10 ms·

As a 40s hacker/entrepreneur what I miss most from the 90s was the feeling of having a vast unexplored frontier with endless possibilities ahead of us even for

by guelo 9y ago

As a 40s hacker/entrepreneur what I miss most from the 90s was the feeling of having a vast unexplored frontier with endless possibilities ahead of us even for the little guys. These days, with the web and mobile revolutions maturing, it feels like the 5 or so giant tech monopolies have locked up most of the future potential. But maybe that feeling is part of having an older mentality.

ianai 9y ago
On the contrary, I see at least social as being open for distruption. FB did displace myspace after all. Google, Apple, and Microsoft, though, seem pretty safe.
- lisper 9y ago
  I think Apple jumped the shark quite a while ago. I would love to ditch my Macs, but the problem is that as much as Macs suck, everything else sucks more. If someone built something that Just Worked the way Macs did back in the Snow Leopard days I would replace all of my Macs immediately. And I think this is possible starting with Linux as a base. Linux has come a long, long way since 1993. I just bought a couple of Raspberry Pis and I get the same exciting this-is-the-start-of-something-really-cool vibe from them as I did from my first Apple II back in 1980.
  - p49k 9y ago
    I think iOS 11 is an example of Apple realizing that they need to take a step back and focus on the "it just works" aspect of their mission. There are dozens of small fixes that I've wanted for years that they've finally fixed, all in one release. Haven't had the chance to look at High Sierra, but I'm hoping it's the same there.
    - ianai 9y ago
      All of their products used to behave much more synergistically. There was a real feel when you bought an iPod and hooked it up to your iMac that the two popped together. Now, an iPad barely ever needs to even touch a Mac or even PC. The technology is at the point where it ought to be possible to offload display/UI tasks to an iPad - but you can't in an integrated way. They really need to tie their whole product lines together again (through synergistic features).
      - photojosh 9y ago
        Not iPad as much as iPhone, but do you use Handoff? I do all the time, between work and home MBP, my phone and watch. For iMessage, web pages, emails, phone calls, etc. I feel like the only thing we've actually lost was the requirement to use iTunes to set up a new iDevice, and good riddance to that. An iPod really was a peripheral whereas their modern successors are fully-fledged mobile computers. If you mean use an iPad as an external display, that's a rather niche use. Is there a reason that the 3rd party app Duet Display doesn't meet your needs?
  - scottlocklin 9y ago
    I jumped ship in snow leopard days when I saw what they were doing with their shared object formats (basically making my life difficult for no reason). I've used Mint since then; never looked back. Mint on an old X220 thinkpad is better than anything mac has done since then. Requires a bit of overhead on setup to get power management right, but I paid that price years ago and can endlessly clone HD images. Bonus is, most of my work product ends up on the EC2 anyway.
    - lisper 9y ago
      My problem is that I need to figure out a solution that works not just for me but also for my very-non-techie spouse. Mint might work for me, but I'm pretty sure it won't for her.
      - scottlocklin 9y ago
        Mint+KDE is pretty good. Sadly the akonadi junk needs to be sabotaged.
jimbokun 9y ago
It means it's time to start looking for the next revolution. Before the web, there was the PC revolution. And...microcomputers before that, I think? It's true, computing technologies mature and there are fewer opportunities for real break throughs. But then new technologies arrive for the cycle to start over again.
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
(Another 40's hacker/entrepreneur here) Something I try to continuously tell myself is that "It's still early days" because while it doesn't feel like it - I think it is. Look at the massive shifts we've seen in social media use (Friendster > MySpace > Facebook + Twitter > Snap) - at near any point in their usage you could have reasonably said: "I don't see how anyone could overthrow one of these - they're too big" There is so much future still to invent.
- LiweiZ 9y ago
  IMO, each generation faces different landscape of software and hardware infrastructure and end-device. The existing social net work and communication solutions can't meet the delta of this generation's needs against previous ones, hence there comes the big unmet needs from the emerging generation. However, solution builders have to be close to this generation enough to have enough sense/instinct of the delta to build products that can actually cover those delta. Just my observation and not being described accurately and clearly enough here. But I hope you get what I'm trying to say.
- hyperpallium 9y ago
  Search went through many shifts, but hasn't since Google. When a new technology matures, someone eventually figures out how to dominate it, and does. The difference with computing was on-going Moore's law (forever young), which now slows/ends. Worse, though they still shrink, the cheapest node remains at 28nm. Cheapness fuels revolution. Peak silicon has passed. We could get a new technology (like fracking etc and peak oil), as Kurzweil suggests for the singularity.
  - edward_rolf 9y ago
    >When a new technology matures I don't believe search is mature. We haven't seen a lot of innovations in web search for a while and what we know as web search is probably the best Google can do. It's probably not the best possible web search though. Just the best from Google. The reason nobody is there to challenge Google is because noone has come up with a way to fund a web search engine other than through ads. Challenging Google probably also means challenging the whole ad industry. It's a rough climb.
Animats 9y ago
Computing has become so banal. We used to be working on important problems. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher, formerly at Facebook. (There are more people working on important problems than in the 1980s. Computer science research used to be about a hundred people each at MIT, CMU, and Stanford, with a few smaller groups elsewhere, plus internal efforts at IBM and Bell Labs. The whole field was tiny. Now, it's larger, but overshadowed by the massive level of activity associated with ads.)
- jjtheblunt 9y ago
  That's possibly false: the best minds are likely working at places like Genentech (no relation to my world) and other places where truly useful things requiring deep knowledge of multiple technical domains is a prerequisite.
  - Hydraulix989 9y ago
    SpaceX?
    - throwaway-1209 9y ago
      SpaceX is doing more or less the things that have already been done 50 years ago by truly the best minds of that generation, except they're cheaper and run as a private enterprise. They're standing way up there on the shoulders of those giants, and we should recognize that.
