Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

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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