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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Definitely thought that consumer software (the thing sold in boxes on store shelves) would continue to get bigger as a category rather than die out completely. Anyone remember that famous photo of the guy jumping with joy after snagging a launch copy of Windows 95?

No one knew what the internet really was and what it would become. Not Bill Gates, not anyone else.

Developers believed that processing power, RAM, storage etc. would continue to grow exponentially to the point where there would just be too much of it and we wouldn't need to care about any resource constraints when writing code.

Writing code line by line in a text editor was supposedly on its way out, to be replaced by fancy IDEs, WYSIWYG, UML etc.

All the jobs were supposed to go to India. Programming as a profession has always been on the brink of death for one reason or another, and yet here we are.

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> guy jumping with joy after snagging a launch copy of Windows 95?

I was pretty excited about it too... And I was a kid in the 90s. I once worked with a guy who got excited about new releases of directx... Which I also admit could be a little exciting

Its funny I used to get excited about new API stacks coming out. They enabled such amazing things. Now I look at them as this thing we drag around, (hope you know the latest ones to get a job, and spend 4 months figuring it out). I look at them as this thing that will be quickly abandoned in 4 years and something I will end up supporting once the cool kids have wandered off to something new.

Innovation is exciting. Serious, exciting innovation in most of the computing world has ground to a near halt for over a decade now. Most things, hardware, software, web etc are just iterative, and often a step backward. Nothing to be excited about anymore.

In the 90s, not getting an expensive new PC every 2 years or so meant you were screwed if you wanted to play any of the cool new games coming out. I haven't upgraded my system in over 5 years, and I can still play most new titles with a few minor graphic settings turned down or off.

>Writing code line by line in a text editor was supposedly on its way out, to be replaced by fancy IDEs, WYSIWYG, UML etc.

If you're using something like Visual Studio then that's is a very fancy IDE and a long long way from writing C in a text editor and dealing with arcane compile errors.

Everyone knew the internet was going to change things massively. It’s just that nobody with any sort of power in the industry knew how exactly things were going to change. A lot of people overshot by trying to work on video streaming, video chat, document editors (Google Docs like) decades before the technology got there. Microsoft had a demo of Excel running in the browser by 1999.

> Not Bill Gates, not anyone else.

Didnt Bill Gates send a memo to MS employees in the 90's that internet is going to be very important and they have to take it seriously.

Yeah, and they responded to it by launching WebTV and Windows Mobile. At least the latter became something of a market standard, although firmly in 3rd/4th place behind Nokia, BlackBerry and Palm.

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