As I've gotten more experience in tech, I came up with a saying -

"Everything great was created in the '80s, and we've been rediscovering those things every ten years since."

I'm not firm on "the '80s" - maybe this stuff is older than I think - but I think the principle still holds. If it's a problem today, somebody probably thought about it before, and then others came around and wrapped things differently.

It's not BAD to wrap things differently, but the old stuff had more of the sharp corners sanded off, and sometimes we lose that battle-hardened aspect when we rewrite code.

Except for garbage collection/whatever is happening with memory safety today. That's the good stuff.

I tend to find that if there is a software idea, there are good odds that someone once had it before and probably made some code/prototype/paper/blog post/newspaper article on it.

However usually these systems didn't take off because they were "before their time". There were cloud services in the 80s - but PCs got faster and cheaper than internet speeds could keep up. Client side apps looked better than cloud apps. Similarly modern data centers, and cloud computing primitives didn't exist so reliability was more miss than hit.

Now the economics have turned and people need data shared across multiple devices. Cloud services are the defacto method of developing applications.

Even as a different perspective to that - a lot of what AWS/GCP/Azure are doing today, IBM was doing in the 80's with Cobol and DB2 and a bunch of tech that people today are just not interested in.

There's a post that I saw on HN a couple weeks ago[1] talking about what an AWS Lambda service would look like in Cobol and I was blown away. This is the stuff my dad used to work on when he was fresh out of college, and I'm not exactly a spring chicken (as evidenced by the fact that I used the phrase "spring chicken")!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25989454, link to article submitted for the lazy: https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18156250&cid...

The problem was, undergrads in top 50 CS programs were not using IBM mainframes during the 80's. They were using UNIX.

Same thing today (and a few PC here and there).

Getting access to a mainframe was and still is very expensive. That's why Google, Facebook, everyone post 2000 basically got started on commodity hardware. Because it's cheap, it's what the founders knew and it works. It's also what the top 50 alumni know, and there's no vendor lock-in.

Yup. Its so shocking when something "new" or at least that feels new is actually created. I don't care about the countless companies that will make it slightly easier for me to get something from point a to point b.

I care a lot about companies that actually make something new or popularize something that already existed but didnt have widespread appeal.

Yeah. I remember looking at the Slack IPO and saying to myself, "Your F'ing kidding me. They went public for doing IRC channels in a web browser with emojis?!?!"

This isn't _as_ short-sighted as the famous "Dropbox comment"[1], but it's pretty close.

a) Slack _clearly_ offers a lot of meaningful functionality over-and-above IRC channels. "Searching" - and, implicitly, persistence - is so fundamental to the offering that it's (apocryphally) part of the acronymic name. Threading, bot support, and channel discovery are all useful features. Sure, all of those things _can_ be implemented on an IRC server, but they're not out-of-the-box.

b) Setting up and supporting an IRC server is non-trivial for a non-technical person. Sure, it's easy to you and me - but any system that can allow customers to get access to that functionality _without_ needing a dedicated I.T. team is going to be more attractive to decision-makers.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Sadly, Slack is also missing a whole lot of IRC functionality - starting with a proper desktop client. The logging it provides is a joke, even when you actually pay for it. Its search capabilities are nowhere near grep(1).

> Its search capabilities are nowhere near grep(1).

This is again missing the point. Yes, the statement "Slack's search isn't as powerful as grep's" is true - but many of the prospective users of Slack (and, crucially - most of those who make the decisions about corporate IT) are incapable or unwilling to use grep _anyway_. You are judging a tool by how well it suits your needs, without realizing that you are not its only target audience.

I think you're both missing the point, though. And it surprises me how many people miss this point even on this incredibly smart forum. The idea doesn't matter as much as the execution. The business side matters as much or more than the technology side.

Fair enough. And I'll admit the above statement is exactly why I'm not a business person:)

Big same. I appreciate that they exist, so that I don't have to worry about it :)

Well, I agree only in part. Their biggest feat wasn't doing IRC in a browser with emojis, it was convincing many companies they actually need it. They also managed to somehow convince the geeks saying "look, you can always use IRC gateways" only to kill them once they secured their position.

