Hacker News Reader

"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed."

It's almost guaranteed that somewhere out there, the next big thing is incubating amongst a group of passionate enthusiasts who are certain it's the next best thing. It's just that most of humanity thinks they're crazy geeks.

That's what it was like with the Internet. I got on it in 1994 and couldn't convince anyone else it was worth paying attention to. By 1995, gifted & talented enrichment programs were starting to suggest all their students check it out. By 1996, I could convince my parents to pay for it. By 1998 a bunch of our family friends were putting their life savings into dot-coms.

Maybe, I think the thing with that quote is that it's not always technology that is missing for things to get distributed. Technology, or affordable technology, has been missing for many things so far, but also organization. And I would say that the latter is increasingly the case, since technology is developing faster than we can make use of it. Last years smart phone processor is almost already obsolete, but it's a supercomputer for anything else.

I think the things that are going to get distributed in the next decade have already been invented and are just waiting to get organized. Much like the dotcom boom for that matter. Shopping online? So silly! People say that software is eating the world, but it's more like that software and the world is struggling to catch up with the opportunities provided by hardware.

I wish I could frame this comment in gold.

So let's make a list of all of the things that have a group of passionate enthusiasts who are certain it's the next big thing. I can only think of two things:

* Bitcoin

* Self driving vehicles

Smart home. Virtual reality. Drones. Smartwatches (yes, some people still really like theirs). Rust. AI. IPFS. Federated wikis.

Probably others too. The scale that we're talking about is ~1000s of people, not millions. This doesn't even register in the news media - hell, HN probably has close to a few thousand people online at any given time, and there are 1000s of forums like Hacker News on the Internet.

You're correct. The worldwide network was already assumed by 1990. The only question was whether or not it would become mainstream to muggles.

I gained internet access via my midwestern college in 1991. Within a few weeks, I was a regular on a MUD hosted somewhere in Bavaria, chatting (and arguing) with Israelis about middle eastern politics on newsgroups, and had (very slow) shell access on a system in Taipei thanks to a woman there I was flirting with. There was no question this was the future. The only question was: would this be limited to corporations, academia, and interested geeks? Or would this ever hit the general public? Considering the state of the interfaces in 1991, I vaugely remember I assumed it would be geek-only for a while, though I did my part in getting my non-technical friends online. Largely for the selfish reason of wanting them to have email so I didn't have to use the telephone as much.

> The only question was: would this be limited to corporations, academia, and interested geeks? Or would this ever hit the general public?

As a 14yo in 1994 I knew the internet was going to be huge the first time I the amount of porn that was already available.

I'd like to say this was some incredible insight into human nature but it really wasn't, I was around when VHS became popular (just) and remembered that the reason my father had wanted one had very little to do with the stated goal of "You can record your soaps when you are at work dear" and rather more to do with the VHS collection in the top drawer of the unit in my parents room.

I grew up reading Cyberpunk (the good and the bad) and I wanted the cyberspace from the books but I was willing to settle for 256 color boobs at 14.

"In fact FIDONET and the like probably had already met that bar, in an early PoC sense. Lots of folks in that space had the vision of at least a nationwide network of 24x7 connected bbs' if not the entire picture. You also had a lot of guys working in private industry, who operated small "national" or regional networks between a few sites at that point."

Also, distinct from BBS culture, many people in 1990 had telenet[1] access (not telnet) from local dialups and could connect to computers all over the country in that fashion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet

>> In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later.

> The prevailing discussion in the late 80's/early 90's on the tech boards (BBS) I frequented were all talking about networking and how computers were one day all going to be interconnected.

That's obviously a fairly small subset of people, though.

(On a separate note - I'm curious, do you recall if they thought it was going to be "a network for anyone and everyone"?)

I remember when the web started becoming popular and that there was a lot of discussion about whether it would be passing fad, so it was far from obvious to a lot of people then.

>That's obviously a fairly small subset of people, though.

Yes, but it's the same kind of "fairly small subset of people" that today would frequent a place like HN.

So if today's devs and engineers don't think there'll be much in smartphone innovation, then it's like people in BBS in the 80s not believing in a networked future.

In my memory of the internet becoming a thing in the early 90s, there was an intense fight over the commercialization of it. There was a group that really didn't want it to support money-making enterprises. Even at the time it seemed like a losing battle, but I doubt anyone foresaw just how overwhelming the commercial forces would be.

Yeah. It was by no means an unexpected or even unanticipated thing. It wasn't hard to see coming.

You have to account for selection/hindsight bias.

There were probably many more things predicted by various niche groups, just selectively looking at the few correct ones later does not mean that the overall prediction success ratio is high.