Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 469 posts

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

#321

Post by criddell »

pjmlp wrote: post #295
criddell wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that time was a bit of a golden age. Pre-PC, users were at the mercy of mainframe administrators. On their desk was a terminal that gave you a view into somebody else's computer. Then IBM started a revolution - giving control to users and they changed the world for the better. It didn't last long though. In the 90's PCs started their devolution back to being little more than dumb terminals giving us a view in…

Lets see what Windows 11 brings, but I bet it will still be WinUI powered.

I don't think Windows will change much. They will reskin it, add more ways to change settings (especially remote admin), but what else is there to do? A lot of it is still plain old win32 and I don't think that's a particularly bad thing. Windows has been good enough for a long time now.

Microsoft's problem is that nobody cares about Windows anymore. Businesses are moving to web apps which I think makes a lot of sense for businesses. Gamers use it because that's where games run best. Who runs Windows because they are a Windows enthusiast? I know they exist, but not in the same numbers that exist for the Mac even though the Mac's market share is relatively small. (for the record, the only Apple computer I own is an iPad).

So Microsoft mostly wants to keep their users. There really isn't a path for growth which means there's not a lot of reason for investment.

I'm bummed about this and have been thinking about it a lot lately because I've been reading Ellen Ullman's Life in Code. In it she laments the fade out of the PC era (20 years ago!) and the loss of privacy and security and power that users had for a brief moment between mainframes and web apps.

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

#322

Post by analyte123 »

tasogare wrote: post #217
k__ wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In a way they were right. Movie and music have better definition, games better graphics but on a functional level everything we do today (web browsing, text messaging, video call, email, online shopping) already existed 15 years ago. There is more bloat (JS and Electron), more confusing UI design, more privacy invasive software now and but for the end user nothing really changed.

Not true, now you can also do those same things on a cell phone! Seriously though, some things are new but disappointingly few. Voice recognition and machine translation actually work now. VR has gotten pretty good but not many use it. Virtualization has improved a lot. More-or-less functional cryptocurrencies exist. Things like lane keeping and adaptive cruise control are almost standard on new cars. What else am I missing?

I agree that for a tech-savvy consumer end-user, not that much has changed. But endless porting and migrations aside, there are still plenty of businesses and industries that need new software for new ideas. For example most every new concept in medicine or finance needs software.

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

#323

Post by _wldu »

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…

That's why we have the DNS. People know names, not numbers. Use AAAA records.

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

#324

Post by [deleted] »

danbolt wrote: post #18
stakkur wrote: post #9

So many 'trends' back then. A few that come to mind (from the pre-web days, anyway): * Thin clients: everybody was going to have a 'dumb terminal', and all the computing/storage would happen elsewhere. There were many variations on this idea. * PIMs: Palm Pilots and all the variations. I knew a guy who quit his job to develop Palm Pilot wares, claiming it was 'the future'. In a way, he was right. * Windows: Linux was…

When it comes to thin clients, a lot of computing does happen via web services these days, albeit mostly video streaming and REST-based applications. Did you envision things a little differently?

[deleted]

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

#325

Post by sumedh »

paxys wrote: post #16

Definitely thought that consumer software (the thing sold in boxes on store shelves) would continue to get bigger as a category rather than die out completely. Anyone remember that famous photo of the guy jumping with joy after snagging a launch copy of Windows 95? No one knew what the internet really was and what it would become. Not Bill Gates, not anyone else. Developers believed that processing power, RAM, storag…

> Not Bill Gates, not anyone else.

Didnt Bill Gates send a memo to MS employees in the 90's that internet is going to be very important and they have to take it seriously.

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

#326

Post by kstrauser »

geocrasher wrote: post #306
zonethundery wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. THIS. Right now there are three mainstream choices: Win, Linux, Mac And I'm sorry- no matter how diverse your Linux distro is or even what hardware you're running it on (x86 vs ARM etc), it's still just Linux. And again, sorry- Linux just isn't interesting anym…

A lot of people around me are playing with Plan 9 these days, but I haven’t paused to figure out why yet.

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

#327

Post by maestroia »

blunte wrote: post #284

It's less about what I expected, but more about what I did not expect. The pace of technology change has accelerated dramatically, the complexity of software has grown beyond imagination, and perhaps correspondingly, the fragility and interdepencency has grown out of control. We (myself included) have become so acclimated to complex software as users that we forget how much work is buried under the surface of a "simp…

You'll enjoy this read from 1996.

"...the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups."

https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

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

#328

Post by rom16384 »

I expected the common programming language would be an improved Visual Basic or other Visual Programming Language (drag component to screen, write event handler), and that desktop applications would continue to be the dominant form of computing. DHTML looked like a toy, and I didn't take it seriously, and although I knew the internet was a revolution I only saw it as a means to distribute information, not as way to do stuff, so you would have to download and install an app, not run it in the browser (or buy the app in CDROM and receive patches via the internet). Most people had either limited (pay per minute, modem speeds) or no access to the internet.

I expected most people to be able to create and publish their own websites using desktop apps like Microsoft FrontPage or Dreamweaver, and that these types of apps would be the dominant way to create content on the web.

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

#329

Post by at_a_remove »

Wow, this was calculated to make me feel old.

I actually own some of the more speculative non-fiction books on "Cyberspace," in particular the representational aspect. I did expect some higher levels of abstraction to be present when it comes to working with data, browsing file systems, making connections, and so on. I was not necessarily expecting wireframe graphics, but yes, more abstraction. The closest I have seen is something like WinDirStat when it comes to looking at a directory, and even that is just colored blocks. I knew the graphics processing would be intense to match the bandwidth of the human visual channel.

I did see the Wild Wild West era of the Internet coming to a close, having donned white and grey hats myself off and on. The early Internet had security holes such you could drive a bus through them honking and dragging a bunch of rusty bikes behind you. The invention of the img tag more or less began the Advertising Era, whether they knew it or not.

I did have an early suspicion about privacy, and permanence, so my Usenet posts from 1989 never had my name on them. So far this has remained a decent decision.

I did not expect a trend in programming languages I have a hard time describing but can only sum as "yes, every programming paradigm and idiom will be crammed into that language over time if allowed."

I have never expected VR to take off until other technologies are in place and cheap. They aren't here yet.

I have never expected the "Fifth Generation" anyone-can-code drag-and-drop thing to happen and I believe that by the time such a thing is available (and effective at scale), it would be AI anyway.

None of the approaches to AI have been promising to me, aside from Cyc, which I would describe as being necessary, but not sufficient.

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

#330

Post by fendy3002 »

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 think it's safe to say that we were close with this one, with jetbrains java (awt / swing) and wpf / winforms visual studio.

Then dot com, mobile and responsiveness arrived.

Post reply on HN