I'm still shocked how many companies basically pay for slack and use it the exact same way they used email before.

One could say that memory safety is exactly the kind of "sanding off" we need on the concept of the traditional coding paradigms that have governed the software industry since there was a software industry(which, conveniently, is something that got started in the 70's and came of age in the 80's). One long period of structural debt and organizational consolidation, most of it piled on the conceptual framework of Unix, C, and core Internet technologies. There's a shift in the cosmology of computing taking place now, where the base layers are getting reexamined.

And now, a period of reinvestment in the bottom layers and signs of a diasporic divergence emerging. Movements that are ideologically different from yesteryear's FOSS, and a tightening of SV's grip on events that increasingly causes sand to pour through, new purposings of old tech and roads previously untaken. It's like Alan Kay put it: The future is the past AND the present.

Security and privacy are another big thing. In the 90s and 200Xs I installed pretty much anything as a native app and didn't worry about it as only "bad" people made viruses/trojans and legit companies had no incentive.

That all changed with big data and marketing. Now, every native app company, and every library those native apps use, has an incentive to mine your machine for data and then use and or sell that data. And further, the vectors for exploits of various native apps have increased as well and the always connected nature of our devices has increased the incentives.

Many people complain about MacOS's new security features. Me, I love them and I don't think they go far enough. Sure I want control of my machine. I don't want to secede control to Apple. But that to me is what MacOS (not iOS) is delivering (or attempting to deliver). Stop every app from doing anything without permission. Give me way to grant that permission if I really want. I wish Windows would do the same. I wish all Steam games were sandboxed.

In other words, getting all that cool tech from the 80s to be secure and privacy respecting is a ton of work.

Your post is about software, but it applies pretty well for hardware.

Like looms.

Robotics is actually generally pretty slow. Regular (serial) robot arms are usually significantly slower than a human arm. Some parallel robots (ie where the motors are mostly stationary and don’t have to be waved around by other motors), like a SCARA or Delta robot, can go about 2-3x the speed of a human, but the difference isn’t massive (60 vs 150 picks per minute?).

But looms are insane. Their task is simpler, but they can do over 2000 picks per second (!). The yarn in air jet looms can be moving over 200 mph. And even mechanical looms like Rapier looms or projectile looms are super fast. The mechanisms are also super advanced and hard to wrap your mind around. Centuries of optimization of the first really good industrial automation instance will do that, I suppose.

It makes me think we haven’t reached a completely flat plateau in mechanical development. Our robots today are actually pretty primitive compared to where they could... where they really should be. It also shows just how hard I think a lot of futurists have underestimated human mechanical capability. Human dexterity and force density is crazy impressive. Humans are actually super strong, fast, AND precise.

And hard automation like looms are also underestimated vs “robot arms.” Hard automation is so much more effective if you can do it. Just robot arms aren’t that great vs people

The potential with arms and other humanoid robotics is to be able to plug them into existing processes without having to make massive structural changes. Robot arms in car factories look like an evolution from a human production line, rather than a completely redesigned production line (or a mashup of the two). Still, redesigning the production around the robot still makes good sense: consider a dishwashing android vs a regular dishwashing machine. We have had dishwasher tech for a long time but we are still very far from a dishwashing android. It's just that maybe that humanoid robot could also hang up the laundry, look after the kids, drive you to the supermarket etc. There is so much room to grow in the "hard automation" space, where scale makes having specialized machines doable - as opposed to a household having to buy a dishwasher, washing machine, roomba, etc.

Didn't Tesla try this for the Model 3 (a fully-automated factory) and it turned out to be a total disaster?

Are they too far ahead of the curve? Or is it just rare that your task remains identical enough (i.e., textiles) for the decades it takes to optimize hardware?

A bit of both, I think. To do this is really hard. And requires some changes to how the car is made. Some of these lessons learned are presumably are being introduced into the Model Y, like the single-piece rear casting.

There's also a ton of engineering needed to go into how to make better robots.

Tesla also patented a wiring harness rigid enough to be robotically manipulated.

Indeed. That's another thing I was thinking of. Robots are terrible at manipulating floppy objects like wiring harnesses.

I made a search in the page for "robots" and got to your comment.

