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

341–350 of 469 posts

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

#341

Post by mjul »

brodouevencode wrote: post #280
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…

By the late 90s it was fully expected that Java would take over everything. And it did kinda for a while.

Oh yes, servlets were such a breath of fresh air.

However that was more of an afterthought- I remember that when it came out I initially bought into the write-once-run-anywhere hype and the idea that Java was for writing applets.

The UIs were too clunky (AWT) or foreign (Swing, the second attempt) and the Java SDKs buggy so in the end HTML just improved faster and took over the presentation layer together with Futuresplash (later renamed to Flash).

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

#342

Post by flyinghamster »

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…

Haiku OS, maybe? It is under active development. https://www.haiku-os.org/

But a key problem with alternative OSes is that if you want to use them as daily drivers, your software choices may be limited or nonexistent. Haiku, for instance, has a WebKit-based browser, but no Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, or Safari.

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

#343

Post by kube-system »

pjmlp wrote: post #297
kube-system wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If we constrain the market to US, maybe.

30.7 million sold just in 2020. 40 million has been forecasted for 2021. Various stats for the number of software developers on the planet cite numbers between 24 and 26 million.

MS doesn't, to my knowledge, post stats on WSL installations, but it's not 30 million+

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

#344

Post by Dracophoenix »

maestroia wrote: post #316
coldpie wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In contrast myself and my CS friends had, well, we had knowledge of Turing machines with infinite tapes. Yeah. Going to school for Computer Science is probably the biggest regret in my life. I could have spent that time & money learning something useful/interesting instead, or better yet, not waste my time in University at all.

I graduated in 1990 with triple major in CompSci, Political Science, and Psychologywhi l it data science!) these gave me the domain and technical knowledge. Fast forward to today, and my biggest regret is either: a) not going directly on to get a PhD in Psychology, which would have been very beneficial now; or, b) not going back and taking over the family farm, which would see me truly working for myself at something…

Which university offers/ed triple majors? And what would've made your psychology PHD beneficial?

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

#345

Post by gradschool »

I thought asynchronous circuits would be more prevalent in the future because clock speeds couldn't increase indefinitely, but it turned out that everyone would rather use all kinds of weird-ass kludges to avoid them in ASIC and FPGA design such as frequency scaling and multiple clock domains. I also expected functional programming to become more mainstream, which partly happened.

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

#346

Post by mtberatwork »

k__ wrote: post #213
Svperstar wrote: post #177

I was told when I majored in CS in year 2000 that "in 20 years Java will be the only language" and also "it will impossible for an American to get a job as they will be hiring all of their programmers from India"

Java had a good run. But when I want to university to study CS in 2007 it was just a marginalia. Some profs would use it for examples, but until Android gave it a second spring in 2010, we mostly used C/C++ and PHP.

Had a good run? Java is still huge.

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

#347

Post by sdevonoes »

I thought that by now we would get something like a global virtual reality simulation (something like one in Ready Player One)... instead now we have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Huge disappointment to see so much talent so much wasted.

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

#349

Post by zozbot234 »

gradschool wrote: post #345

I thought asynchronous circuits would be more prevalent in the future because clock speeds couldn't increase indefinitely, but it turned out that everyone would rather use all kinds of weird-ass kludges to avoid them in ASIC and FPGA design such as frequency scaling and multiple clock domains. I also expected functional programming to become more mainstream, which partly happened.

Multiple clock domains is really just async-lite. True async circuits have to pay for all that added complexity, except to an even greater extent.

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

#350

Post by zozbot234 »

sdevonoes wrote: post #347

I thought that by now we would get something like a global virtual reality simulation (something like one in Ready Player One)... instead now we have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Huge disappointment to see so much talent so much wasted.

Second Life is from the 2000s, not so much the 1990s. But I kinda get your point.
Post reply on HN