I always kick myself that I didn't really appreciate the trends of increasing processing power, reduced size and so on, and what that would mean (smartphones, cloud computers, etc.) While at the same time, also not having much idea about the future now. Visualising the future seems hard.
Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
261–270 of 469 posts
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nothing is preventing society from using the internet in that way You are _technically_ correct, but I think you are minimizing network effects by simply calling it "easier". These days you are pretty much required to use those same 10 sites if you want to interact with anyone, do business, or find useful information. Those 10 sites have effectively captured the Internet.
>, but I think you are minimizing network effects by simply calling it "easier". The gp is saying the millions choosing the "easier" action is what causes the network effects . E.g. another example that applies to tech-savvy programmers: most developers have the knowledge (or can Google a tutorial) to host their own personal git server but most choose not to . The collective millions choosing not to bother with self-…
it really is much harder to self host than it used to.
90s: ask your ISP for a public IP, register your domain, start Apache and off you go
Nowadays: getting a public IP is iffy. All good domain names are taken. Emails from your self-hosted mail server go straight to spam/junk. Fiddling with TLS certificates is close to mandatory. The moment you start your server, you're bombarded by a flood of gratuitous requests, trying out every known vulnerability under the sun. etc. etc.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#263What 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 patterns, methodologies, etc.
IMHO that didn't happen, the integration morass remained, and I'd consider much of that model a failure in retrospect.
On the infrastructure front, I seem to remember a lot of talk about Frame Relay (EDIT: actually I was thinking of ATM, thanks for correction below). And fiber installs all over the place, lots of money in getting fiber into downtown areas, etc. Also I don't think people really predicted the possibility of the dominance of the "cloud" as it is now, really. I mean, hosting services were I'm sure a growth market but "serious" companies were seen as wanting to have their own DCs, and I don't recall major talk or trend away from that until the mid 2000s ("SaaS" etc. became the buzzword around then, too).
Also JavaScript as a serious presentation layer system wasn't much talked about until the 2000s.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#264When 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.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#265Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#266While I'm not typically a very good "futurist", I was involved with things like Linux and the world wide web pretty early. I was in my 20's, mostly working on a mainframe based issue database (sort of jira-like) called PNMS, in the very early 90's.
We were migrating it to a Sun 690MP running SunOS. So, for the end users of PNMS, we got to try different ways of getting them acccess. DOS/Windows and packet drivers, Sun X-Terminals, Workstations, etc. The DOS and Windows experiences were buggy and generally lousy for the end users. The Sun xterms and workstations were great, but crazy expensive. So I was able to sell the otherwise stodgy management on Linux. Slackware, specifically, in the Linux kernel 0.99-1.x days.
Linux was still buggy at the time, but if you used the right hardware, and rebooted at night, the end users didn't notice much of the issues.
So, after getting it all working, it was interesting to me that a one-man show OS was working better and/or cheaper than what the industry leads could offer. I knew it would go somewhere.
Similar for the web. This was at a US military base, so they had access to the internet. I was given a Linux PC and modem to take home for on-call, so we had internet at the house. I remember showing my wife the very early Pizza Hut website where people in one city in California could order pizza on the site. She didn't get it, perhaps because she's very outgoing and the phone seemed natural. Being more of an introvert, though, I did get it, and assumed the web would be important. Though, I didn't predict how important.
I also made a lot of utilities for end users, and presumed that Tcl/Tk would take over the world. That was after struggling with X11, Athena, etc. That prediction didn't pan out. But Ousterhout later invented RAFT, which is sort of eclipsing Tcl now.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#267I 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 horn fire carriers among Plains Indians, the grub hoe, etc. etc.; I'm constantly using Google Lens to identify plants in my area, which ones are native, which ones invasive, etc.)
The problem is something else. The problem is that the internet is more than one thing. It is a couch for the lazy, a distraction for the procrastinator, a massive entertainment delivery device; and most of the monetary value of the internet doesn't come from it being a bicycle for the mind, but for the other things.
Not everyone chooses to ride on the bicycle. Instead of, say, reading Wikipedia, they read Infowars. The world would be a much better place if a lot of people spent their time reading Wikipedia (with all of its faults) instead of scrolling Twitter, Facebook, and slanted news sites like Breitbart, CNN, Fox, etc. etc. etc.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#268As someone that did my degree during the 90s,
I had hoped desktop development would be native compiled RAD tooling similar to Delphi and C++ Builder, the Web would have stayed as interactive documents, all computers would be improved Amiga like experiences and the depency on the CLI would have long been replaced by REPL based environments.
Ah and all modern OSes would be written in memory safe systems programming languages, following the footsteps from Oberon and Modula-3.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#269Linux on phones. I waited and waited. Bought every single gadget with anything resembling Linux on it (remember the Sharp Zaurus)? Got hyped with the Ubuntu Touch system.
Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
#270While I'm not typically a very good "futurist", I was involved with things like Linux and the world wide web pretty early. I was in my 20's, mostly working on a mainframe based issue database (sort of jira-like) called PNMS, in the very early 90's. We were migrating it to a Sun 690MP running SunOS. So, for the end users of PNMS, we got to try different ways of getting them acccess. DOS/Windows and packet drivers, Sun…
> The Sun xterms and workstations were great, but crazy expensive.
My dad has told me so many stories about how amazing those Sun workstations were. I think his university got them his junior or senior year, and they were the killer machines. Sometimes I wish I could've been programming in that era, but other times I think about how awesome it is that I can compile my code in under a minute.