Ask HN: What are some tech hype cycles younger devs might not know about?
The recent hype cycles with stuff like NFTs made me curious:
What were some other tech hype cycles in the past that younger devs might not know about?
For example tech that was promoted as a game changer for the future with a lot of investment but ended up not actually having much impact or dying off
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When CD drives hit; "multimedia content" was going to be the next Big Thing. Couple years before they finally admitted that the hardware and software weren't ready yet, and when it was the parties pushing the notion back then had lost focus and were uninterested in all that potential they'd hyped.
- Object-oriented databases
- CORBA
— Taligent
- AI, a few times
- Expert systems
- And of course, the extremely hilarious CUE Cat bar code reader.
HATEOAS
S-100 was going to be replaced by VMEbus, then the PC came along, then the ISA bus was going to be replaced by the PS/2 bus, but it was too much lock-in, so we got EISA instead.
Laptops had expansion ports, using the PCMCIA interface, we called it People Can't Memorize, Computer Industry Acronyms
Bubble memory was supposed to make rotating disk obsolete. WORM (write once, read many) drives were supposed to revolutionize backups
Back in the early days of transistors they weren't as reliable as tubes, Magnetic Logic used ferrite cores to do logic, and computers were built out of it.
MMIC logic, where a cantilever is etched in free space, and static voltage is used to move it between contacts, could have been amazing fast, low power logic, but it didn't work out
ISDN - Integrated Services Digital Network, as going to be the ultimate connectivity, until the phone networks decided it meant "I Smell Dollars Now", and eventually it became "I Still Don't kNow"
ATM - Asynchronous Transfer Mode was going to revolutionize the phone networks, but eventually it was replaced by IP.
In the world of software:
P-code was the first cross platform interpreter, then Oak/Java, then .NET/Mono, now WASM
In leu of actual capability based security, we got VMs then Containers, now we're getting WASM
The Semantic Web was going to have all of us manually give context and labels to our web pages.
Fuzzy logic was a thing way before neural nets
As were "expert systems", which were going to automate away most professional jobs
Lots of things come and go, this industry is way more fashion driven than most people realize.
Not arguing against its inclusion on the list, just wondering if there should be another list of "incredibly stupid ideas taken to full deployment"
Wavelets