It's also appropiate to put this comment under some other mentioning old tech. Because robots have become steampunk. Very dear to first sci-fi writers, now they're démodé.

As soon as NLP gets another frog leap, we'll start seeing a comeback.

Where do I read more about looms?

Do you mean a better SMTP server or making a better* e-mail in general? (As an example)

* Better in this case would be a fundamental design to prevent spoofing, provide S2S encryption maybe E2E encryption, fixing MIME typing issues, fixing Rich Text/HTML display, etc. Basically an actually good faith replacement of e-mail instead of a vendor co-opting.

There's TMTP, "a sane network protocol for email, to end attacks and promote productivity."

https://mnmnotmail.org/

https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail

Serious money may be required.

Support for MNM by way of Patreon is requested on the home page.

There's also JMAP, with credible standards people involved:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jmap/photos/

Serious industry involvement however appears limited to FastMail.

JMAP is an extension of the email protocol stack; it only replaces IMAP.

TMTP is an alternative to the entire email protocol stack. It will be standardized after it's been proven in a range of real-world scenarios.

The mnm client & server, which implement TMTP, work well today, and have nearly all the features most users need. See docs menu in the online demo.

https://mnmnotmail.org/demo.html

Re "serious money", could you elaborate?

... that also doesn’t rely on DNS!

So why post in a thread that's implicitly about little-known or emerging tech?

"The best under-the-radar car? It's a horse and buggy I tells ya!" Every one of these posts on HN has to have a hot take that's contrarian.

I’m completely serious. There’s a ton of very old boring software that is still somehow little-known to some developers. It’s under the radar the way soil is under the radar - hiding in plain sight, ignored by the folk looking to the sky when the problem they actually have is how to grow some plants.

I’m also genuinely excited that there is growing momentum away from software churn, because we’re not going to solve the complexity crisis with another framework.

Some tech appears before its time has come. It gets some popularity but stagnates because some complementary development isn't there yet.

Some form of tablets and smartphones were there years before the iPhone or iPad.

I think you just won this thread. Seriously, I agree very much with your sentiment. The question isn't so much about the very latest-and-greatest new technologies per-se, but rather about the applications of technologies that are quite often fairly old. That's not to say that there isn't really cool stuff just over the horizon, but as you say, we really need better applications more than more new tech.

And sometimes the tech we need is "out there" and has been for a while, but just hasn't hit "critical mass" yet.

Take @kroltan's answer. I am also extremely bullish on RDF, Wikidata, and the like. But most of this stuff is pretty old now, especially in "Internet years". Which leads, of course, to the question of where the line is between incremental refinement of "old tech" and actual "new tech" as a discrete thing.

I kind of agree but I think I can be more specific.

We need to find more/better ways of integrating people with tech.

Tech on its own is 10% of the solution. Integrating humans with technology is underrated.

(I say this as the owner of various enterprise SaaS businesses but I'm sure it applies in all aspects of software)

This reminds of Nintendo’s philosophy of lateral thinking with withered technology.

https://medium.com/@adamagb/nintendo-s-little-known-product-...

Not just old tech. But old tech made new again. Think about how much server-side web hosting de-complicates websites. If you had to start with a blank linux box, PHP is still one of the fastest ways to get something with a shopping cart functional to this very day. If you are into new-fangled shiny shit and can't be bothered with old, proven tech, look no further than Blazor Server for 99% of the same idea. But also way better because you have C# 8.0 and one of the best IDEs + first-class debugger support at your disposal.

In some circles, you might even be accused of being a boomer for using SQL. I think a lot of developers are missing out on just how much runway you can get out of SQL and libraries like SQLite. You would also be missing out on one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of computer science with regard to our ability to model problem domains and perform inhuman queries against them with millisecond execution times. But hey, maybe machine learning and mongodb are working for your shop.

The final thing a lot of people miss are old ideas. Put your entire application on a single server somewhere, and all of its dependencies live in the same box. Optimize the vertical before you rewrite for horizontal, because 99% of the time you will go bankrupt before you get as big as Netflix so it wont matter anyways. Plus, you would go bankrupt faster anyways by chasing delusions of web-scale grandeur when you could have had the MVP done 3 years ago with just a simple SQLite database back-end and a T3a.micro. More likely than not you would have discovered it was a bad idea to start with and could more quickly move on to the actual thing you should have been focusing on.

