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Comment by ljoshua | Hacker News Reader

What I find most interesting from this clip is that, if you just swapped out some of the product names and acronyms, it would largely sound like a technical presentation that could be given today. “Here’s a database, we want to connect it with SQL to another product for visualizing the data, and we’re going to add some automation to take care of business process X.”

Surely things have gotten faster and (in some cases!) more efficient, but we are doing the same thing 30 years later that we were excited about in 1993. In a way that’s both comforting and darkly funny.

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Choosing software, prioritizing the right things, and connecting it all is hard. We're not good at it and we have to re-connect the dots every-time we shuffle the deck chairs.

I think I've worked on the problem of "we want our sales guys to get an email whenever the sale they made ships" ... an un-countable amount of times. Without fail the first and biggest hurdle is that the customer does not reliably capture or connect their sales people's email addresses in any kind of reliable way. I'm sure they do when it comes to paying bonuses, but not for sending the email when the thing ships. It makes no sense, it should be easy, but they don't. So we work on it on and on and then with the next customer and so on.

And honestly I'm not sure any of these sales folks read the dang email.

The Mother of All Demos was given in 1968, and still warrants its moniker today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

The fact that this is server side and data storage probably contributes to this. Consumer grade client devices in 1993 were large and bulky, didn't even do multitasking or memory protection very well. Now they're cheap, small, ubiquitous, have lots of very high level programming interfaces.

I work in the auto industry. Cars have changed so much but at the end of the day they're still just internal combustion engines that spin wheels. I suppose EVs represent true innovation but I'm still dubious on their future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Type_51

> The 1916 Type 53 was the first car to use the same control layout as modern automobiles- with the gear lever and hand brake in the middle of the front two seats, a key started ignition, and three pedals for the clutch, brake and throttle in the modern order.

I've seen a clip on Top Gear where they drove some early cars and the controls were completely different like levers for acceleration and braking.

How long would it take someone familiar with this 108 year old Cadillac to learn how to drive a modern car from point A to point B? 1 minute?

Driving a Tesla is much easier than driving the 1916 Cadillac. The biggest surprise to this ancient driver would be the aggressive regenerative braking.

Now that internal combustion powered cars are down to less than 20% of new car sales in quite some countries, and has been for several years, I think we can safely say that the EV is not a fad and that the fossil technology is going the same way as the steam engine in the 60s. The modern electric motor is a superior technology in almost any way. The battery, however, is just good enough, and for the replacement to be complete, better battery technology will be needed. For those last 15-20%, the energy density of Li-Ion is just not good enough.

Why are you dubious about the future of EVs?

Honestly, the world was simpler then (with fewer layers of abstraction separating the database from the presentation) and I suspect the majority of the time it was far more efficient then than now.

... speaking as someone who was in the job of enterprise BI where data sources were primarily Progress databases on AS400, back from around 2000-2010, when we finally migrated to a Linux / PostgreSQL stack.

Out of curiosity, why weren't you using the built-in DB2 on AS400?

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