      - aianus 9y ago
        Making things cheap is just as important as inventing things. Nobody would care about computers if they still cost $10m and took up a whole room.
        aswanson 9y ago
        Well, most folk here still would. Point valid, nonetheless.
etrautmann 9y ago
That's how biotech, in particular neural technologies, feel to me right now. In reality, it's still such early days there that it's probably closer to computers in the late 70's than the web in the 90s, but I think the spirit is similar.
Hydraulix989 9y ago
I think the thing that really did it for me was seeing Windows 93 on the front page today. So much possibility and creativity lost.
wslh 9y ago
I think we have endless possibilities but it seems nobody has time, the necessary resources, wisdom, and/or courage to try new paths that would compete with those 5 giants.
TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
As a counter point, perhaps, if that were true we should expect to see much less VC money being directed at tech startups.
- majewsky 9y ago
  Well, we're already seeing VCs diversifying into other sectors. Also, I'm inclined to see the huge amount of VC money as an indication for an overall shortage of investment opportunities.
scottlocklin 9y ago
Same here. 90s were me working my butt off to get a Ph.D. which I didn't end up using, and watching my pals who worked at X, Y, Z cashing out. Some very good times were had for sure, but I don't feel nolstalgic about times when I was eating ramen, working 36 hour shifts at the synchrotron and driving a $200 car. I do feel a bit nostalgic about the 80s; the music, the big hair, and feelings of immanent nuclear doom, and the eventual fall of the Iron Curtain: a very unique feel to this era. Granted I was a teenager for most of it, so maybe that's why. As for age: the main thing I've noticed is my hairline and my joints aren't what they used to be. Exercise, eating right and occasional fasting seems to stave off msot of the physiological effects of aging. I'm pretty sure working in a creative field (and being around a lot of younger people) helps a lot with the psychological aspects.
- gmarx 9y ago
  The feelings of imminent nuclear doom were the best. really made the pop culture special
sixQuarks 9y ago
Also 40s hacker/entrepreneur here. Your complaint is like a 40-year old in the 90s complaining that IBM, Microsoft, Intel and the like have locked up most of the future potential of computing. The internet titans of today will be replaced or be forced to change as the next wave of innovation takes over. There may be a lull right now, but either AI or augmented reality looks like a good candidate for the next cycle.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  I see your point but I also think that in the 90s the computing world was more open and accessible. I guess that happens to most maturing industries. The market players become bigger and start aa dominating. Around 1900 a guy in a garage had a reasonable shot at building a car in his garage (or an airplane) and start a business. Not possible anymore. You need millions to get even started.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    I was a teenager in the 90s, and the consensus among most of the adults I knew working in tech was that it was over. Microsoft had won. Programming was a commodity, all the tech jobs would be outsourced to India, and you were much better off getting into finance. Remember that towards the end of the 90s, Netscape - the one promising new startup that threatened to break the Windows monopoly - had just had its ass handed to it by IE, with some spectacularly underhanded tactics. All the dot-coms had required hundreds of millions in funding and were rapidly blowing through them, with no sign of a profitable business model. Hope didn't really return to techies until the mid-2000s, when a bunch of events (Google's IPO, acquisitions of Flickr & del.icio.us, development of Rails/Django/JQuery/MySQL, and founding of Facebook, Reddit, and YCombinator) made people realize "Hey, maybe it's not the end of history after all. People have actually been doing pretty cool stuff all this time when we weren't looking." 2015 seems like it was the new 2000. That'd put us around 2002-2003 right now, complete with the huge focus on P2P, security, and government overreach, and with a couple years to go before we realize that not everybody gave up.
    - 9y ago
Joeri 9y ago
I would say the opposite. You used to have to do everything yourself, but now you can leverage the infrastructure of amazon/google/microsoft/... to do amazing things by yourself. The potential of ai is just starting to get unlocked, and we're going to see lone wolf developers do incredible things in the coming years.
ca98am79 9y ago
I'm 40 and I feel this way now about cryptocurrencies
randcraw 9y ago
You only have to look at WiReD Magazine from those times (ca. 1993-2000) to appreciate how different the zeitgeist was during the personal computing revolution. Everything was changing and anything was possible. Personally I think it's not because we were working on great new tech products then. I think it's because we knew we were at the forefront on a tsunami of a tech sea change of historic proportions that was obviously reinventing much of everyday life in ways we didn't yet understand, from the global public commons to the local grocery store. The question on everyone's lips was, where will it end? What's happening? Where is the world going next? And can I play? Then from 2005 to maybe 2012 we saw an apparent renewal of tectonic forces as mobile smartphones surged forth and all of us became incessantly and globally interconnected. But now, in today's hindsight, we've had some time to get perspective, and we're disappointed. Where was that brave new world we were promised? We've gained tweets, social and news feeds, e-books and e-tail, and handheld GPS. But we've never been more aware of how meaninglessly trivial tech's ultimate tsunami -- small talk, or how thoroughly manipulated we've let ourselves be by corporations whose highest calling is to sell us ever more trumped-up commodities and ever greater dependency on their latest bit-of-the-nonce drug fix. O where have you gone, Gene Roddenberry?
jarsin 9y ago
40s hacker here too. I felt that way until i discovered VR. I know its not popular on HN and many are skeptical but man I am loving it again. So done with stupid screen apps :)
- sizzle 9y ago
  That how I feel about AR and hololens, just picked up a dev kit. Hit me up if you want to collaborate on a holo app :)
cableshaft 9y ago
Those frontiers still exist. They're just moved to other technologies now. 3D printing, VR/AR, robotics, blockchains, IoT, etc.
sjg007 9y ago
Before the web and mobile people thought programming was done, e.g locked up on desktop by Microsoft. There's a vast unexplored space in AI/autonomous/AR/VR/sensor networks/IoT/smart things and I am sure I'm missing something.

