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Comment by stakkur | Hacker News Reader

So many 'trends' back then. A few that come to mind (from the pre-web days, anyway):

* Thin clients: everybody was going to have a 'dumb terminal', and all the computing/storage would happen elsewhere. There were many variations on this idea.

* PIMs: Palm Pilots and all the variations. I knew a guy who quit his job to develop Palm Pilot wares, claiming it was 'the future'. In a way, he was right.

* Windows: Linux was barely there, Unix was for neckbeards and universities, and it looked like Mac was mostly dead. It looked like Microsoft was about to swallow the world.

* The end of mice and keyboards: Yes, it sounds silly today. but supposedly VR/voice/whatever was going to replace it all.

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In a way most of these came true.

> Thin clients

The cloud.

> Palm pilots.

Cell phones.

> Windows, Mac, Linux

Windows is still for business/economy. Linux is still for neckbeards. Although Mac is bigger than it was, the same people are still waiting for Apple silicon to catch on.

> Keyboards and mice

Have largely been supplanted by touch or gesture and consumer VR is becoming more and more viable every day.

Linux did eat the world, in the form of Android and all its variations. Every TV, most cellphones, many game consoles, and even your watch, are all probably running a Linux kernel.

(And there's also ChromeOS, eating the education sector.)

Linux in that case ate the embedded OS world. vxworks and so on. When trying to make a cheap device the OS can become the dominant cost. If it had not been linux it would have been one of the BSDs eventually. In those markets the margin is thin.

Keyboards and mice being supplanted by touch or gesture is only true for phones and tablets, which are new devices that really aren't equivalent to the general computing devices in the 90's: desktops and laptops. If anything, I'd say that tablets are just televisions that became small, light, and interactive, and smart phones are partly that and partly handheld gaming devices with multiplayer capability. Neither are equivalent to a computer (though they have computers built-in.)

Of course, as a software developer, I've always used computers differently than the masses. The computers I need are far more powerful than anything they need.

When it comes to thin clients, a lot of computing does happen via web services these days, albeit mostly video streaming and REST-based applications. Did you envision things a little differently?

I think he probably imagined it being a little thinner. The box on the desk hasn't changed size much.

But certainly the majority of "stuff" people do at home now takes place in data centers. And as a percentage of all computing cycles day by day, data centers do effectively all of it.

I realized I move very little data from install to install -- most of my data is in various web services.

I relatively painlessly can work both from Windows and Linux - most of what I need is in web browsers and remote systems..

certainly a success of "thin clients" - especially the browser.

More like VDIs everywhere, rather than SaaS suites, I think.

You actually nailed all the ones everyone missed, just missed the brand name.

What's your prediction for the next 20 years?

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