is already created. They would download movies, music, and games with BitTorrent and chat with ICQ and IRC. What else is there to create?

I should go into administration, because that's where the big money is.

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

#209

Post by julian_t »

massung wrote: post #196

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 processin…

Oh yes... IBM 3270 terminals sending fields from the screen back to the mainframe. The first time I came across a simple HTML form I wondered where I'd seen the idea before.

And as you say, there's definitely a cycle between "everything local" and "everything central".

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

#210

Post by maverick-iceman »

aparsons wrote: post #87
amalcon wrote: post #61

I guess I count as a 90s programmer? I did technically write programs in the 90s. I thought Java applets (those things you'd embed in a webpage) were hot stuff that would completely reshape the Web someday, but they managed to effectively die before the proprietary Flash. I thought Java as a server language was doomed for performance reasons, but that turned out to be just fine. Basically I completely misunderstood w…

I wrote this months ago, but worth repeating- from a Microsoft perspective, as Java was seen as the Microsoft platform killer by many: “Java was a token threat. Bill knew it would not be performant enough on clients for Applets to succeed. They had to rebuild their language to put every fixed-size object on the stack because sorting an array on a typical machine took forever. That’s why Java still doesn’t have operat…

> The real threat was dumb terminals (aka web browsers). Even today, the world could run on Mac OS / iOS and Safari. If Microsoft was okay with sacrificing Windows market share and instead controlled content and services, they would be much more valuable

They were more valuable (as % of total stock market) back in 1999.

MSFT massive valuation and the consequent Gates wealth swelling to 150B back in 1999 was the reason why the DOJ attacked them.

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