I started programming as a kid in the early 90s, and went to college in the late 90s/early 00s. It might sound crazy in hindsight, but between these tools and outsourcing, everyone I talked to thought being a programmer was going to be a dead end minimum wage type job, and I was strongly advised by many to pick a different major.

Equally, tools like Wordpress has killed off/deskilled the old 'webmaster' role - I mean sure, there are still people making money doing Wordpress sites for businesses but it's nowhere near as lucrative as it was at the start of the dot-com boom era.

Yes, now they are all Cloud admins.

He: Civil engineer, ending up working in China (stealing their jobs!)

Me: MechE, but fell into data science, and now work with a local team that's plurality 1st gen Indian, and majority 1st gen non-US.

How would I grade her prediction? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Don't worry, the big tech companies are spending ungodly amounts to make this happen.

In the 90s and 00s, every company with more than 1-2000 employees would have an internal dev staff. I worked in some companies with 20 devs, some with half a dozen, but there was always a dev team in the IT group.

Today, companies do low code via SharePoint and Salesforce. The do BI with Tableau and Power BI instead of internal BI teams. Their external web presence is done with Wordpress instead of a custom site. Sprinkle in some SaaS, and the internal dev teams of corporations are way smaller than they used to be, with some companies not having any internal devs.

Now you can hire content writers with experience in using CMS systems and leave the security/infrastructure part of it to developers.

I expected IPv6 to be adopted quickly.

I expected 6GB to be more storage than I could ever fill.

I expected Windows to be quickly dismissed and Unix to become the standard.

I expected to have a screen built into my glasses by now.

My response then is mostly as it is now - it's just too confusing to read and write. The UIs - even at the time - telling people to put in a dotted quad - were... manageable. 4 is an easy number to understand. Numbers only is easy to understand.

I still maintain that had some intermedia come out adding 2 (or possibly 4) more spaces and we transitioned from

187.43.250.198 to 0.0.187.43.250.198, and defaulted most UIs to just prefixing with the 0.0 then grew from there, we'd have had much faster adoption, and still given ourselves 64k 4 billion address spaces.

But... I'm not a network technician, nor am I on the committees... I'm just someone who's had to live with the last 20 years of "ipv6 is coming, we're running out of ipv4 addresses!!" and... the last 5-10 years of trying to mess around with ipv6 and realizing it's still mostly out of my control (home ISPs, ime, do not, support it still).

tldr, I never expected ipv6 to be adopted quickly. I'm surprised it's made it this far.

It's actually simpler than IPv4 in many respects. For example, prefix delegation: My router is getting an IPv6 /56 block from my ISP using DHCPv6. It is then handing out /64 blocks of on several different subnets with minor configuration.

The average user doesn't care about IP addresses. They're using DNS.

How often do you watch other people browse the web?

If you count iOS and Android having a Unix core...

However, as far as I can tell every major tech company still expects that problem to be solved and for them to be the Next Big Thing. I don't know why else they'd be putting so much money & PR into consumer AR efforts when it's niche at best, so long as you have to hold up a device to use it, unless they fully expect hardware development to come through in the nearish future and make AR glasses the next smartphone, in terms of becoming must-have and driving the next wave of human-computer interaction.

Problem was the only stories about it were about the “glass-holes” walking into bars with a camera on their face. I thought it was an interesting “intervention” style art piece that showed people still expected obscurity, if not privacy.

I've tried the glasses from North, which has been bought by Google a few years ago. The projection of the screen on the lens looks cool, but the glasses had no traction in the market and the company tried to charge me C$1100+ for a pair of prescription smart glasses.

Starting from some point (Pentium Pro I suppose?) even x86 CPUs became RISC internally CISC externally.

I remember working with Silicon Graphics gear back then and the 3D guys were quite enthusiastic about it. Of course, we had all devoured William Gibson’s novels like Neuromancer so we were naturally attracted.

We even built some 3D desktop apps as portals to the wider internet. They were too static and too hard to build so the Internet with HTML had much more pull for producers and consumers as well.

In practice, I think the 3D stuff that really worked at the time was more games like Quake and avatar-based web apps like Habbo Hotel.

It would still be fun to go back and read Jaron Lanier’s writing from that era.

When I was a kid my dad refused to teach me to program, he thought it would be a useless skill to learn because he believed in the future there would be no more programmers, as everyone would be able to program anything they wanted through drag and drop interfaces.

I don't get that. Moore's law is about transistor size shrinking, but that has an obvious end — transistors can't be smaller than one atom across. I feel like "everyone" did know that, even in the 90s. Or, at least, it was mentioned in every explanation of Moore's law itself.

> Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs

I mean, they did, but they also created consultant jobs to replace the ones they took away. See: Salesforce.

The need to write source code can be taken away; but the need to do requirements analysis and deliberate architectural design cannot. So you end up with people who do 80% of a programmers' job, except for the coding part.

