Early 90s?
Networking: ATM to the desktop, QoS everywhere, apps reserving capacity as consumers.
Software: 4GL, low code, data definitions which trigger code generators.
Add to this the paradigm of intelligent agents doing your programmatic bidding.
Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
391–400 of 469 posts
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#392What 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/
Walked into new multi-campus hospital; fiber and an ATM core. Didn't take much to configure and start up an IP instance, some token ring I think, and associated support daemons. It worked very well and left me impressed. Oh, and synchronizing two sniffers to actually force our management to apply pressure to AT&T when it wouldn't acknowledge dropping packets.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#393What 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…
There is this Jobs interview when he also discusses how there will be a marketplace for objects and people will buy and sell objects instead of software. In one sense it failed because all it ever saves you is the typing. You still have to learn the whole model, sometimes it is like learning a programming language from scratch. On the other hand, it may have succeeded. Objects don't exist in isolation but as a librar…
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Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which books would those be? What exactly was your part in your grey hat days?
I would have to dig through my boxes to find those books. They were rather dense and a little esoteric. The grey hat stuff consisted of things like breaking out of the restrictive policies of my campus to get onto the Internet proper, tricking the equivalent of the (yet to be dubbed) script kiddies to incriminating themselves, and sort of Robin-Hooding accounts back away from a gent who spent a lot of time hacking ac…
This was in a university setting I take it? I wouldn't have thought the early Internet/NSFNET was exciting enough to hack into. Usenet, yes. But the Internet? Wasn't it just a document retrieval system for scientific work?
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would have to dig through my boxes to find those books. They were rather dense and a little esoteric. The grey hat stuff consisted of things like breaking out of the restrictive policies of my campus to get onto the Internet proper, tricking the equivalent of the (yet to be dubbed) script kiddies to incriminating themselves, and sort of Robin-Hooding accounts back away from a gent who spent a lot of time hacking ac…
This was in a university setting I take it? I wouldn't have thought the early Internet/NSFNET was exciting enough to hack into. Usenet, yes. But the Internet? Wasn't it just a document retrieval system for scientific work?
Well, we couldn't get out to it to even see what was there, which, by then had IRC, gopher, archie, and so on. Usenet. It was all locked away and we were curious.
We randomized the exchange listing, split up the results, and then proceeded to war-dial the entire exchange until we found a forgotten (and unprotected) modem line in the math department, which then hosted all of computer science. From there out to what were called "telnet gates," which were known only from rumor and just knowing of them was a commodity in and of itself.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#396Earlier 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.
I'm not sure that this ever amounted to more than a urban legend.
Urban legend? Entire books were written on the subject, by respected authors, too:
https://www.amazon.com/Decline-American-Programmer-Edward-Yo...
The book is not only pushing 30 years old, it was crap when I bought it in hardcover in '93, and whoo boy, did that one not age well.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#397I thought the digital divide will be a serious problem. It is in fact a problem now but not how I thought about it. I thought, in the future, everybody has a computer so it will be a part of basic literacy. Most of our generation will be obsolete because we can't stand a chance against people who all had computers in their home at their birth. Then, the smartphone was invented and most people were just satisfied with…
>>In the late 1990s to 2000s, there were so many personal text web sites, public forums and chats in my language, Japanese. Now it's all gone. There is no place in the modern Internet I can enjoy serious text-based communication in Japanese. Because, everyone use the smartphone now and it's so inefficient to write a serious text with it.
If you mean forums in the vein of Ayashii World, they still exist in the form of 2channel/Futaba. Unless you mean something else.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#398I thought the digital divide will be a serious problem. It is in fact a problem now but not how I thought about it. I thought, in the future, everybody has a computer so it will be a part of basic literacy. Most of our generation will be obsolete because we can't stand a chance against people who all had computers in their home at their birth. Then, the smartphone was invented and most people were just satisfied with…
Gradually, I've learned that the history of almost all technology is this:
1. Smart, well-meaning people see a problem, and try to craft a solution.
2. Bad actors completely ignore these good intentions and use the new invention for money and power, harming or exploiting the general population in the process.
This isn't to say progress is never made, but the lion's share of the benefits of any new tech always ends up going right back to the rich and powerful that didn't need it in the first place.
I wasn't a programmer in the 90's, but I did grow up then, and into the hacker culture of the 00s. Looking back, I feel comradeship for the radicals in the 60s. A revolution was in the air, things were going to change! And then it all petered away to nothing.
Smart, well-meaning people constantly dream of freeing everyone: from poverty, or political oppression, or ideological entanglement. One more advance, one more theory or piece of tech and then we'll have it! But the general populace will never be free, because they don't want to be. On an unconscious level, they desire their cage. Freedom is scary and uncomfortable. That's why smartphones replaced PCs, and why software and the web became a closed, user-hostile morass. Most people do not want the power to self-actualize. They just want to be kept comfortable until they die.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#399Definitely 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…
> guy jumping with joy after snagging a launch copy of Windows 95? I was pretty excited about it too... And I was a kid in the 90s. I once worked with a guy who got excited about new releases of directx... Which I also admit could be a little exciting
Innovation is exciting. Serious, exciting innovation in most of the computing world has ground to a near halt for over a decade now. Most things, hardware, software, web etc are just iterative, and often a step backward. Nothing to be excited about anymore.
In the 90s, not getting an expensive new PC every 2 years or so meant you were screwed if you wanted to play any of the cool new games coming out. I haven't upgraded my system in over 5 years, and I can still play most new titles with a few minor graphic settings turned down or off.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was in a university setting I take it? I wouldn't have thought the early Internet/NSFNET was exciting enough to hack into. Usenet, yes. But the Internet? Wasn't it just a document retrieval system for scientific work?
Well, we couldn't get out to it to even see what was there, which, by then had IRC, gopher, archie, and so on. Usenet. It was all locked away and we were curious. We randomized the exchange listing, split up the results, and then proceeded to war-dial the entire exchange until we found a forgotten (and unprotected) modem line in the math department, which then hosted all of computer science. From there out to what we…
"Telnet gates" being early form of a static proxy funneled through separate hardware? If so, I could see how they would valuable for ,say, the Kevin Mitnicks of the era.