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A comment on Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future o... by zonethundery on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @10:21AM (#27591961)
My mid-90's telco experience involved a test deployment of citrix winframe (IIRC) dumb terminals. They worked okay, but not great.

Every tech or bigco job i've had there's at least one mainframe codger doing the Kinge George "You'll be back" number from hamilton. Don't think they anticipated the non-MF cloud. Almost always among the best engineers though in the joint though, IME.

I miss genuine differences in hardware. Happy hour discussions about alpha vs sparc vs intel etc. I'm hopeful that diversity will come back around as a thing.

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Re:Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future o... by geocrasher on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @10:46AM (#27592323) 

   I miss genuine differences in hardware. Happy hour discussions about alpha vs sparc vs intel etc. I'm hopeful that diversity will come back around as a thing.
THIS. Right now there are three mainstream choices: Win, Linux, Mac And I'm sorry- no matter how diverse your Linux distro is or even what hardware you're running it on (x86 vs ARM etc), it's still just Linux. And again, sorry- Linux just isn't interesting anymore. Extremely useful for its purpose, but it's commonplace enough to be ho-hum.

Can anyone recommend something quite a bit different that a guy could toy with? Or is this why everyone is having so much fun with 8 bit retrocomputers?

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Re:Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future o... by flyinghamster on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @11:33AM (#27592981)
Haiku OS, maybe? It is under active development. https://www.haiku-os.org/

But a key problem with alternative OSes is that if you want to use them as daily drivers, your software choices may be limited or nonexistent. Haiku, for instance, has a WebKit-based browser, but no Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, or Safari.

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Re:Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future o... by geocrasher on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @01:40PM (#27594669)
I'm more interested in exotic or uncommon hardware than software.
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Re:Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future o... by kstrauser on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @11:08AM (#27592619)
A lot of people around me are playing with Plan 9 these days, but I haven’t paused to figure out why yet.
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Re:Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future o... by rewgs on Wednesday June 23, 2021 @02:36AM (#27601470)
It's hip.
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