Porting Calculator V4 2 2 Bittorrent
Donalvon Stilwell
As the Wall Street Journal said earlier this month (article is paywalled), "... In a presentation earlier this month, the venture-capital firm Sequoia estimated that the AI industry spent $50 billion on the Nvidia chips used to train advanced AI models last year, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue."
On top of that, the industry is running at a loss on power consumption alone, never mind labour costs (which are quite high: those generative LLMs require extensive human curation of the input data they require for training).
So, we've been here before. Most recently with cryptocurrency/blockchain (which is still going on, albeit much less prominently as governments and police go after the most obvious thieves and con men like Sam Bankman Fried).
I was in on the ground floor of the dot-com boom from 1995-2000, and the hype back then was absolutely bonkers: that may be part of why I'm so thoroughly soured on the current wave of bilge and bullshit. (That, and it's clearly being pumped up by fascist-adjacent straight white males with an unadmitted political agenda, namely to shore up the structures of privilege and entitlement that keep them wealthy.)
If I had more energy I'd be writing a snarky, satirical, 21st century Jetson's style short story right now to highlight the way this plays out. It'd be set in a future where all the dot-com 1.0 hype and promises actually delivered and laid the bedrock of our lives in 2025.
But of course, that's not the story. Instead, the story would explore the unanticipated drawbacks. Starting with "oops, the Amazon drone delivering your neighbour's new dishwasher just fell through your roof; but trades.com only shows you roofers who live in Boston, England, not Boston, MA".
In this shiny dotcom 1.0 future, shoppers always carry their laptop to the supermarket so they can use their CueCat scanner to scan product discount coupon codes off the packaging: they collect the money off vouchers using internet delivered over the supermarket wifi (which blasts them with ads they're forced to click through in return for bandwidth).
The Teledesic satellite network got funded and built out, so you now have 9600 baud global roaming data on your Microsoft Windows CE phone. Which has a fold-out QWERTY keyboard because nobody likes writing on a touch-sensitive screen with a stylus and multitouch was still-born. But your phone calls are secure, thanks to the mandatory built-in Clipper chip.
But Pets dot com just mailed you the third dead and decomposing Rottweiler of the month, instead of the cat food subscription you ordered: the SKUs for Rottie pups and Whiskas are cross-linked in their database, and freight shipping from China takes weeks.
In this gleaming, chromed, Jetsons style future, the Intel Itanium didn't fail, Macs still run on Power architecture, and Microsoft OS/2 4.0 runs everywhere on MIPS, Alpha, and SPARC workstations. Linux is nearly extinct thanks to restrictive embrace-and-extinguish commercial bootloader licensing terms ...
Solaris never really took over the workstation market; NeXT ate Sun's lunch in the 90s. Today, UNIX research workstations are all featureless black cubes or monoliths and come bundled with Mathematica and FrameMaker. Cheaper RISC-based workstations are all the domain of Microsoft, as are PCs. Apple lives on in a strange twilight: Steve Jobs was unavailable in 1998 (he was tied up buying Oracle), and Apple was not-exactly-saved by buying Be and hiring on Jean-Louis Gasse as their CEO. He staunched the bleeding through strategic alliances, but in the end Gasse had no alternative but to sell Apple to IBM as Big Blue tried to push their Power Architecture down into the realm of business personal computing.
The world of MP3 music players is dominated by Archos. Video is ... well, video as such isn't allowed on the public internet because the MPAA hooked up with the cable TV corporations to force legislation mandating blockers inside all ISPs. Napster does not exist. Bittorrent does not exist. YouTube does not exist. But what passes for video on the internet today is 100% Macromedia Flash, so things could be worse.
So the Windows CE phone can only do simple text-based pages (though the display is an alphanumeric one, so no real loss). The pages are all controlled by operators, so everything is properly curated and most importantly billed on your phone bill.
Meanwhile, the UK's Acorn Computers bought what was left of the NewtonOS intellectual property and continues to market the Newton Messagepad series as ruggedized retail and industrial data capture terminals in Europe, using the unique Graffiti text entry system from Palm Computing).