by guelo 9y ago

ianai 9y ago

On the contrary, I see at least social as being open for distruption. FB did displace myspace after all. Google, Apple, and Microsoft, though, seem pretty safe.

lisper 9y ago
I think Apple jumped the shark quite a while ago. I would love to ditch my Macs, but the problem is that as much as Macs suck, everything else sucks more. If someone built something that Just Worked the way Macs did back in the Snow Leopard days I would replace all of my Macs immediately. And I think this is possible starting with Linux as a base. Linux has come a long, long way since 1993. I just bought a couple of Raspberry Pis and I get the same exciting this-is-the-start-of-something-really-cool vibe from them as I did from my first Apple II back in 1980.
- p49k 9y ago
  I think iOS 11 is an example of Apple realizing that they need to take a step back and focus on the "it just works" aspect of their mission. There are dozens of small fixes that I've wanted for years that they've finally fixed, all in one release. Haven't had the chance to look at High Sierra, but I'm hoping it's the same there.
  - ianai 9y ago
    All of their products used to behave much more synergistically. There was a real feel when you bought an iPod and hooked it up to your iMac that the two popped together. Now, an iPad barely ever needs to even touch a Mac or even PC. The technology is at the point where it ought to be possible to offload display/UI tasks to an iPad - but you can't in an integrated way. They really need to tie their whole product lines together again (through synergistic features).
    - photojosh 9y ago
      Not iPad as much as iPhone, but do you use Handoff? I do all the time, between work and home MBP, my phone and watch. For iMessage, web pages, emails, phone calls, etc. I feel like the only thing we've actually lost was the requirement to use iTunes to set up a new iDevice, and good riddance to that. An iPod really was a peripheral whereas their modern successors are fully-fledged mobile computers. If you mean use an iPad as an external display, that's a rather niche use. Is there a reason that the 3rd party app Duet Display doesn't meet your needs?
- scottlocklin 9y ago
  I jumped ship in snow leopard days when I saw what they were doing with their shared object formats (basically making my life difficult for no reason). I've used Mint since then; never looked back. Mint on an old X220 thinkpad is better than anything mac has done since then. Requires a bit of overhead on setup to get power management right, but I paid that price years ago and can endlessly clone HD images. Bonus is, most of my work product ends up on the EC2 anyway.
  - lisper 9y ago
    My problem is that I need to figure out a solution that works not just for me but also for my very-non-techie spouse. Mint might work for me, but I'm pretty sure it won't for her.
    - scottlocklin 9y ago
      Mint+KDE is pretty good. Sadly the akonadi junk needs to be sabotaged.

