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The Computer Chronicles – Visual Programming Languages (1993) [video] (youtube.com)
4 points by ak39 on March 10, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments



At about 16:10 in the video:

> There are all kinds of different controls here, things for user interface, things for spreadsheet like display, here’s a gauge control. There’s also about a hundred custom controls in the aftermarket from third parties, everything from mainframe connectivity to neural networks to-

For someone who was still a small child when this video was made, hearing “mainframe” and “neural networks” in the same sentence in a video from 1993 when watching it now in 2019 caught me off-guard.

I am acutely aware that a lot of what is currently popular in software development comes from many years ago, much of it all the way back from the 70’s. However, I had the impression that things like neural networks were not mainstream until the mid 2010’s basically.

I was thinking that that kind of stuff had mostly been going on in circles of researchers in universities, and that a lot of it had come into “view” of the world at large only as recently as the mid 2010’s.

And likewise in the other direction while I know that some banks and such still run some of their systems on mainframes to this day, I thought most mainframes were gone by the end of the 80’s.

Point being, I guess there is a much more diverse set of computer technologies and techniques in use at every point in time since the 70’s than I tend to think of day to day.

It’s like, I know that HN bubble is a thing for example, but I think the world outside of my bubble might be much larger than I’ve really considered until now, even though my bubble is quite big IMO.


1990 "neural networks" are todays crypto currency, a scam that didnt work at the time, but sounded great.


Oh, makes sense. Thanks.




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