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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?

#351

Post by criddell »

pjmlp wrote: post #331
criddell wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I work in C++ and MFC every day and really enjoy it. Do you see a lot of new projects choosing those technologies?

I agree that web apps can't do everything. I'd go one step further though and say there are lots of things that shouldn't be in the browser.

Businesses love web apps for the ease of administration and (unfortunately) surveillance. Devs like web apps for the write-once, run everywhere aspect and the financial opportunities of SAAS schemes.

Users, I think, are often best served by well written native apps. Unfortunately, outside of Mac apps, iOS apps, and games, they don't seem to be willing to support the development of those types of applications.

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

#352

Post by moftz »

kstrauser wrote: post #305
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #263

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/

I had to reread this part a couple times:

"How do you scare a Bellhead?" he begins. "First, show them something like RealAudio or IPhone.

Haha, I forgot IPhone was a trademark before the iPhone.

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

#353

Post by kstrauser »

moftz wrote: post #352
kstrauser wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I had to reread this part a couple times: "How do you scare a Bellhead?" he begins. "First, show them something like RealAudio or IPhone. Haha, I forgot IPhone was a trademark before the iPhone.

My first exposure to IOS was telnetting into a 7513.

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

#354

Post by auiya »

Less commercialized for sure, and certainly not being entirely consumed by predatory data gathering tactics. Also, I can recall in the early 2000's being enamored with the idea of cheap, unlimited, and ubiquitous high-speed wireless replacing all terrestrial infrastructure. Sadly, ISPs have colluded to ensure that never becomes a reality. I guess I'm just mad at commercialization overall?

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

#355

Post by gsibble »

I still remember my first palm pilot and already wondering why it wasn't a cell phone. I had a Nokia 9000iL that connected to the internet using a built in modem at 9600 baud in 1998 so I saw the internet as fully mobile from very early on.

I thought tech would be used more for good. The 90s were an incredible era where the internet and the people using it were usually good people interested in changing the world. Now everything is a scam, or collecting information on you. In the end, all internet money flows to advertising which is just sad. It's so over-commercialized and my original hopes have long been dashed.

At least I can run Linux. That makes me happy.

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

#356

Post by oftenwrong »

Software services would all support being plugged into a distributed transaction manager, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X/Open_XA . Instead there has been more of a shift toward embracing inconsistency.

Another: There was always this idea that in the future, applications would be built to run on the database, such as with stored procedures. Obviously, this was widely done, and continues to be done, but it never really matured in the way we expected. There is still a big gap in tooling to make this easy.

This is also related to the ideas we had back then about object persistence. One day, we imagined, we would just manipulate objects in memory, and all of the concerns about persisting those changes, including making it performant, would be taken care of.

Also, transactional memory was surely going to be the norm, whether in software or hardware.

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

#357

Post by goatlover »

lokedhs wrote: post #271
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…

Both of these hits home. Working at Sun in the late 90's, Java was a big thing, and while Sun was clearly way too early in their push for a universal virtual machine that could run anything, at the time people were complaining that Java could never be used for real software because of it not being natively compiled and using a GC. Well, now everyone are using Javascript and Python, and no one seems to be complaining.…

> Well, now everyone are using Javascript and Python, and no one seems to be complaining.

Read more Hacker News and you'll see complaints about both languages.

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

#358

Post by jghn »

trashface wrote: post #254
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 completely agree. With a different degree, one can still do programming. I worked with several good programmers who had no CS degree. Some had no degree at all. For me, CS was largely a waste. Most of the real, required-for-job programming skills I learned were self-taught anyway. I just used CS as an on-ramp to industry. Maybe nowadays CS is required for "signalling" but it definitely wasn't in the 90s. Wish I had…

Over time I found the CS degree worked out. I was able to pick up the necessary domain knowledge for my own specialty. And having the deeper understanding of how/why things work at a theoretical level enabled me to transition to new technologies faster than people I know who just "learned to code".

But yes. As a junior developer where my programming skills were roughly the same as my friends who had non-coding skills as well, there was some second guessing on my part

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

#359

Post by pjmlp »

kube-system wrote: post #343
pjmlp wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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+

I bet the amount of Windows PC sold worldwide beats that.

Yes not everyone installs WSL, because it is a tool for sell PCs to GNU/Linux developers that rather pay Apple and are neither buying Chromebooks nor Apple laptops.

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

#360

Post by oftenwrong »

bitwize wrote: post #319

I was expecting open source to take over. I was also expecting something like a decentralized form of cloud computing, similar to Plan 9 where you can just attach remote resources to your local PC and get instant access to their CPU, storage, etc. I was expecting the internet to turn into decentralized peer-to-peer "fabric" where everyone could publish or subscribe to whatever they wanted from their own machine. (Whe…

>I was also expecting something like a decentralized form of cloud computing, similar to Plan 9 where you can just attach remote resources to your local PC and get instant access to their CPU, storage, etc.

This was definitely a common vision. Being able to attach machines together ubiquitously. We would be able to have a room of multiple computers, as well as computers over the network, all working as one machine; sharing peripherals, audio-visual inputs and outputs, CPU, storage, etc. And it could all be used by multiple people at once. There would be no walled gardens required to share my screen with someone else across the world, or play the same music from every device.

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