Hacker News Reader

Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

Imagine going back to the early 1980s and seeing people argue that the personal computer market was too crowded, and there was no way anyone was ever going to make any money in it. The whole thing had played out. Big companies owned the software market. Big companies owned the games. Big companies owned the peripherals. What could possibly be left?

Wait, what's a laptop? What's a workgroup server? What's email? None of those things had really happened, they were all markets just over the horizon about to explode onto the scene.

View on HN

My 12th grade computing science instructor (who was admittedly horrible) said that she didn't see much of a future programming computers, because pretty much all of the computer programs that were required had been created, and all that was left was to improve the speed, size of documents allowed, and maybe add a few extra features.

This was in Spring, 1987.

My father had a completely different experience. His ancient physics teacher said, "computers my boy...they are the future". This would have been some time in the 1970's.

Of-course dad didn't listen and went on to have a unremarkable career as a Structural Engineer.

A real shame as I'm sure he would have made an excellent programmer. I like to tease him over what-ifs - especially as he shares a birthday with Bill Gates.

And, funnily enough, the word processing tool most often used in my office (Dropbox Paper) is slower, less suited to long documents and has fewer features than the first word processor I used. Still, you can't expect your teacher of 30 years ago to foresee "the future is emojis".

People just want different software every few years, because fashion is fickle there's a natural feeling that old stuff is out of date. Slack doesn't provide any real improvement over an IRC server that keeps its logs around, but it's web-based and it has custom emojis, so...

I mean, did the first word processor you use allow collaborative working on documents available anywhere with an internet connection, constantly backed up to Dropbox servers?

Sure, the internet makes our lives a lot better, but Wordpad sticking regular .rtf files in a vanilla Dropbox folder would provide 80% of the benefit. Realtime same-file editing is convenient, but it's pretty minor really.

It was actually very useful at my last company. We used it in many different kinds of meetings. I think it will pave the way to some interesting collaborative software in the future.

Dropbox has a word processor? My god, Google's offering is bad enough and I hate when coworkers inflict it on me. I hope nobody discovers the Dropbox one.

The computer market was more crowed in the early 1980's that it is now, goto a library and look at an old computer magazine from that period. Dozens of brands with dozens of operating systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com