The Computer Chronicles – Visual Programming Languages (1993) [video]

> There are all kinds of different controls here, things for user interface, things for spreadsheet like display, here’s a gauge control. There’s also about a hundred custom controls in the aftermarket from third parties, everything from mainframe connectivity to neural networks to-

For someone who was still a small child when this video was made, hearing “mainframe” and “neural networks” in the same sentence in a video from 1993 when watching it now in 2019 caught me off-guard.

I am acutely aware that a lot of what is currently popular in software development comes from many years ago, much of it all the way back from the 70’s. However, I had the impression that things like neural networks were not mainstream until the mid 2010’s basically.

I was thinking that that kind of stuff had mostly been going on in circles of researchers in universities, and that a lot of it had come into “view” of the world at large only as recently as the mid 2010’s.

And likewise in the other direction while I know that some banks and such still run some of their systems on mainframes to this day, I thought most mainframes were gone by the end of the 80’s.

Point being, I guess there is a much more diverse set of computer technologies and techniques in use at every point in time since the 70’s than I tend to think of day to day.

It’s like, I know that HN bubble is a thing for example, but I think the world outside of my bubble might be much larger than I’ve really considered until now, even though my bubble is quite big IMO.