8 ms·

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

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)

derefr 5y ago
> 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 take away many dev jobs I mean, they did, but they also created consultant jobs to replace the ones they took away. See: Salesforce. The need to write source code can be taken away; but the need to do requirements analysis and deliberate architectural design cannot. So you end up with people who do 80% of a programmers' job, except for the coding part.
- spamizbad 5y ago
  The expectation was low/no code tools would put many devs out of work and it would only be a niche job. The idea that we would have a decade+ labor shortage was unheard of until the craziness of the dotcom bubble (which then popped and people moved to assuming dev work would be permanently outsourced like textiles and never coming back due to high US labor costs)
  - astrange 5y ago
    People seem to be in a permanent state of lump-of-labor fallacy and not understanding comparative advantage. The current one is thinking we'll run out of jobs because of AI. (Their scenarios seem to end up with a few rich business guy types owning all the AIs and trading with each other while the rest of the world is somehow unemployed - which I'm pretty sure was the plot of Atlas Shrugged.)
- gopalv 5y ago
  > Computer perf was doubling from transistors getting smaller. But transistors can't get smaller than an atom. What did y'all expect would save you and keep things going? We are nowhere near an atom well into 2005 at least, but things were getting pipelined and there was a ton of SRAM on each die, there were improvements to fetch pipelines (well, SPECTRE and friends really), everything was happening as fast as it could with out-of-order pipelines, with prefetch and every other speedup out there including auto-vec. The "how big is an atom?" is sort of post-2010 thinking, at least the way I saw it happen. Modems was one place where this sort of thing I saw personally happen - 9600 baud modems to 56kbps happened so fast and it almost looked it would keep going that way (Edge was 115kbps, now I can't even do a page load over it) with DSL suddenly dropping in to keep the same copper moving even faster again.
- ghaff 5y ago
  >Moore's law is about transistor size shrinking, but that has an obvious end Yes, but by itself that isn't a single core vs. multicore issue. It's a process node question generally. That said, Intel in particular did try to push single-core frequency at least a beat too far. They demoed a 10GHz prototype at one IDF--and other companies were mocking them for it. The story that a very senior Intel exec gave me at the time was something to the effect that, of course, they knew that they were going to have to go multi-core but Microsoft was really pushing back because they weren't confident in multicore desktop performance in particular.
- labcomputer 5y ago
  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 R8000, Sun SuperSparc, HP PA-7100 * out of order execution (mid 90’s) Intel Pentium Pro and later, DEC Alpha 21264, Sun UltraSparc, HP PA-8000 * SIMD (vector) instructions (mid/late 90’s) Pentium MMX (integer) Pentium III (floating point), DEC Alpha 21264 * multithreading (early 2000’s) Pentium 4, planned chips from DEC and MIPS We also got improved branch predictors and larger, more-associative caches. But it feels like most of that progress stopped in the early 2000’s, and the only progress is slapping more cores on a die. I mean, if you can put 8 cores in a consumer level CPU, you have 8 times as many transistor (give or take) as you need to implement a CPU. Nobody seems to be building a higher IPC CPU with 2x transistors, even though they clearly have the transistors to do it.
  - derefr 5y ago
    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.)
    - labcomputer 5y ago
      > [...] 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?
swman 5y ago
> Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs this is still something some of us think about today
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  We keep on chasing and chasing. I think the closest we’ve come so far is excel and most in programming scorn it instead of revering it.
  - atlantageek 5y ago
    IKR. Excel and the other spreadsheet variants are the gateway drug to software development. There is no other tool that has such a low entry to barrier and is so enticing to scale up into a ridiculously complex product. It eventually does get to a point that when the original user/developer is ready to change their job someone says 'OK can we turn this into a webapp or something... this is nuts. Lets hire someone from guru.com to do this.'
    - jfk13 5y ago
      > Excel and the other spreadsheet variants are the gateway drug to software development Ah, HyperCard ... RIP.
bcrosby95 5y ago
> 3) Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs I started programming as a kid in the early 90s, and went to college in the late 90s/early 00s. It might sound crazy in hindsight, but between these tools and outsourcing, everyone I talked to thought being a programmer was going to be a dead end minimum wage type job, and I was strongly advised by many to pick a different major.
- valbaca 5y ago
  During my college internship (2010) I was told that my CS degree would be totally worthless and I should focus on electrical engineering (though that would've been fine too tbh)...oh, and that I should put all the money I could into gold and guns...the dude was a nut is what I'm saying.
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    I mean, to be fair, gold has sextupled in price in the past twenty years, and Smith and Wesson is worth roughly 20x as much, depending on the point in 2000. So, yes, a nut, but not horrible investment advice, per se
- alexgmcm 5y ago
