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

UWP/WinRT is basically an improved COM, it never went away, rather took over most of the modern Windows APIs since XP.

Pity that WinDev keeps producing the same tools as back in MDIL 1.0 days though, the only good tool C++/CX, got killed by them.

Selfhosting can also just be: hosting your own email and website and not on AWS.

I was a programmer in the 90s but I didn't become a paid professional until the early 2000s.

I thought that the internet would kill the tabloid press (I am in the UK), and give the public better quality news and information. Instead, the internet became the tabloid.

I thought that it would be the "other guys" who would first leverage the internet as a political platform. People descended from 90s hacktivists, DMT-eating civil libertarians and the like. The rise of internet driven populism was a surprise to me.

I thought that in the future I would own an SGI home computer with superpowered custom chips, or something like a Playstation 2 with an os and keyboard. That is, something highly integrated like the home computers were.

I kind of miss the immersive experience of working with a computer where the whole thing is a unified design and you have a couple of big books which tell you everything you'll need to know to program them, and all the layers of abstraction are accessible and make sense to the programmer-user.

Back then, I thought that the computers of the future would be more profound rather than merely more complex. That they would still be knowable to the lone hacker, only they would demand more from them. Instead we have these huge complexes of ordinary complexity, reminiscent of power station piping diagrams, that we work on in teams as bureaucrats of abstraction. Of course, back then I was a kid, in love with the mystique of computers, there was a lot I romanticized, and a lot I didn't know.

I thought there would be more visual tools for programming, things derived from NeXT Interface Builder, Visual Basic and multimedia authoring systems that people used to use to make CD ROMs and information kiosks in the 90s. And I thought that the development process would be more integrated. We wouldn't be bothering with stacks of batch-mode build tools and things like that, and it would be relatively easy to open a window or play a sound in a high level language without having to do C bindings to third party cross-platform toolkits etc.

I didn't think programming would be replaced with graphical tools, I thought it would be augmented by them, in a unified, ergonomic package.

I thought VR would get going sooner than it did. I was a big fan of Howard Rheingold's 1991 book "Virtual Reality" (a great guide to early VR) and got to try it out in 1993 at a computer exhibition. I used to fantasize about going to VR arcades and playing flight simulators with a bunch of people. Now I do it at home with IL2: Great Battles.

One prediction I got right was shaders on graphics cards. Back in the late 90s I was a user of BMRT, a shareware Renderman-compliant raytracer which introduced me to the idea of programmable shaders. I figured it was only a matter of time before they ended up in consumer hardware, and my ears pricked up when the author of BMRT went to work for Nvidia.

Having been around for all of the 90s: I was in my twenties. I really didn't care that much about the future of tech, because it was all fun and exciting. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think the twenties are a period of deep contemplation about long-term trends ;)

The things I did see were kind of right there. You could see Linux taking shape - and the biggest driver there, IMHO, was that Unix as an OS removed a lot of constraints Windows and macOS had at the time, that Linux was free & open, and that the entire teaching environment used some form of Unix.

You could see that Internet thing take shape. (I'm still cranky with myself I didn't see it enough, so I turned down several excellent startup options). A commercial future was still dubious. At least to me, but then, I'm not a futurist ;)

You could believe, for a glorious moment, that open sharing was an unalloyed good, and privacy wasn't necessary. (That lasted about 18 months, but for a brief moment in time, it felt amazing)

Most of us spent a lot of time making fun of early video sharing attempts, because we could do math. (Bandwidth made it impossible). We were less good in estimating how much bandwidth would increase. Also, the funniest early attempt was Oracle, because Oracle had a reputation even back then.

The one thing I did "see" early on was that single-core was headed to the dustbin. Mostly because I had the fortune to work with a bunch of people who worked on transputers. A dead-end tech by itself, but it made a very clear point that networked systems of cores are extremely powerful.

Looking back, what strikes me most is how little has changed. We had passionate editor wars. We had OS fanboys. We had our own overhyped and underused lazy FP language (Miranda, back then). We still applied functional principles, just not in that language. Lisp was supposed to be cool, but nobody used it. Nobody wrote FORTRAN, but we'd have been doomed without numeric libraries from FORTRAN. C (and figments of C++) were the workhorse for heavy tasks. The lighter lifting, you did in a scripting language (Perl), because ain't nobody got time for C++. GUIs were derided as fat and bloated, and people in general clamored for the good old times of fast and light software. Programs were at the outer limit of complexity we could manage.

I started in the late 90s when I learnt HTML and tiny bits of Javascript and Perl. The only thing I can remember thinking was this should be easier. Most people used lots of different specialist tools back then, Dreamweaver for web pages, massive IDEs for programming etc. As I got into PHP later I kept thinking I was just repeating the same patterns over and over again.

Much later I discovered things like Ruby on Rails and Django. I switched to emacs and most others switched to editors like vim and VS Code. And things are just generally so much better now. A lot of the things I imagined would be possible back then actually happened.

What I got wrong was how popular the internet would become and what it would be used for. Back then it was mainly a space for geeks. Sure there were a few non-geeks doing internet shopping even back then, but anyone contributing to the internet was more of a geek. There were no girls on the internet. Anonymity was default. While, of course, there was a person behind each handle, it was no concern who they were in meatspace. On the Internet, everyone was equal. Anyone could be anything. Like Neo in the Matrix. That all changed with social media and the big corps decided they wanted to tie us to meatspace IDs. Everyone joined and they brought their meatspace bullshit with them. I didn't see that coming.