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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?

#11

Post by rcurry »

I’m embarrassed to say this on HN, but straight up I thought 9600 baud connections were the shit in the late eighties - who would ever need more bandwidth than this?!? Now I get pissed off when the 4K video on my phone stutters for a second.

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

#13

Post by hunter2_ »

haser_au wrote: post #6

A lot more visible (i.e. on the street) robots. We see robots in manufacturing plants (e.g. cars), but not too many visible when you walk down the street. Of course, they're there, but hidden inside various normal looking objects. Automatic street lights, driverless trains, boom gates for public transport.

Robot/bot can mean many things, but typically means a humanoid object. I suppose controlling street lights used to be an entirely human job, but when the automated version of it looks nothing like a human, is it really a robot? Chat bots lack a physical similarity to the human body, but in text mode communications do resemble human activity.

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

#14

Post by wrs »

Ubiquitous wireless networking and tablet computers. (That one came true!)

Programming environments based on something other than editing text files directly. (See the Self, Smalltalk, or Dylan environments.)

Object-oriented programming world domination. (That came true but we’re slowly recovering.)

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

#15

Post by spamizbad »

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? Maybe something else? And the CLI would be gone

3) Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs

4) Microsoft taking over and Unix dying

5) All programming would be object-oriented (We are talking 90s style definition here)

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

#16

Post by paxys »

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, storage etc. would continue to grow exponentially to the point where there would just be too much of it and we wouldn't need to care about any resource constraints when writing code.

Writing code line by line in a text editor was supposedly on its way out, to be replaced by fancy IDEs, WYSIWYG, UML etc.

All the jobs were supposed to go to India. Programming as a profession has always been on the brink of death for one reason or another, and yet here we are.

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

#17

Post by bluedino »

Thought for sure windows would have been replaced with one of Microsoft’s concept OS’s

Did not see the workstation companies going away so fast

Disk storage and networking got really, really cheap

Did not expect such fast mobile phones (cpu and bandwidth wise)

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

#18

Post by danbolt »

stakkur wrote: post #9

So many 'trends' back then. A few that come to mind (from the pre-web days, anyway): * Thin clients: everybody was going to have a 'dumb terminal', and all the computing/storage would happen elsewhere. There were many variations on this idea. * PIMs: Palm Pilots and all the variations. I knew a guy who quit his job to develop Palm Pilot wares, claiming it was 'the future'. In a way, he was right. * Windows: Linux was…

When it comes to thin clients, a lot of computing does happen via web services these days, albeit mostly video streaming and REST-based applications. Did you envision things a little differently?
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