301–310 of 469 posts
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…
And I wouldn't have imagined something as locked up as iOS in my most dystopian nightmares. On the other hand there's Linux and RaspberryPi, which gives me some hope for the future.
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.
Starting from some point (Pentium Pro I suppose?) even x86 CPUs became RISC internally CISC externally.
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 the early 1990s, it sure felt like there was a limited market for robotics, machine learning, AI, etc. It was mostly industrial robotics and assembly line inspection cameras.
What many people thought was that the shift to object-oriented development, object oriented RPC systems (CORBA, "JavaBeans", some stuff in J2EE, OLE, etc) and CASE/modeling tools (UML, Rational Rose etc.) would turn the market into more of an automated component oriented system, with a marketplace of ready made components and more reliable systems with a faster time to market etc. Lots and lots of books sold about OO…
I still re-read this every few years: https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/
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…
My mid-90's telco experience involved a test deployment of citrix winframe (IIRC) dumb terminals. They worked okay, but not great. Every tech or bigco job i've had there's at least one mainframe codger doing the Kinge George "You'll be back" number from hamilton. Don't think they anticipated the non-MF cloud. Almost always among the best engineers though in the joint though, IME. I miss genuine differences in hardwar…
I miss genuine differences in hardware. Happy hour discussions about alpha vs sparc vs intel etc. I'm hopeful that diversity will come back around as a thing.
Can anyone recommend something quite a bit different that a guy could toy with? Or is this why everyone is having so much fun with 8 bit retrocomputers?
What many people thought was that the shift to object-oriented development, object oriented RPC systems (CORBA, "JavaBeans", some stuff in J2EE, OLE, etc) and CASE/modeling tools (UML, Rational Rose etc.) would turn the market into more of an automated component oriented system, with a marketplace of ready made components and more reliable systems with a faster time to market etc. Lots and lots of books sold about OO…
Frame relay? I’ll do you one better: remember when the Bellheads thought we’d be using ATM with virtual circuits for everything? I still re-read this every few years: https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/
In the late '80s I started studying AI in college, fully expecting it to boom. That did not really happen, until it did. Unfortunately, most of what I learned about AI back then is pretty useless now. I started with symbolic AI: parsers, tree searches, expert systems, logic. Even then it felt like this approach was stuck in a rut. So I changed lanes and studied early ML: decision trees, genetic algo's, nearest neighb…
This may not apply if you want to create new ML algorithms, but those jobs are rare in any case.
I went to university in September 1997. In my first week there I used the internet for the first time. It took me about an hour to decide I wanted to learn how to make my own website, to start figuring out what I needed to learn, and to fire up an editor and to write my first HTML tag. 6 months later I got my first freelance gig. I've been making web stuff ever since. I got it right, but with hindsight it was pretty…
It really felt like the Internet was a fantastical place, a destination for unlimited possibilities.
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.
2001 High School Graduate - People told me everything would be outsourced to India and it wasn't worth getting started in programming.