We are nowhere near an atom well into 2005 at least, but things were getting pipelined and there was a ton of SRAM on each die, there were improvements to fetch pipelines (well, SPECTRE and friends really), everything was happening as fast as it could with out-of-order pipelines, with prefetch and every other speedup out there including auto-vec.

The "how big is an atom?" is sort of post-2010 thinking, at least the way I saw it happen.

Modems was one place where this sort of thing I saw personally happen - 9600 baud modems to 56kbps happened so fast and it almost looked it would keep going that way (Edge was 115kbps, now I can't even do a page load over it) with DSL suddenly dropping in to keep the same copper moving even faster again.

For example, these techniques improve instructions per clock, at the cost of adding transistors:

* pipelining (late 80’s early 90’s) MIPS R3000, Intel 486, Motorola 68040

* superscalarity (early 90’s) Pentium, DEC Alpha 21064, MIPS R8000, Sun SuperSparc, HP PA-7100

* out of order execution (mid 90’s) Intel Pentium Pro and later, DEC Alpha 21264, Sun UltraSparc, HP PA-8000

* SIMD (vector) instructions (mid/late 90’s) Pentium MMX (integer) Pentium III (floating point), DEC Alpha 21264

* multithreading (early 2000’s) Pentium 4, planned chips from DEC and MIPS

We also got improved branch predictors and larger, more-associative caches.

But it feels like most of that progress stopped in the early 2000’s, and the only progress is slapping more cores on a die. I mean, if you can put 8 cores in a consumer level CPU, you have 8 times as many transistor (give or take) as you need to implement a CPU. Nobody seems to be building a higher IPC CPU with 2x transistors, even though they clearly have the transistors to do it.

> Nobody seems to be building a higher IPC CPU with 2x transistors

I mean, there are designs like this, but they run into problems of cache invalidation and internal bus contention.

The way to get around this is to enforce rules about how much can be shared between cores, i.e. make the NUMA cores not present a UMA abstraction to the developer but rather be truly NUMA, with each core having its own partition of main memory.

But then you lose backward compatibility with... basically everything. (You could run Erlang pretty well, but that’s basically it.)

Sure, but that's not helping the general case. Only specific types of workloads. You could argue that adding lots of special-purpose hardware doesn't hurt from a transistor count (we have plenty) or power perspective (turn them off when not needed), but it can make layout tricky and reduce clock speed (which slows down everything else).

> [...] cache invalidation and internal bus contention [...] NUMA

Sure, but the context from spamizbad was specifically single-core performance. (I probably opened up a can of worms by mentioning hypertheading). The problem is many real-world workloads that add business value are not embarrassingly parallel problems. If it worked like that, Thinking Machines would have swept the court since the 1980's (they had NUMA like you are describing).

The point is that, since about 2005-2010ish, single-thread performance has mostly stalled. Intel CPUs can issue slightly more instructions per clock. AMD has a slightly better branch predictor. But performance growth has mostly been the result of adding more cores (Except Apple's M1 has some magic).

The things I previously mentioned gave big IPC gains on a diverse set of real workloads. Some innovations, like pipelining and multi-issue were responsible for 2x-4x IPC each. Pipelining, in particular, was a trick that also helped clock speeds.

All those innovations happened between the late 1980's and early 2000's. So an observer during that time might have just assumed that similar innovations would keep coming. But they haven't. A Pentium III has probably around 15x IPC compared to an i386 (maybe 60x if you include SIMD), in addition to a 40x higher clock speed (some of which came from adding more transistors).

How can you add transistors (say 2x or 3x) to a CPU to double performance on diverse, real-world problems that don't parallelize well? My point is, I don't think anyone knows, so it is irrelevant whether there is a physical limit to transistor shrinkage. We don't even know what to do with the transistors we have, so who cares if we can't have more?

Yes, but by itself that isn't a single core vs. multicore issue. It's a process node question generally.

That said, Intel in particular did try to push single-core frequency at least a beat too far. They demoed a 10GHz prototype at one IDF--and other companies were mocking them for it.

The story that a very senior Intel exec gave me at the time was something to the effect that, of course, they knew that they were going to have to go multi-core but Microsoft was really pushing back because they weren't confident in multicore desktop performance in particular.

this is still something some of us think about today

Ah, HyperCard ... RIP.

I think it's safe to say that we were close with this one, with jetbrains java (awt / swing) and wpf / winforms visual studio.

Then dot com, mobile and responsiveness arrived.

And it did kinda for a while.

However that was more of an afterthought- I remember that when it came out I initially bought into the write-once-run-anywhere hype and the idea that Java was for writing applets.

The UIs were too clunky (AWT) or foreign (Swing, the second attempt) and the Java SDKs buggy so in the end HTML just improved faster and took over the presentation layer together with Futuresplash (later renamed to Flash).

It only did not happened because they messed up with UNIX subsystem on Windows NT/2000.

Those that give Apple money to develop GNU/Linux software would be just as happy with the POSIX subsystem.

During the 00s and early 10s, it felt like it is.