Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like? • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by ergot_vacation » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

jonnycomputer wrote: post #267

diego_moita wrote: post #65

I really believed computers would make people smarter, better informed, able to make more rational decisions. They'd understand and trust science more, make better political decisions. We even had a slogan for it: "computers are bicycles for the mind": https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-... I was so naive...

It is a bicycle for the mind. Remember back when if you wanted to learn about a topic, you had to travel to a library, spend a couple hours looking up books in a card catalogue, and then find 1 book, that maybe answers your question. I'm constantly using the internet to learn new things, to learn about all kinds of things (e.g. Californian urchin galls, best way to process small branches for firewood, the use bison h…

Put another way, computers and the Internet are a tool to accelerate the process of becoming more of what you are. If what you are is a curious, humble person looking to understand the world better, it can help with that. If you're a vicious self-promoter looking to crush everyone on your way to the top, it can help with that too. If you're a terrorist looking for how to build a bomb or fly a plane or use certain guns, again, it can help.

Computers are information. Giving people access to information does not magically make them moral, or curious, or thoughtful. It just amplifies what they were already trying to do.

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

#402

Post by amedvednikov » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 6:49 PM UTC

omarhaneef wrote: post #288

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…

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…

I've been trying to find that interview. Do you maybe have a link?

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

#403

Post by jfengel » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 6:53 PM UTC

csours wrote: post #264

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.

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

I graduated high school in 1988, and made the same assumption. I don't think anybody explicitly said it to me, but it seemed obvious. They're plenty smart and they're sufficiently good at English (often, flawless).

I still don't entirely understand why it turns out to be so hard to outsource. I get some of it, but it seems like something that we should have figured out by now. I'll be interested to see what the post-pandemic shift to remote work does for that.

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

#404

Post by bigbillheck » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

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…

That's just the good old-fashioned dialectic : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic

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

#405

Post by _jbmf » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 7:03 PM UTC

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #158

simonw wrote: post #26

I thought that giving everyone in the world access to the sum total of human knowledge via the internet would be all upside. And I thought that conspiracy theories were harmless fun.

This. At bare minimum, a better-informed population that would be increasingly resistant to gov’t and corporate propaganda. And in a sense, that kind of came to pass. Nobody believes _anything_ the government says anymore, and skepticism is at all-time highs. It’s just… everything. I also bet very heavily against the widespread popularity of video on the net, not due to any technical limitations, but simply because r…

I don't understand the use of video to teach many things. Particularly when it's not just a "Building this together" tutorial, it's a "teaching core concepts" video. You can't go back and forth on a video without quickly skipping through it, you really have to watch the whole thing. And listening to human speech is much slower than reading. I understand it for some things (Gaming, DIY, etc) but not teaching thinking subjects.

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

#406

Post by omarhaneef » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 7:05 PM UTC

amedvednikov wrote: post #402

omarhaneef wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've been trying to find that interview. Do you maybe have a link?

I think he has said a few times, almost certainly also mentioned in "the lost interview".

He usually says something like: They showed me three things are Xerox Parc, first, the windows mouse graphic interface, second, networked computing and the third thing I didn't notice at the time which is object oriented software.

Then he mentions how at Apple they did the first, and the internet is the second. At Next, they are doing the third, and then brings up objects.

It was during the NEXT era. Here is the lost interview: https://youtu.be/Jk4dzQs859M

But, as I said, I think he has also said it at other places.

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

#407

Post by injinj » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 7:16 PM UTC

jl2718 wrote: post #375

I did not expect html, http, or even tcp/ip to become dominant. I didn’t expect CSP centralization. Video over http/tcp? You have got to be crazy. Portable code in text (JavaScript) seemed ridiculous. I was quite young at the time writing file sharing and chat network applications, and did a lot of experiments building WANs for doom. Most things I was interested required single multicast and rebroadcasted packets wit…

I remember downloading and compiling Mosaic and thinking that this is stupid. A glacially slow way to display text with links and graphics, who's going to want that? Why not display text as it was meant to be displayed, on a terminal.

I still think there will be a return of peer to peer eventually, since every pocket has a computer capable of computation and bandwidth unimaginable back then. The ultimate form of data privacy is when you control the power plug.

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

#408

Post by tonyedgecombe » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

omarhaneef wrote: post #288

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…

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…

There was a market for components back in the nineties. People were buying VBX's and OCX's for Visual Basic and Delphi applications. Component Source had a huge catalogue.

Open source killed it all.

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

#409

Post by GPerson » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 7:31 PM UTC

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…

For #1, did people really believe this? In hindsight, granted, it just sounds obvious that the doubling would have to slow down pretty quickly. Was there some magical feeling in the culture that’s no longer present?

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

#410

Post by duped » Tue, Jun 22, 2021, 7:36 PM UTC

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…

> Compiled (native) vs. interpreted (bytecode/VMs)

The debate today is mostly AoT vs JIT compilers, I don't see anyone bring up VMs unless they're talking about how slow Python is.

I also don't see anyone bringing up "portability" anymore - compilers support all the architectures people care about, while libraries and APIs are designed to be platform agnostic as far as they can be while developers recognize there is no such thing as portable software (and where portable software is absolutely required, it shall run in the browser).