3 ms·

50 Years of Wow- I lived through 5 decades of computing milestones

36 points by herodotus 4y ago

abraxas 4y ago
To my eyes ChatGPT is a milestone that rivals the arrival of the Internet as a mainstream technology. I think the potential for changing the way we interact with the machines and the data they store is undergoing a shift that will make entire industries obsolete. I think a lot of recent editorials are downplaying the magnitude of the impact because you always sound smarter when you take the cynical side. Especially when it comes to AI. But this time it really is different. Is it a multivac yet? Hell no. Is it going to flip entire industries on their head in a short order in a way that happened with the arrival of consumer accessible internet? I'll bet my last dollar on that.
cc101 4y ago
We all see the elephant in different ways. For me the major milestones were: FORTRAN IBM's Timesharing OS (the 1st step in personal computing) The end of "GOTO" The desktop user interface The creation of a huge library of available frameworks. The World Wide Web. The internet existed, but was ignored. Object Oriented Programming I guess the final milestone was the fragmentation of the computer world. No one can now encompass everything. No event can now rank as a milestone in so wide a field. I'll give props to machine learning, but I don't understand its eventual impact. Perhaps it represents a whole new genre on par with the computer world itself.
- heresie-dabord 4y ago
  ubiquitous encryption -- people are typically transacting every day with their data protected
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  OOP turned out to be trivial, in the end: a trick to get better-performing runtime binding.
  - ido 4y ago
    The mainstream paradigm before OOP wasn't functional, but procedural programming (like in c or pascal). Going from procedural to OO as the default mainstream programming model is not trivial and mostly not about performance (but about the organisation of code).
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      But in practice, as I said, trivial. Paradigms are also trivial. A good modern language supports all "paradigms" -- styles, really -- equally, and unholy mixes of them, because problems don't sort themselves out neatly according to CS fads. If you are failing to mix up styles according to dictates of problems, you are fielding suboptimal designs, cramming problems into shoes that fit badly.
- didgetmaster 4y ago
  The Internet was not ignored before the WWW, but it was simply inaccessible to the masses because only highly trained computer users could navigate it using tools that required specialized knowledge. The web opened the Internet to the masses who could point and click their mouse on hyperlinks in a browser. It only took a few minutes for people with little computer knowledge to learn to navigate around the web.
  - cc101 4y ago
    It certainly was ignored at the USGS where the Information System Division threatened to remove it unless people started using it. It was ignored because there weren't compelling applications. When the web arrived, it was an almost instantaneous success.
harel 4y ago
My experience with computers is not that long and goes back to the early 1980s, but I definitely had my mind blown multiple time. Home micros, commodore, Amiga, BBSs, 3d graphics, the internet... The new AI (aka statistical models on drugs) is to me just another mind combustion after a long lull.

36 points by herodotus 4y ago

To my eyes ChatGPT is a milestone that rivals the arrival of the Internet as a mainstream technology. I think the potential for changing the way we interact with the machines and the data they store is undergoing a shift that will make entire industries obsolete. I think a lot of recent editorials are downplaying the magnitude of the impact because you always sound smarter when you take the cynical side. Especially when it comes to AI. But this time it really is different. Is it a multivac yet? Hell no. Is it going to flip entire industries on their head in a short order in a way that happened with the arrival of consumer accessible internet? I'll bet my last dollar on that.

cc101 4y ago

We all see the elephant in different ways. For me the major milestones were: FORTRAN IBM's Timesharing OS (the 1st step in personal computing) The end of "GOTO" The desktop user interface The creation of a huge library of available frameworks. The World Wide Web. The internet existed, but was ignored. Object Oriented Programming I guess the final milestone was the fragmentation of the computer world. No one can now encompass everything. No event can now rank as a milestone in so wide a field. I'll give props to machine learning, but I don't understand its eventual impact. Perhaps it represents a whole new genre on par with the computer world itself.

heresie-dabord 4y ago
ubiquitous encryption -- people are typically transacting every day with their data protected
moloch-hai 4y ago
OOP turned out to be trivial, in the end: a trick to get better-performing runtime binding.
- ido 4y ago
  The mainstream paradigm before OOP wasn't functional, but procedural programming (like in c or pascal). Going from procedural to OO as the default mainstream programming model is not trivial and mostly not about performance (but about the organisation of code).
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    But in practice, as I said, trivial. Paradigms are also trivial. A good modern language supports all "paradigms" -- styles, really -- equally, and unholy mixes of them, because problems don't sort themselves out neatly according to CS fads. If you are failing to mix up styles according to dictates of problems, you are fielding suboptimal designs, cramming problems into shoes that fit badly.
didgetmaster 4y ago
The Internet was not ignored before the WWW, but it was simply inaccessible to the masses because only highly trained computer users could navigate it using tools that required specialized knowledge. The web opened the Internet to the masses who could point and click their mouse on hyperlinks in a browser. It only took a few minutes for people with little computer knowledge to learn to navigate around the web.
- cc101 4y ago
  It certainly was ignored at the USGS where the Information System Division threatened to remove it unless people started using it. It was ignored because there weren't compelling applications. When the web arrived, it was an almost instantaneous success.

harel 4y ago

My experience with computers is not that long and goes back to the early 1980s, but I definitely had my mind blown multiple time. Home micros, commodore, Amiga, BBSs, 3d graphics, the internet... The new AI (aka statistical models on drugs) is to me just another mind combustion after a long lull.