An interesting compilation of buzzwords of that time. Ultimately, almost none of them stuck to the walls. I wonder if today's AI hype will look the same in 27 years?
> I wonder if today's AI hype will look the same in 27 years?
If the AI hype from 37 years ago is any indication (fuzzy logic on lisp machines, anyone?): Yeah. 99% of the buzzwords will be dropped because they're empty, and the remaining 1% useful ideas will vanish into the background and see continued use under new names, because they won't be sexy enough any more to be called AI.
My first year of computer science (or any university course) was in 1997. I had used a Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX81, etc in the 80s, then a break in Junior High and High School, and for several years after that, and gotten back into computers as a hobby in the mid-90s. For health reasons, I could no longer work as a cook, had been learning C from K&R's book to make it easier to build ray tracing animations, and decided to go to university for it (I had some money saved up by virtue of having no free time or social life).
I sat down a to a Sun workstation that was described as a "thin client". This was slicker than my Linux system at home (which I mostly ran as a terminal using Lynx or something to browse the web) and featured the Sun browser and blinding fast Internet. Since I was using dial up at home, this was pretty intense.
Yes, I believed the future was thin clients, web browsers for everything, and that hyper-connected devices were just around the corner. It seemed totally reasonable to me that every system would be like a Chromebook. You sit down, login, and your "system" is waiting for you just as you left it the last time you used it whether it was here, or across the world. I also imagined this experience working on your watch (I imagined a bigger watch - we had watches that you could watch TV on in the 80's - a kid in my school had one) or on what I imagined were inevitable table-top and wall sized monitors that I assumed would be ubiquitous in 10 years (surface hub comes to mind).
So this was a popular vision and one that is kind of realized today although not all the way and not quite in the way "we" (people I was reading, talking to, and hoping to become) imagined.
So today we have Google accounts suspended by corporate bots (on the grounds mostly based on output of /dev/urandom), and I wonder (looking at the sales pitch of these ideas in 1997): are we NUI yet? And if yes, can we have our GUI back please?
Frankly, idea of mainframe is much older, and never really appealed to me. I prefer a kind PCs where P is for 'personal'.
> I sat down a to a Sun workstation that was described as a "thin client". This was slicker than my Linux system at home (which I mostly ran as a terminal using Lynx or something to browse the web) and featured the Sun browser
creshal|2 years ago
If the AI hype from 37 years ago is any indication (fuzzy logic on lisp machines, anyone?): Yeah. 99% of the buzzwords will be dropped because they're empty, and the remaining 1% useful ideas will vanish into the background and see continued use under new names, because they won't be sexy enough any more to be called AI.
zikzak|2 years ago
I sat down a to a Sun workstation that was described as a "thin client". This was slicker than my Linux system at home (which I mostly ran as a terminal using Lynx or something to browse the web) and featured the Sun browser and blinding fast Internet. Since I was using dial up at home, this was pretty intense.
Yes, I believed the future was thin clients, web browsers for everything, and that hyper-connected devices were just around the corner. It seemed totally reasonable to me that every system would be like a Chromebook. You sit down, login, and your "system" is waiting for you just as you left it the last time you used it whether it was here, or across the world. I also imagined this experience working on your watch (I imagined a bigger watch - we had watches that you could watch TV on in the 80's - a kid in my school had one) or on what I imagined were inevitable table-top and wall sized monitors that I assumed would be ubiquitous in 10 years (surface hub comes to mind).
So this was a popular vision and one that is kind of realized today although not all the way and not quite in the way "we" (people I was reading, talking to, and hoping to become) imagined.
mkup|2 years ago
Frankly, idea of mainframe is much older, and never really appealed to me. I prefer a kind PCs where P is for 'personal'.
sillywalk|2 years ago
I wonder if that was a JavaStation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaStation
romusha|2 years ago
f1shy|2 years ago