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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

What kind of sucks about tech is you start realizing people mainly just do the same stuff they did 25 years ago with it. Only today, the hardware has to be 1000x as powerful to run all the shitty bloaty software that's still just serving email, rendering spreadsheets, chat, images, videos, news, online shopping, etc, as its ever been. It's like we've been in this arms race for sexier and more resource demanding window dressing, versus something that I actually couldn't do before, and there has been absolutely no letting up.

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25 years ago we were in Windows 98 times.

UX and general day to day quality of life has been improved dramatically in the last 25 years for 'regular' consumer things. I would take everyday a 'shitty bloaty' modern operating system if the alternative is to run something from that era. Especially for mundane things like the ones you mentioned. I can open a spreadsheet on my computer and instantly have it in all my devices or shared with anyone in the world. I can have 4k video and max res pictures backed up everywhere. Maybe you don't remember how clunky were computers 25 years ago and how low resolution everything was.

For 'professional' things (Coding, Game Development, Video Editing, Design, Photoediting, Architectural work) today technology simply allow things that were not possible even 5 years ago, 25 years ago are ancient times. I don't know what you do with computers, but there are plenty of things that you couldn't do just a short time ago.

I have a several copies of Windows 98 running on emulators.

The quality of life is not that different from a modern OS. I wouldn’t call it dramatically improved. The paradigms have just changed, and not even that drastically. Business tasks are particularly similar. Certain tasks are actually easier on something like Excel 97 than they are on Excel 2021. Applications actually adhered to human interface guidelines.

Man, I was trying to think of examples of cool stuff we can do now that we couldn't in the 90s, and came up pretty short.. It's quicker and easier to load up bite-sized games in the web browser nowadays, but that comes with a whole mess of really awful dystopian shit and a lot of 100x code speed de-improvements thanks to JavaScript, Design Patterns, etc.

I don’t know where I heard this analogy, but there are lots of things in life that don’t change linearly, but asymptotically to some target, and the analogy ad absurdum goes something like: “Thousands of years ago we thought the earth was flat, now we think it’s round, what’s next? A torus?”

The idea being that there is a period of massive change as we figure out how something ought to work, but then once we do, the change gradually slows and then stops. Spreadsheets are basically a solved problem, and they’re also very useful, so for certain types of work, changing it is probably only going to make it worse. Multiply that by all sorts of different types of software, and it’s hard to find any areas where we fundamentally need a new paradigm.

So it’s not surprising that 25 years ago, software was changing all the time, and since then it only seems like we’ve changed the window dressing. Because most of the time, we actually got it right 25 years ago, and there’s no reason to change it further.

There are a number of things that are possible today that would have blown people's mind in 1998.

Streaming music - I remember downloading my very first mp3 (maybe around 96-ish) and my computer not being able to decode it in real-life (the audio skipped/stuttered). It also took 40 minutes to download. Streaming a song with near CD quality fidelity on a computer would have been mind boggling. Streaming music to a wireless pocket computer was unthinkable.

Streaming 4k video - similar to music but even more insane. I remember the first time I streamed video over the internet. It was on CNN's website around maybe 98 or 99. It used the real player, was some silly low resolution (lower than 320x240), and was so pixelated that you couldn't make out people's faces.

Google Maps with Street View

Google Translate

Actually good OCR (including handwriting support)

Actually good speech recognition.

Video calls

ah, I meant use cases that were enabled by/tied to the bloat

I guess you could say that streaming content is a core part of the horrible software bloat we've been suffering under. Instead of being allowed to just download a good quality copy of anything, we have to 'stream' low quality DRM-laden copies again and again

Google Maps would work a lot better as a standalone app than embedded in a web browser, but I guess that and a lot of other apps are delivered via browser nowadays

Its an entire wasteful paradigm of pull everything, cache nothing. It just relies on the assumption that you'd always have perfectly reliable data; I can't get a good wifi or LTE signal in certain parts of my home on the other hand so I guess I am screwed.

> rendering spreadsheets

I am dying to know what the next paradigm for spreadsheets will be. Is it some sort of "walk-through" spreadsheet?

It's just spreadsheets plus AI, apparently

The same 2d excel spreadsheet you've been staring at for the last 25 years, only rendered in VR 40 stories in height.

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