> Put your entire application on a single server somewhere, and all of its dependencies live in the same box. Optimize the vertical before you rewrite for horizontal, because 99% of the time you will go bankrupt before you get as big as Netflix so it wont matter anyways.

Worse case, you'll get bottlenecked by the DB and move it to a different (bigger) server.

I've come to appreciate so many old FOSS tools that are incredibly well built and thought of in their design.

Emacs and org-mode (and many things GNU) have started to make more and more sense to me in this day and age.

Amen. We need to walk back from convoluded and bloated software to the era when every software was simple. https://collapseos.org

Such a sad perspective of innovation... new ideas don't always result in better technology, but they're certainly not aimless.

I suppose you're writing this on a 1982 Commodore 64...

A lot depends on what you value in "innovation". Better, more useful things? The industry has been falling short here. Perpetually reinventing solutions to the same problems, to secure a money flow? Yeah, we're good at it.

I agree with the concept that many industries still rely on old technology that with a 10% improvement could already surpass current "advanced" implementations. A good example being the Besides Tool Import Wizard that can scrape PDF data with way more ease and simplicity than a manual implementation with say Python. And that tool has been around for 20+ years!!

Everything gets shittier and more complicated for no obvious benefit. I used to write code. Now I just search stack overflow and try and get pieces to work together.

> We don’t need more new tech. We need better applications of old tech.

“Better application” + “old tech” ≡ “new tech”.

Can you give some examples of where this is happening today?

The real problem seems to be experience transfer. People reinvent because they don't even know what already exists. They run into the same problems because they don't know they've already been solved. They come up with a flawed solution because they don't know someone else already had the same idea, took their hits, and learned from it.

Indeed. The amount of "new tech" around auth leaves me head scratching. So many of the problems these start-up types are trying to solve have been solved by something like a well maintained Active Directory 10+ years ago.

Group permission, PAM, SSO, etc. It's like these developers have never been exposed to Active Directory ever in their life...

The other day I got around to finally learn some COM/DCOM, and realized Windows had microservices built in for 2+ decades, and with better protocols and security...

Recently I ported a suite of 30 year old c/c++ programs, each one was deployable and runable on their own and communicated via sockets, microservices from the early 90's. Likewise FaaS doesn't add much that couldn't be done via apache cgi in the 90's.

Was the communication encrypted?

How long ago did you learn that? Because back in the day I didn't know even one developer who wouldn't curse when working with DCOM/Corba implementations because of convoluted complexity, bugs, and problems with debugging.

Less than a year ago. I've been using it a little here and there for almost two decades - DirectX is accessed and operated through COM API - but I never bothered to actually learn it in depth, until I had to jump straight into debugging obscure errors in an application that used a DCOM-based service.

> Because back in the day I didn't know even one developer who wouldn't curse when working with DCOM/Corba implementations because of convoluted complexity, bugs, and problems with debugging.

Yeah, I got that impression about COM through osmosis over the years. But come to think of it, isn't the exact same thing happening with the current trend of microservices, and super-convoluted stacks of Docker containers and Kubernetes? So perhaps the problem ultimately wasn't with COM per se :).

I'm not sure I understand your comment. Active Directory is Microsoft's proprietary tech that is a modification of the Kerberos standard, reimplemented most notably in Samba, but client solutions (open and proprietary) also exist.

Group permissions predate AD by decades, PAM by a few years. SSO in today's form is a web phenomenon, so a web-oriented solution makes more sense, and there is a lot of work being done in this direction.

>Active Directory is Microsoft's proprietary tech that is a modification of the Kerberos standard

And LDAP, and some DNS, and certs, etc. It's not just Kerberos; you're sounding ignorant here.

>Group permissions predate AD by decades

No one said otherwise, but it goes beyond basic POSIX groups with things like nested groups, delegated group permissions, etc.

>SSO in today's form is a web phenomenon

So is AD's...

Basically, you're proving my point.

Windows isn't used in academia.

So you get new grads that are re-inventing the wheel.