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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?

#361

Post by pjmlp »

criddell wrote: post #351
pjmlp wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 finan…

Here is an example of businesses that won't use Web applications.

https://www.lab-services.nl/en/products/platebutler

https://www.zeiss.com/microscopy/int/products/imaging-system...

https://www.moleculardevices.com/products/cellular-imaging-s...

I spent 4 years developing in a mix of Forms, WPF and MFC for such domains between 2014 and 2018, and they keep looking for people in 2021, without any plans to migrate to Web technologies.

Regarding MFC, given the way Microsoft killed C++/CX and replaced it with clunky tooling for C++/WinRT, I actually consider it more productive than coding IDL files by hand without any kind of Visual Studio support.

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

#362

Post by koofdoof »

GartzenDeHaes wrote: post #155

I thought MS Comic Chat [1] style was going to be the future of UI design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

The artist who did the characters for Comic Chat, Jim Woodring, has an excellent comic series that is worth checking out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_(comics)

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

#363

Post by twox2 »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #179
twox2 wrote: post #149

As a 90s kid, I thought the internet would be more censorship resistant and less corporatized than it is today.

I've thought the opposite. I remember seeing Yahoo for the first time in 1993 and thinking "I can't believe they aren't using this to censor ideologically everything". They are doing it now tho.

Interesting. I imagine you are probably a few years older than me. I was too young to have that thought back then... but maybe I would now.

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

#365

Post by rchaud »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #179
twox2 wrote: post #149

As a 90s kid, I thought the internet would be more censorship resistant and less corporatized than it is today.

I've thought the opposite. I remember seeing Yahoo for the first time in 1993 and thinking "I can't believe they aren't using this to censor ideologically everything". They are doing it now tho.

I was on Yahoo News! daily during the 2004 US Presidential election. I can assure you that the comment sections were not censored in any way, so you can imagine the quality of the insights being posted.

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

#366

Post by rchaud »

codingdave wrote: post #189
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 - I believe this did happen much more than people realize. In the 90s and 00s, every company with more than 1-2000 employees would have an internal dev staff. I worked in some companies with 20 devs, some with half a dozen, but there was always a dev team in the IT group. Today, companies do low code via SharePoint and Salesforce. The do BI with Tableau and Power BI instead of internal BI teams. Their external web…

Low-code also applies to the day to day management of web content. It used to fall to the 'webmaster', who needed to know HTML/CSS, maybe multiple scripting languages, cybersecurity practices, etc.

Now you can hire content writers with experience in using CMS systems and leave the security/infrastructure part of it to developers.

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

#367

Post by rchaud »

sumedh wrote: post #325
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.

Yeah, and they responded to it by launching WebTV and Windows Mobile. At least the latter became something of a market standard, although firmly in 3rd/4th place behind Nokia, BlackBerry and Palm.

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

#368

Post by handrous »

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…

> 2. Local processing vs. dumb terminals and shared computing. The current "dumb terminal" phase being the idea that you can buy a $100 Chromebook and working entirely online.

Joke was on the proponents of this since web-apps bloated to require a damn super computer to run them with acceptable performance, until that YC/PG-backed startup that was posted on here recently came along selling mainframe-hosted-browsers-as-a-service-over-VNC.

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

#369

Post by embeddTrway690 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #314
csours wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2001 High School Graduate - People told me everything would be outsourced to India and it wasn't worth getting started in programming.

> People told me everything would be outsourced to India I'm not sure that this ever amounted to more than a urban legend. When you actually looked into the supposed outsourcing "trend", all you heard about was TheDailyWTF-grade horror stories.

Now In India, students starting CS are often told "CS has no longer demand" in recent years.

The problem was too many people entering engineering degrees after a temporary 'IT boom' decades ago, seeing that as a way towards upwards social mobility.

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

#370

Post by rchaud »

onion2k wrote: post #224

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…

I'm about 6 years younger than you judging from that timeline. I had a home phone line that could connect to a dial-up server. The desire to create websites didn't hit me until I too was in college, and by that time the web was much more complex than in '97, and I never got beyond basic static sites in Dreamweaver.

More than a decade later, I finally learned how to do it. HTML+CSS+JS and a bit of PHP for WordPress. I'll never be paid a cent for this knowledge as I'm not a web designer, but it feels good to work on my own sites, just as an expression of myself, and as a hobby.

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