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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?

#331

Post by pjmlp »

criddell wrote: post #321
pjmlp wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sens…

On my bubble plenty of people care about hiring devs to produce Qt, WPF, MFC, WinUI stuff to keep running on Windows.

There are still so many use cases that a browser cannot cover.

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

#332

Post by mjul »

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…

#2 - remember the hype around VRML and how we would have virtual words in the browser?

I remember working with Silicon Graphics gear back then and the 3D guys were quite enthusiastic about it. Of course, we had all devoured William Gibson’s novels like Neuromancer so we were naturally attracted.

We even built some 3D desktop apps as portals to the wider internet. They were too static and too hard to build so the Internet with HTML had much more pull for producers and consumers as well.

In practice, I think the 3D stuff that really worked at the time was more games like Quake and avatar-based web apps like Habbo Hotel.

It would still be fun to go back and read Jaron Lanier’s writing from that era.

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

#333

Post by kingkongjaffa »

ja27 wrote: post #304
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 the mid-1980s my dad (PhD EE) talked me out of majoring in Computer Science initially because "you'd be a glorified typist". Glad I eventually switched to CS. 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 else is there in robotics?

You are either building killer robots like Boston Dynamics (morally reprehensible) and drone striking the middle east, or helping people make things with production line robots.

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

#335

Post by Dracophoenix »

ja27 wrote: post #304
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 the mid-1980s my dad (PhD EE) talked me out of majoring in Computer Science initially because "you'd be a glorified typist". Glad I eventually switched to CS. 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.

Several of the comments here echo your father's sentiment to some extent. How did a CS degree pay dividends for you in the 90's as opposed to majoring in math, a hard science, or engineering and learning to program on your own?

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

#336

Post by flyinghamster »

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…

Another one along that line that I've seen over and over: "smart" hardware vs. "dumb" hardware. Back in the days of analog modems, we had ones that were built on dedicated modem hardware, and the "Winmodems" that were basically just a DAC and an ADC. Or, the smart laser printers with built in PostScript interpreters vs. dumb printers where everything gets done in the driver.

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

#337

Post by kieckerjan »

Smithalicious wrote: post #317
zozbot234 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Symbolic AI gets used quite a lot, we just don't call it AI. Even expert systems, often seen as a late-1980s dead end, are based on the same sort of technology one would use for efficiently querying any database.

If the computer solves problems and we know what it's doing, that's software engineering If the computer solves problems and we don't know what it's doing, that's AI If the computer doesn't solve problems and we don't know what it's doing, that's Friday afternoon

Good one. I will remember that next time it's Friday.

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

#338

Post by ilaksh »

I expected VRML or something like it to become a really popular thing, and/or to see an open VR metaverse become popular and more-or-less ubiquitous.

I also thought that RAD tools would continue to stay popular.

Personally I still think that stuff will happen, it's just delayed by people's stupidity/ignorance.

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

#340

Post by ragnarok451 »

treespace88 wrote: post #276
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…

I call it the mainframe/desktop cycle. The 90s was peak desktop. Everything was on the local hard drive. Now everything is back on the mainframe(cloud) i fully expect it to cycle back to the desktop in some form. (we just won’t call it that)

Maybe services using wasm will pull compute back to the desktop, even though end users won't realize it.
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