  In fairness, lots of tech jobs have died out like there are nowhere near as many system administrators, database admins as there were since the cloud has become bigger. Equally, tools like Wordpress has killed off/deskilled the old 'webmaster' role - I mean sure, there are still people making money doing Wordpress sites for businesses but it's nowhere near as lucrative as it was at the start of the dot-com boom era.
  - jimbokun 5y ago
    > In fairness, lots of tech jobs have died out like there are nowhere near as many system administrators, database admins as there were since the cloud has become bigger. Yes, now they are all Cloud admins.
- 5y ago
ta1234567890 5y ago
> Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs When I was a kid my dad refused to teach me to program, he thought it would be a useless skill to learn because he believed in the future there would be no more programmers, as everyone would be able to program anything they wanted through drag and drop interfaces.
- derwiki 5y ago
  Was your dad a programmer?
  - ta1234567890 5y ago
    He was an electrical engineer who loves computers and programming, although he didnt do software development for a living.
mcv 5y ago
I expected RISC to overtake CISC much sooner than it did. I expected IPv6 to be adopted quickly. I expected 6GB to be more storage than I could ever fill. I expected Windows to be quickly dismissed and Unix to become the standard. I expected to have a screen built into my glasses by now.
- andyana 5y ago
  Regarding screens in glasses: where is the hold up? I've been thinking of prototyping something for the past few weeks (only thinking, hence my question).
  - mcv 5y ago
    Well, Google Glass was launched big some years ago, and everybody mocked it.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      The device was pretty slick, which it should be for 1500$ (Typical devkit prices I guess), I enjoyed recoding tutorials where I needed both hands - it reliably captured what I was looking at, and it was lightweight and didn’t get in the way, great tool. Problem was the only stories about it were about the “glass-holes” walking into bars with a camera on their face. I thought it was an interesting “intervention” style art piece that showed people still expected obscurity, if not privacy.
    - BatteryMountain 5y ago
      Yeah and now plenty adults are running around with powered-up Tamagotchi's on their wrists. Probably the same people who laughed at google glass would insist on wearing it now or in the near future.
    - forbiddenvoid 5y ago
      I think fewer people would have mocked it if it were in anyway accessible to ordinary folks. They set the wrong price point, which made it an easy target for ridicule because only 'rich' people with sufficient disposable income even had them.
golergka 5y ago
> 5) All programming would be object-oriented (We are talking 90s style definition here) During the 00s and early 10s, it felt like it is.
dave_sid 5y ago
On number 4… imagine the idea back then that Apple would be as big now
codingdave 5y ago
#3 - I believe this did happen much more than people realize. In the 90s and 00s, every company with more than 1-2000 employees would have an internal dev staff. I worked in some companies with 20 devs, some with half a dozen, but there was always a dev team in the IT group. Today, companies do low code via SharePoint and Salesforce. The do BI with Tableau and Power BI instead of internal BI teams. Their external web presence is done with Wordpress instead of a custom site. Sprinkle in some SaaS, and the internal dev teams of corporations are way smaller than they used to be, with some companies not having any internal devs.
- rchaud 5y ago
  Low-code also applies to the day to day management of web content. It used to fall to the 'webmaster', who needed to know HTML/CSS, maybe multiple scripting languages, cybersecurity practices, etc. Now you can hire content writers with experience in using CMS systems and leave the security/infrastructure part of it to developers.
brodouevencode 5y ago
By the late 90s it was fully expected that Java would take over everything. And it did kinda for a while.
- mjul 5y ago
  Oh yes, servlets were such a breath of fresh air. However that was more of an afterthought- I remember that when it came out I initially bought into the write-once-run-anywhere hype and the idea that Java was for writing applets. The UIs were too clunky (AWT) or foreign (Swing, the second attempt) and the Java SDKs buggy so in the end HTML just improved faster and took over the presentation layer together with Futuresplash (later renamed to Flash).
pjmlp 5y ago
> 4) Microsoft taking over and Unix dying It only did not happened because they messed up with UNIX subsystem on Windows NT/2000. Those that give Apple money to develop GNU/Linux software would be just as happy with the POSIX subsystem.
fendy3002 5y ago
> 3) Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs I think it's safe to say that we were close with this one, with jetbrains java (awt / swing) and wpf / winforms visual studio. Then dot com, mobile and responsiveness arrived.
mjul 5y ago
#2 - remember the hype around VRML and how we would have virtual words in the browser? I remember working with Silicon Graphics gear back then and the 3D guys were quite enthusiastic about it. Of course, we had all devoured William Gibson’s novels like Neuromancer so we were naturally attracted. We even built some 3D desktop apps as portals to the wider internet. They were too static and too hard to build so the Internet with HTML had much more pull for producers and consumers as well. In practice, I think the 3D stuff that really worked at the time was more games like Quake and avatar-based web apps like Habbo Hotel. It would still be fun to go back and read Jaron Lanier’s writing from that era.
GPerson 5y ago
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?

