I remember talking in mid 99 about ipv6, while I was at a web company. Immediately on seeing it I said "this is crazy, and isn't going to take off". "Why not?" I got from some of the network folks there.

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.

I've been working with IPv4 since 1993, back when getting a SLIP or PPP connection was uncommon. I set up my first IPv6 tunnel back in 2007. When properly configured, IPv6 is no more difficult to set up than a IPv4 connection with DHCP: It just works.

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.

I have had native IPv6 at home for over 10 years.

our regional TWC didn't offer it, and our local spectrum doesn't offer it for residential. I can get it for our office now, and might, but my own desire to experiment/learn isn't there, and no one else in the office here is asking for it right now.

That's why we have the DNS. People know names, not numbers. Use AAAA records.

Today people don't even remember DNS names anymore. They just use the search engine/advertisement provider of choice. DNS is of course still very useful to separate service names from physical architecture so you can move stuff around. But I hardly ever see people typing in DNS names or using bookmarks these days.

> But I hardly ever see people typing in DNS names or using bookmarks these days.

How often do you watch other people browse the web?

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

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

It hardly matters when POSIX is hardly part of the public SDK, no one is running CLI or init daemons on iOS/Android.

Regarding screens in glasses: where is the hold up? I've been thinking of prototyping something for the past few weeks (only thinking, hence my question).

Enough battery for all-day power being able to fit in a device that doesn't look like complete shit (i.e. looks sufficiently like normal glasses or sunglasses) seems to be the problem.

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.

Well, Google Glass was launched big some years ago, and everybody mocked it.

I think fewer people would have mocked it if it were in anyway accessible to ordinary folks. They set the wrong price point, which made it an easy target for ridicule because only 'rich' people with sufficient disposable income even had them.

It makes sense that the first version of something like that is going to be expensive, though. And compared to some of the high-end smartphones of today, it wasn't even that outrageous, was it? It was aimed at early adopters, which makes sense. If successful, prices would drop, cheap knock-offs would appear, and more people could afford it.

The built in camera had a huge creepy factor to it.

Yeah and now plenty adults are running around with powered-up Tamagotchi's on their wrists. Probably the same people who laughed at google glass would insist on wearing it now or in the near future.

The device was pretty slick, which it should be for 1500$ (Typical devkit prices I guess), I enjoyed recoding tutorials where I needed both hands - it reliably captured what I was looking at, and it was lightweight and didn’t get in the way, great tool.

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.

Well, someone has tried "screen in glasses".

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.

I think you were right in RISC prediction.

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