jimbokun 9y ago

It means it's time to start looking for the next revolution. Before the web, there was the PC revolution. And...microcomputers before that, I think? It's true, computing technologies mature and there are fewer opportunities for real break throughs. But then new technologies arrive for the cycle to start over again.

michaelbuckbee 9y ago

(Another 40's hacker/entrepreneur here) Something I try to continuously tell myself is that "It's still early days" because while it doesn't feel like it - I think it is. Look at the massive shifts we've seen in social media use (Friendster > MySpace > Facebook + Twitter > Snap) - at near any point in their usage you could have reasonably said: "I don't see how anyone could overthrow one of these - they're too big" There is so much future still to invent.

LiweiZ 9y ago
IMO, each generation faces different landscape of software and hardware infrastructure and end-device. The existing social net work and communication solutions can't meet the delta of this generation's needs against previous ones, hence there comes the big unmet needs from the emerging generation. However, solution builders have to be close to this generation enough to have enough sense/instinct of the delta to build products that can actually cover those delta. Just my observation and not being described accurately and clearly enough here. But I hope you get what I'm trying to say.
hyperpallium 9y ago
Search went through many shifts, but hasn't since Google. When a new technology matures, someone eventually figures out how to dominate it, and does. The difference with computing was on-going Moore's law (forever young), which now slows/ends. Worse, though they still shrink, the cheapest node remains at 28nm. Cheapness fuels revolution. Peak silicon has passed. We could get a new technology (like fracking etc and peak oil), as Kurzweil suggests for the singularity.
- edward_rolf 9y ago
  >When a new technology matures I don't believe search is mature. We haven't seen a lot of innovations in web search for a while and what we know as web search is probably the best Google can do. It's probably not the best possible web search though. Just the best from Google. The reason nobody is there to challenge Google is because noone has come up with a way to fund a web search engine other than through ads. Challenging Google probably also means challenging the whole ad industry. It's a rough climb.

Animats 9y ago

Computing has become so banal. We used to be working on important problems. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher, formerly at Facebook. (There are more people working on important problems than in the 1980s. Computer science research used to be about a hundred people each at MIT, CMU, and Stanford, with a few smaller groups elsewhere, plus internal efforts at IBM and Bell Labs. The whole field was tiny. Now, it's larger, but overshadowed by the massive level of activity associated with ads.)

jjtheblunt 9y ago
That's possibly false: the best minds are likely working at places like Genentech (no relation to my world) and other places where truly useful things requiring deep knowledge of multiple technical domains is a prerequisite.
- Hydraulix989 9y ago
  SpaceX?
  - throwaway-1209 9y ago
    SpaceX is doing more or less the things that have already been done 50 years ago by truly the best minds of that generation, except they're cheaper and run as a private enterprise. They're standing way up there on the shoulders of those giants, and we should recognize that.
    - aianus 9y ago
      Making things cheap is just as important as inventing things. Nobody would care about computers if they still cost $10m and took up a whole room.
      - aswanson 9y ago
        Well, most folk here still would. Point valid, nonetheless.

etrautmann 9y ago

That's how biotech, in particular neural technologies, feel to me right now. In reality, it's still such early days there that it's probably closer to computers in the late 70's than the web in the 90s, but I think the spirit is similar.

Hydraulix989 9y ago

I think the thing that really did it for me was seeing Windows 93 on the front page today. So much possibility and creativity lost.

wslh 9y ago

I think we have endless possibilities but it seems nobody has time, the necessary resources, wisdom, and/or courage to try new paths that would compete with those 5 giants.

TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago

As a counter point, perhaps, if that were true we should expect to see much less VC money being directed at tech startups.

majewsky 9y ago
Well, we're already seeing VCs diversifying into other sectors. Also, I'm inclined to see the huge amount of VC money as an indication for an overall shortage of investment opportunities.

scottlocklin 9y ago

Same here. 90s were me working my butt off to get a Ph.D. which I didn't end up using, and watching my pals who worked at X, Y, Z cashing out. Some very good times were had for sure, but I don't feel nolstalgic about times when I was eating ramen, working 36 hour shifts at the synchrotron and driving a $200 car. I do feel a bit nostalgic about the 80s; the music, the big hair, and feelings of immanent nuclear doom, and the eventual fall of the Iron Curtain: a very unique feel to this era. Granted I was a teenager for most of it, so maybe that's why. As for age: the main thing I've noticed is my hairline and my joints aren't what they used to be. Exercise, eating right and occasional fasting seems to stave off msot of the physiological effects of aging. I'm pretty sure working in a creative field (and being around a lot of younger people) helps a lot with the psychological aspects.

gmarx 9y ago
The feelings of imminent nuclear doom were the best. really made the pop culture special

sixQuarks 9y ago

Also 40s hacker/entrepreneur here. Your complaint is like a 40-year old in the 90s complaining that IBM, Microsoft, Intel and the like have locked up most of the future potential of computing. The internet titans of today will be replaced or be forced to change as the next wave of innovation takes over. There may be a lull right now, but either AI or augmented reality looks like a good candidate for the next cycle.

maxxxxx 9y ago
I see your point but I also think that in the 90s the computing world was more open and accessible. I guess that happens to most maturing industries. The market players become bigger and start aa dominating. Around 1900 a guy in a garage had a reasonable shot at building a car in his garage (or an airplane) and start a business. Not possible anymore. You need millions to get even started.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  I was a teenager in the 90s, and the consensus among most of the adults I knew working in tech was that it was over. Microsoft had won. Programming was a commodity, all the tech jobs would be outsourced to India, and you were much better off getting into finance. Remember that towards the end of the 90s, Netscape - the one promising new startup that threatened to break the Windows monopoly - had just had its ass handed to it by IE, with some spectacularly underhanded tactics. All the dot-coms had required hundreds of millions in funding and were rapidly blowing through them, with no sign of a profitable business model. Hope didn't really return to techies until the mid-2000s, when a bunch of events (Google's IPO, acquisitions of Flickr & del.icio.us, development of Rails/Django/JQuery/MySQL, and founding of Facebook, Reddit, and YCombinator) made people realize "Hey, maybe it's not the end of history after all. People have actually been doing pretty cool stuff all this time when we weren't looking." 2015 seems like it was the new 2000. That'd put us around 2002-2003 right now, complete with the huge focus on P2P, security, and government overreach, and with a couple years to go before we realize that not everybody gave up.
  - 9y ago

Joeri 9y ago

I would say the opposite. You used to have to do everything yourself, but now you can leverage the infrastructure of amazon/google/microsoft/... to do amazing things by yourself. The potential of ai is just starting to get unlocked, and we're going to see lone wolf developers do incredible things in the coming years.

ca98am79 9y ago

I'm 40 and I feel this way now about cryptocurrencies

randcraw 9y ago

You only have to look at WiReD Magazine from those times (ca. 1993-2000) to appreciate how different the zeitgeist was during the personal computing revolution. Everything was changing and anything was possible. Personally I think it's not because we were working on great new tech products then. I think it's because we knew we were at the forefront on a tsunami of a tech sea change of historic proportions that was obviously reinventing much of everyday life in ways we didn't yet understand, from the global public commons to the local grocery store. The question on everyone's lips was, where will it end? What's happening? Where is the world going next? And can I play? Then from 2005 to maybe 2012 we saw an apparent renewal of tectonic forces as mobile smartphones surged forth and all of us became incessantly and globally interconnected. But now, in today's hindsight, we've had some time to get perspective, and we're disappointed. Where was that brave new world we were promised? We've gained tweets, social and news feeds, e-books and e-tail, and handheld GPS. But we've never been more aware of how meaninglessly trivial tech's ultimate tsunami -- small talk, or how thoroughly manipulated we've let ourselves be by corporations whose highest calling is to sell us ever more trumped-up commodities and ever greater dependency on their latest bit-of-the-nonce drug fix. O where have you gone, Gene Roddenberry?

jarsin 9y ago

40s hacker here too. I felt that way until i discovered VR. I know its not popular on HN and many are skeptical but man I am loving it again. So done with stupid screen apps :)

sizzle 9y ago
That how I feel about AR and hololens, just picked up a dev kit. Hit me up if you want to collaborate on a holo app :)

cableshaft 9y ago

Those frontiers still exist. They're just moved to other technologies now. 3D printing, VR/AR, robotics, blockchains, IoT, etc.

sjg007 9y ago

Before the web and mobile people thought programming was done, e.g locked up on desktop by Microsoft. There's a vast unexplored space in AI/autonomous/AR/VR/sensor networks/IoT/smart things and I am sure I'm missing something.