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? |
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? |
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.
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...
"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.
As far as practical applications --- the set is vastly smaller, especially where there's a human in the REPL loop.
"Hot technologies of <YEAR>" should be a good keyword for search.
Iirc IBM even held an event there and had like an official place.
Cool concept tho.
Sensors are more important than ever, but they became technological details as opposed to selling points.
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.
