Ask HN: What were the tech trends thought to be revolutionary but died out?
For examples NFTs are in style right now, I do not know how it's going to fare in the future, but has there been similar trends like this in history? Shareware - Back when we had the relative safety of hardware too dumb to stuff trojan horses in, and write protectable operating system disks, it was commonplace to have a vendor at your local user group with floppy diskettes full of new stuff to try out, for $2-3 per disk. There are thousands of disks with dozens of programs on each. This was mobile code on a scale that is currently impossible. Once we get capability based security that protects the hardware and our data from things we run by default, it's possible it'll make a comeback, and there will be another wild explosion of creativity in programming. I live in rural Ireland and I remember a family friend came back from the US and gave us a shareware CD-ROM with 1000 DOS games on it. This was the mid 90s before we had internet. We had just fitted a sound blaster card and a CD-Rom, I filled my dad’s 386 hard disk with them, it absolutely blew my mind. Shareware versions of Wolfenstein, Doom, Jetpack, all the Apogee games, all the classics. This is really cool, why did this die out? It died out because there is no longer an easy method to sandbox things that is bulletproof. Wearable computers were going to be a thing several times - look at the progression of Prof. Steve Mann's wearables[1], around the late 1990s when the Twiddler chording keyboard he's using became available and the hardware was small and light enough to be more like a big walkie talkie than a freakshow. Again with Timex Datalink watches, and things like PDAs and Palm Treos, again with Google Glass, again with early smartwatches. They were basically all wiped out by smartphones. Maybe smartwatches are in fashion again now, but maybe not. Netbooks - the idea of a low power device which can hardly do anything. From the Asus EEE to the WebOS tablet to the One Laptop Per Child to the Chromebook. You could say the Chromebook did become the next big thing, but it's kinda been trumped by the Macbook M1 which has smallness, battery life and none of the web-only restrictions, and competing on price was always a struggle between the low-end Windows laptops and the high prices of decent Chromebook hardware. On the low-price end, Raspberry Pi came out. Airships, they were going to be the great military air power of the WWI era but too many crashed, they were going to be the long-distance passenger and freight vehicles of the pre-WWII era, but the Hindenburg and other accidents happened, they have been going to be reinvented by Airlander (2001), Techsphere (2003), DARPA / Aeroscraft /Lockheed Martin (2009), similar work by Google Loon (2011 - 2021), Airlander with Graphene (2016), Airship do Brasil (2017), Buoyant.aero (YC 2019?), SkyCat, among others. Their intersection of cost to build and certify, lifting power or freight capacity, weather dependence, size, safety, profitable use cases despite low speed, is quite small. Segway. [1] https://cdn57.androidauthority.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/0... Virtual reality in 1987, 1992, 1998?, 2005, 2015 ... "parallel computing" has been the next big thing several times since Cray; but it never "died out", it just keeps grinding on the fact that human thoughts are pretty serial, and our computers mostly encode and track with our thinking. Parallel computing's actually progressed pretty far. Virtually all GPU-based applications (unfortunatly, cyptocurrency mining being the most notable) are massively / embarassingly parallel. As far as practical applications --- the set is vastly smaller, especially where there's a human in the REPL loop. This is where pulling up a stack of old Wired / Omni / Popular Science and similar magazines, as well as Gartner hype-cycle predictions and forecasts would be handy. "Hot technologies of <YEAR>" should be a good keyword for search. aspect oriented programming Second Life and all the similar stuff. Iirc IBM even held an event there and had like an official place. Cool concept tho. It was known 15 years ago that sensors will be the next big thing, but Kinect did not make it. It was later repurposed as an AI sensor. Sensors are more important than ever, but they became technological details as opposed to selling points. Most tech trends are less revolutionary than they first appear. Really life-changing stuff doesn’t come along that often. How do you think NFTs will die out? Art NFTs are trendy but the space is not going away. NFTs are what BTC use to be ten years ago. But BTC isn't going anywhere, so why would you think NFTs are? I suspect you are correct wrt NFTs for art, but I do believe there are valid uses for NFTs still to be discovered. By the time they become mainstream and usable by the majority of people, they won't even be considered NFTs in the same way. Semantic Web.
