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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?

#241

Post by indy »

mildavw wrote: post #231

I downloaded and installed the first “browser” (what a weird name) to see what the hype about “hypertext” (sounds sci-fi!) was all about. It was a page of text where some words were underlined and blue. And if you clicked on a blue word, it would jump you to a new page before you were even finished reading the first page! I remember thinking how dumb that was and must be for people with short attention spans. Uninsta…

Same here. It was just sending text across a network, how boring! Also the developers who worked on the Web were using scripting languages like Perl, not real languages that had to be compiled.

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

#242

Post by tluyben2 »

I wanted mostly everything we have now since the 80s (portable computers, access to BBSs everywhere, chat to your friends everywhere so I do not have to call them etc), but while working on some formally verified software back then in uni in the 90s, I thought we would be better at making software by now. It is better but not so much as I thought then. Ah well, it is still a young industry.

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

#243

Post by icedchai »

mgkimsal wrote: post #187
mcv wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Number…

I've been working with IPv4 since 1993, back when getting a SLIP or PPP connection was uncommon. I set up my first IPv6 tunnel back in 2007. When properly configured, IPv6 is no more difficult to set up than a IPv4 connection with DHCP: It just works.

It's actually simpler than IPv4 in many respects. For example, prefix delegation: My router is getting an IPv6 /56 block from my ISP using DHCPv6. It is then handing out /64 blocks of on several different subnets with minor configuration.

The average user doesn't care about IP addresses. They're using DNS.

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

#244

Post by zozbot234 »

dagw wrote: post #239

The big one is I thought 'visual code' and visual GUI building tools would continue to advance and play a lot bigger role in the future. I also thought we'd see new paradigms in GUI and desktop design take over, probably involving 3D. Everything related to how the internet has developed has been both awe inspiring and deeply disappointing.

> I also thought we'd see new paradigms in GUI and desktop design take over, probably involving 3D.

In a way, this has occurred. The Microsoft Bob, full-virtual-environment sort of 3D is not popular but modern UI's are generally hardware accelerated and use lightweight 3D effects to enhance UX, whereas this was very uncommon in the 1990's.

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

#245

Post by weinzierl »

I was pleasantly surprised that in the early web everything was text based and super easy to mess around with. I didn't seriously expect this to last into the noughties, though. I believed that most of the protocols will quickly be replaced by something more efficient and binary. Maybe even signed and encrypted...

Just when I started to think that will never happen, it happened;-)

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

#246

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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…

A contributing factor to this was the early and still fairly-extant asymmetry between upload and download bandwidth. This is going away slowly, especially with fiber (e.g. Verizon), but it was typical from the end of the dialup era right up until today to have upload be perhaps 1/10th of download bandwidth. This puts quite a crimp in self-hosting anything that becomes (or is hoped to become) particularly successful.

I had a friend who was there at the start of IP-over-cable, and they were particularly excited about the promise that they would be offering symmetric upload/download performance. By the time it became a consumer product, that too had this major asymmetry baked in.

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

#247

Post by kube-system »

magnusmundus wrote: post #20
bradleyjg wrote: post #12

Calls us fools, but we thought Linux on the desktop would happen. I guess it finally did, in a way, with chromebooks.

> chromebooks Huh, that's a name I haven't heard in a while. WSL, on the other hand...

There are way more chromebooks in the wild than there are installations of WSL

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

#250

Post by Dracophoenix »

scandox wrote: post #202

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.

You thought that we'd still be working with command line terminals? Or is there something more to it?
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