derefr 5y ago

> 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 take away many dev jobs I mean, they did, but they also created consultant jobs to replace the ones they took away. See: Salesforce. The need to write source code can be taken away; but the need to do requirements analysis and deliberate architectural design cannot. So you end up with people who do 80% of a programmers' job, except for the coding part.

spamizbad 5y ago
The expectation was low/no code tools would put many devs out of work and it would only be a niche job. The idea that we would have a decade+ labor shortage was unheard of until the craziness of the dotcom bubble (which then popped and people moved to assuming dev work would be permanently outsourced like textiles and never coming back due to high US labor costs)
- astrange 5y ago
  People seem to be in a permanent state of lump-of-labor fallacy and not understanding comparative advantage. The current one is thinking we'll run out of jobs because of AI. (Their scenarios seem to end up with a few rich business guy types owning all the AIs and trading with each other while the rest of the world is somehow unemployed - which I'm pretty sure was the plot of Atlas Shrugged.)
gopalv 5y ago
> Computer perf was doubling from transistors getting smaller. But transistors can't get smaller than an atom. What did y'all expect would save you and keep things going? We are nowhere near an atom well into 2005 at least, but things were getting pipelined and there was a ton of SRAM on each die, there were improvements to fetch pipelines (well, SPECTRE and friends really), everything was happening as fast as it could with out-of-order pipelines, with prefetch and every other speedup out there including auto-vec. The "how big is an atom?" is sort of post-2010 thinking, at least the way I saw it happen. Modems was one place where this sort of thing I saw personally happen - 9600 baud modems to 56kbps happened so fast and it almost looked it would keep going that way (Edge was 115kbps, now I can't even do a page load over it) with DSL suddenly dropping in to keep the same copper moving even faster again.
ghaff 5y ago
>Moore's law is about transistor size shrinking, but that has an obvious end Yes, but by itself that isn't a single core vs. multicore issue. It's a process node question generally. That said, Intel in particular did try to push single-core frequency at least a beat too far. They demoed a 10GHz prototype at one IDF--and other companies were mocking them for it. The story that a very senior Intel exec gave me at the time was something to the effect that, of course, they knew that they were going to have to go multi-core but Microsoft was really pushing back because they weren't confident in multicore desktop performance in particular.
labcomputer 5y ago
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 R8000, Sun SuperSparc, HP PA-7100 * out of order execution (mid 90’s) Intel Pentium Pro and later, DEC Alpha 21264, Sun UltraSparc, HP PA-8000 * SIMD (vector) instructions (mid/late 90’s) Pentium MMX (integer) Pentium III (floating point), DEC Alpha 21264 * multithreading (early 2000’s) Pentium 4, planned chips from DEC and MIPS We also got improved branch predictors and larger, more-associative caches. But it feels like most of that progress stopped in the early 2000’s, and the only progress is slapping more cores on a die. I mean, if you can put 8 cores in a consumer level CPU, you have 8 times as many transistor (give or take) as you need to implement a CPU. Nobody seems to be building a higher IPC CPU with 2x transistors, even though they clearly have the transistors to do it.
- derefr 5y ago
  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.)
  - labcomputer 5y ago
    > [...] 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?

swman 5y ago

> Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs this is still something some of us think about today

bradleyjg 5y ago
We keep on chasing and chasing. I think the closest we’ve come so far is excel and most in programming scorn it instead of revering it.
- atlantageek 5y ago
  IKR. Excel and the other spreadsheet variants are the gateway drug to software development. There is no other tool that has such a low entry to barrier and is so enticing to scale up into a ridiculously complex product. It eventually does get to a point that when the original user/developer is ready to change their job someone says 'OK can we turn this into a webapp or something... this is nuts. Lets hire someone from guru.com to do this.'
  - jfk13 5y ago
    > Excel and the other spreadsheet variants are the gateway drug to software development Ah, HyperCard ... RIP.

bcrosby95 5y ago

> 3) Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs I started programming as a kid in the early 90s, and went to college in the late 90s/early 00s. It might sound crazy in hindsight, but between these tools and outsourcing, everyone I talked to thought being a programmer was going to be a dead end minimum wage type job, and I was strongly advised by many to pick a different major.

