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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

I love those "eras" when people only half knew what the hell they were doing. The early space/rocketry research era was crazy like that. Inflatable satellites, blowing up a tank of water in the upper atmosphere (and, hey, nuclear bombs too), dragging wires through orbit, dropping metallic chaff in orbit....

When people don't quite know what's going on a lot of crazy ideas can seem legit. I suspect it is sort of the fun part of the era as well — before sobering reality, data and formulas start to encroach on everyone's good time.

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> When people don't quite know what's going on a lot of crazy ideas can seem legit.

Kind of makes you sentimental when you realise you've lived through something like that by being a software developer in the 90s.

I don't know. It wasn't all good. We also had MFC (remember that?), tcl/tk, and everything had to be written in C. It was like pulling teeth to get people to use C++, and if you succeeded, you might regret it. The C++ people were still having flame wars on all the ways to do exception handling. The world revolved around Microsoft more and more, and Linux wasn't an alternative yet.

I think of the naughts as that idyllic time (for a software engineer). Microsoft was being overthrown, Apple hadn't gone full-minimalist yet, and the Linux Desktop was actually a pretty fun place to hack. Gnome and KDE weren't yet trying to copy everything Apple was doing (also, we had WindowMaker and enlightenment if you wanted to actually go minimalistic). The internets made all that sharing and open source possible, and it was like the world was all new and shiny.

> The world revolved around Microsoft more and more, and Linux wasn't an alternative yet.

There were a lot of unix alternatives to microsoft, just not as many on x86 hardware (which was still mostly bsd variants like Jolix.) SunOS/Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, AUX, OpenVMS, etc. In this period the x86 platform was not dominant and if you wanted real power you were using things like an Alpha or PowerPC CPU, with the Pentium Pro being mostly a server chip and the Pentium getting a bit long in the tooth through the mid-90s before the PII was released. The 90s were a pretty interesting time to be doing server development or sysadmin work.

Really? Software design feels way more interesting and experimental now than it did back then.

Inter-war tanks are another great example. Everyone knew these new "tank" things were the future, and everyone wanted them, but nobody really knew what they were supposed to look like. So we get marvels like the Vickers Independent, the FCM F1 and the M2 Medium

> I love those "eras" when people only half knew what the hell they were doing.

You say that as if people 50 years from now won't look back on some of things we do today thinking the same thing.

I suppose they will. Even now, the 80's, 90's when we were programming for nerds, for people just like us, seems in hindsight like a very rarified time. BBS's, modems, floppy disks, computer magazines ... it does seem pretty wild.

It’s going to be the variations on the concept of artificial intelligence.

Like the way people are making funny DALL-E memes today is like Jennicam or how people made webcam sites for their coffee maker in the late 90’s.

"I love those "eras" when people only half knew what the hell they were doing."

I think we are at this stage in AI, robotics and a lot of medical research. Unfortunately the weird things we are doing in these areas are not very visible.

100 years from now people will look back at the tech and crypto startups of today and think the same thing.

The difference is not data and formulas, it's government regulations. We would still be seeing lots of fantastical new ideas in aerospace a d probably be decades further along technologically if not for the government granting patents blocking ideas from being used and creating multi-million dollar, years-long regulatory review processes.

Eliminate regulations and see innovation leap forward.

Technology tends to move faster in war. Society too- America had a smaller army than Bulgaria in 1939.

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