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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?

#461

Post by derefr »

labcomputer wrote: post #457
derefr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We just expected single core performance to double forever every 2 years or so. I don't get that. Moore's law is about transistor size shrinking, but that has an obvious end — transistors can't be smaller than one atom across. I feel like "everyone" did know that, even in the 90s. Or, at least, it was mentioned in every explanation of Moore's law itself. > Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would tak…

I’d argue that the larger problem is not that transistors can’t shrink forever, but that we stopped finding ways for additional transistors to usefully increase the speed of processors. For example, these techniques improve instructions per clock, at the cost of adding transistors: * pipelining (late 80’s early 90’s) MIPS R3000, Intel 486, Motorola 68040 * superscalarity (early 90’s) Pentium, DEC Alpha 21064, MIPS R8…

On the contrary, we got a number of improvements for novel workloads by first inventing new things we expected computers to need to do all the time (e.g. encryption-at-rest, signature validation), and then giving the ISA special-purpose accelerator ISA ops for those same operations.

> Nobody seems to be building a higher IPC CPU with 2x transistors

I mean, there are designs like this, but they run into problems of cache invalidation and internal bus contention.

The way to get around this is to enforce rules about how much can be shared between cores, i.e. make the NUMA cores not present a UMA abstraction to the developer but rather be truly NUMA, with each core having its own partition of main memory.

But then you lose backward compatibility with... basically everything. (You could run Erlang pretty well, but that’s basically it.)

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

#462

Post by impute »

_jbmf wrote: post #405
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some people are readers and some people are listeners.

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/reader-listener

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

#463

Post by labcomputer »

derefr wrote: post #461
labcomputer wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d argue that the larger problem is not that transistors can’t shrink forever, but that we stopped finding ways for additional transistors to usefully increase the speed of processors. For example, these techniques improve instructions per clock, at the cost of adding transistors: * pipelining (late 80’s early 90’s) MIPS R3000, Intel 486, Motorola 68040 * superscalarity (early 90’s) Pentium, DEC Alpha 21064, MIPS R8…

On the contrary, we got a number of improvements for novel workloads by first inventing new things we expected computers to need to do all the time (e.g. encryption-at-rest, signature validation), and then giving the ISA special-purpose accelerator ISA ops for those same operations. > Nobody seems to be building a higher IPC CPU with 2x transistors I mean, there are designs like this, but they run into problems of ca…

> [...] number of improvements for novel workloads by [...] (e.g. encryption-at-rest, signature validation) [...]

Sure, but that's not helping the general case. Only specific types of workloads. You could argue that adding lots of special-purpose hardware doesn't hurt from a transistor count (we have plenty) or power perspective (turn them off when not needed), but it can make layout tricky and reduce clock speed (which slows down everything else).

> [...] cache invalidation and internal bus contention [...] NUMA

Sure, but the context from spamizbad was specifically single-core performance. (I probably opened up a can of worms by mentioning hypertheading). The problem is many real-world workloads that add business value are not embarrassingly parallel problems. If it worked like that, Thinking Machines would have swept the court since the 1980's (they had NUMA like you are describing).

The point is that, since about 2005-2010ish, single-thread performance has mostly stalled. Intel CPUs can issue slightly more instructions per clock. AMD has a slightly better branch predictor. But performance growth has mostly been the result of adding more cores (Except Apple's M1 has some magic).

The things I previously mentioned gave big IPC gains on a diverse set of real workloads. Some innovations, like pipelining and multi-issue were responsible for 2x-4x IPC each. Pipelining, in particular, was a trick that also helped clock speeds.

All those innovations happened between the late 1980's and early 2000's. So an observer during that time might have just assumed that similar innovations would keep coming. But they haven't. A Pentium III has probably around 15x IPC compared to an i386 (maybe 60x if you include SIMD), in addition to a 40x higher clock speed (some of which came from adding more transistors).

How can you add transistors (say 2x or 3x) to a CPU to double performance on diverse, real-world problems that don't parallelize well? My point is, I don't think anyone knows, so it is irrelevant whether there is a physical limit to transistor shrinkage. We don't even know what to do with the transistors we have, so who cares if we can't have more?

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

#464

Post by cblconfederate »

rmah wrote: post #7

Well, I certainly didn't expect to still be coding for loops by hand in a text editor after 30 years. Guess it could be worse, at least I (mostly) don't have to worry about memory leaks anymore. So that's something I guess.

tbf computer science has not changed. Despite all the tech, we humans still use language to express our ideas so i don't think the coding of thoughts into serial text will go away

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

#465

Post by kayamon »

Melkman wrote: post #425
_wldu wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we have the DNS. People know names, not numbers. Use AAAA records.

Today people don't even remember DNS names anymore. They just use the search engine/advertisement provider of choice. DNS is of course still very useful to separate service names from physical architecture so you can move stuff around. But I hardly ever see people typing in DNS names or using bookmarks these days.

> But I hardly ever see people typing in DNS names or using bookmarks these days.

How often do you watch other people browse the web?

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

#466

Post by bcrl »

I didn't expect the proliferation of tech to result in a total loss of privacy. The internet was promising to be the great equalizer in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Broadband would mean access to jobs in rural communities revitalizing towns with new growth, and it seemed like everyone would be able to participate. That view is hopelessly naive today.

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

#467

Post by SomeT »

I thought it peaked towards the end of the nineties and stupidly stopped studying programming at all, I managed to keep a decent job with the skills I had until about 2010. I thought the internet would have died out by this time. I was such a stupid young kid.

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

#468

Post by karthiksripal »

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?

Maybe not the exact interview, but I came across this interview from Rollingstone where Jobs was super pumped about Objects oriented programming https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/steve-jobs...

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

#469

Post by meiraleal »

carapace wrote: post #135

I was sure that money would be effectively eliminated by MLM (multilevel marketing) plus six-degrees-of-separation, aka affiliate networks. I figured that once MLMs could be automated they would replace advertising. Folks would make money connecting each other to products and services through a kind of generic MLM network. Word-of-mouth on steroids. Heck, I still think it could work... What else? Flying cars, and fly…

> I figured that once MLMs could be automated they would replace advertising. Folks would make money connecting each other to products and services through a kind of generic MLM network. Word-of-mouth on steroids. Heck, I still think it could work...

This is happening now with crypto and the DeFi space. Products create tokens and the users hold it to be able to use some of the functions which drives the price of the token up and the developers profit.

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