valbaca 5y ago
During my college internship (2010) I was told that my CS degree would be totally worthless and I should focus on electrical engineering (though that would've been fine too tbh)...oh, and that I should put all the money I could into gold and guns...the dude was a nut is what I'm saying.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  I mean, to be fair, gold has sextupled in price in the past twenty years, and Smith and Wesson is worth roughly 20x as much, depending on the point in 2000. So, yes, a nut, but not horrible investment advice, per se
alexgmcm 5y ago
In fairness, lots of tech jobs have died out like there are nowhere near as many system administrators, database admins as there were since the cloud has become bigger. Equally, tools like Wordpress has killed off/deskilled the old 'webmaster' role - I mean sure, there are still people making money doing Wordpress sites for businesses but it's nowhere near as lucrative as it was at the start of the dot-com boom era.
- jimbokun 5y ago
  > In fairness, lots of tech jobs have died out like there are nowhere near as many system administrators, database admins as there were since the cloud has become bigger. Yes, now they are all Cloud admins.
5y ago

ta1234567890 5y ago

> Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs When I was a kid my dad refused to teach me to program, he thought it would be a useless skill to learn because he believed in the future there would be no more programmers, as everyone would be able to program anything they wanted through drag and drop interfaces.

derwiki 5y ago
Was your dad a programmer?
- ta1234567890 5y ago
  He was an electrical engineer who loves computers and programming, although he didnt do software development for a living.

mcv 5y ago

I expected RISC to overtake CISC much sooner than it did. I expected IPv6 to be adopted quickly. I expected 6GB to be more storage than I could ever fill. I expected Windows to be quickly dismissed and Unix to become the standard. I expected to have a screen built into my glasses by now.

andyana 5y ago
Regarding screens in glasses: where is the hold up? I've been thinking of prototyping something for the past few weeks (only thinking, hence my question).
- mcv 5y ago
  Well, Google Glass was launched big some years ago, and everybody mocked it.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    The device was pretty slick, which it should be for 1500$ (Typical devkit prices I guess), I enjoyed recoding tutorials where I needed both hands - it reliably captured what I was looking at, and it was lightweight and didn’t get in the way, great tool. Problem was the only stories about it were about the “glass-holes” walking into bars with a camera on their face. I thought it was an interesting “intervention” style art piece that showed people still expected obscurity, if not privacy.
  - BatteryMountain 5y ago
    Yeah and now plenty adults are running around with powered-up Tamagotchi's on their wrists. Probably the same people who laughed at google glass would insist on wearing it now or in the near future.
  - forbiddenvoid 5y ago
    I think fewer people would have mocked it if it were in anyway accessible to ordinary folks. They set the wrong price point, which made it an easy target for ridicule because only 'rich' people with sufficient disposable income even had them.

golergka 5y ago

> 5) All programming would be object-oriented (We are talking 90s style definition here) During the 00s and early 10s, it felt like it is.

dave_sid 5y ago

On number 4… imagine the idea back then that Apple would be as big now

codingdave 5y ago

#3 - I believe this did happen much more than people realize. In the 90s and 00s, every company with more than 1-2000 employees would have an internal dev staff. I worked in some companies with 20 devs, some with half a dozen, but there was always a dev team in the IT group. Today, companies do low code via SharePoint and Salesforce. The do BI with Tableau and Power BI instead of internal BI teams. Their external web presence is done with Wordpress instead of a custom site. Sprinkle in some SaaS, and the internal dev teams of corporations are way smaller than they used to be, with some companies not having any internal devs.

rchaud 5y ago
Low-code also applies to the day to day management of web content. It used to fall to the 'webmaster', who needed to know HTML/CSS, maybe multiple scripting languages, cybersecurity practices, etc. Now you can hire content writers with experience in using CMS systems and leave the security/infrastructure part of it to developers.

brodouevencode 5y ago

By the late 90s it was fully expected that Java would take over everything. And it did kinda for a while.

mjul 5y ago
Oh yes, servlets were such a breath of fresh air. However that was more of an afterthought- I remember that when it came out I initially bought into the write-once-run-anywhere hype and the idea that Java was for writing applets. The UIs were too clunky (AWT) or foreign (Swing, the second attempt) and the Java SDKs buggy so in the end HTML just improved faster and took over the presentation layer together with Futuresplash (later renamed to Flash).

pjmlp 5y ago

> 4) Microsoft taking over and Unix dying It only did not happened because they messed up with UNIX subsystem on Windows NT/2000. Those that give Apple money to develop GNU/Linux software would be just as happy with the POSIX subsystem.

fendy3002 5y ago

> 3) Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs I think it's safe to say that we were close with this one, with jetbrains java (awt / swing) and wpf / winforms visual studio. Then dot com, mobile and responsiveness arrived.

mjul 5y ago

#2 - remember the hype around VRML and how we would have virtual words in the browser? I remember working with Silicon Graphics gear back then and the 3D guys were quite enthusiastic about it. Of course, we had all devoured William Gibson’s novels like Neuromancer so we were naturally attracted. We even built some 3D desktop apps as portals to the wider internet. They were too static and too hard to build so the Internet with HTML had much more pull for producers and consumers as well. In practice, I think the 3D stuff that really worked at the time was more games like Quake and avatar-based web apps like Habbo Hotel. It would still be fun to go back and read Jaron Lanier’s writing from that era.

GPerson 5y ago

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?