Oh, and don't get me started about e-democracy. All the promises became true - not only information at your fingertips, but also portable and personal digital voting. And even structured discussion fora to debate the public.
Of course there is a social media network: Usenet is booming after it became an essential tool for celebrities to interact with their fans and for businesses and governments to communicate. Of course the MPAA got the binaries groups banned, which drastically reduced the burden for the server admins, but now with a significant portion of the population on Usenet there are constant complaints from the ISPs about the storage and bandwidth requirements
The post-grunge, post-techno scene swaps tracks on MD - that are micro disc. And if you want the full concert experience including vvvideo, a iOmega Zip disc is the medium of choice for your portable Atari WalkAndPlay station.
The NeXT was supposed to be pretty good in its day, it would be nice to see what might come out of that. But then, a few years before 1995 people were saying the same thing about the Amiga; if Commodore had had any clue how to market what they had the personal computer scene might have been very different.
The IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was replaced by the MSN Messenger. IRC was used for a bit in universities, but the Real Operators took one look at it and prevented it being used as it was too decentralized and could be used for distributing subversive material.
Is it worth speculating as to where things might have ended up if Net Neutrality went in the other direction? There's no Netflix if cable channels are delivering your internet and they decide to throttle your bandwidth (but they have an alternate service that's merely $59/month!). I know there were predictions that we'd end up with multiple 'nets' and you'd need to subscribe to each one (historian Susan J Douglas made exactly such a prediction in her 2004 history "Listening In" by analogy with American radio stations).
...that puts Visa/Mastercard in a far more robust content moderation role than they are currently. Which also means your ISP looks a lot like your traditional Cable operator, in that there are bundling tiers for what content you're allowed to access, outside content providers have to pay peering to gain access to your users, and there is robust incentives to build out competing trans-continental fiber networks for content distribution.
Want access to adult sites? (Meaning anything off the evangelical straight and narrow; remember Visa/Mastercard are governing what's allowed) Prepare for the sleeze fees and taxes if they can be accessed at all.
Also that the USA has a population of roughly 350M people to the EU's 400M and China's 1.7M and India's 1.4M (and if you think India and China don't count, I have some lunar landers and a space station to point you at: they're not poor any more, and they've leapfrogged the USA in important and significant ways).
But what you have described as the current tech world is the setting for the Apple TV series Hello Tomorrow. Your post could be the elevator pitch for the show. Flying (well low flying) cars styled like around 1960. Video calls in B&W on tube TVs.
All tied together by a traveling crew hitting up medium sized town after town in the US selling lots and houses on the moon. With the first ship to take folks there being continuously delayed. And big piles of cash being moved around with refunds given when there is no other option.
The 90s OOP Future for programmers will look extremely familiar, except Python and Ruby never take off and their culture becomes the generation that writes backend code using each others' frameworks in Visual Basic 7.
I was in on the ground floor of the dot-com boom from 1995-2000, and the hype back then was absolutely bonkers: that may be part of why I'm so thoroughly soured on the current wave of bilge and bullshit.
The last word in this sentence brings back a strong memory of this time. A group of what had to be grifters or fools (or both) was proposing getting fiber internet to the masses (in large urban cities) by having small crawlers/robots climb up through sewer lines in high rises dragging a fiber line along. They would exit into homes so you'd have a fiber cable coming out of your toilet that would hook to your router.
I suspect it'd be less blatant but there'd be a significant price-based differentiator between machines you can do more than play games and write up your homework on and ones you can write more than slightly prettier versions of things you could do on 8-bit machines though. Leading to laws like the DMCA actively targeting the demo scene for repeatedly jailbreaking their kit.
Oh, this is the future of weirdness like "Boots.co.uk, exclusively available through Mercury Communications!" Or in the US, "Sears.com, exclusively available through Rogers Networking!" And countries with telco monopolies will have near absolute government content censorship abilities from about day one.
Some very smart people I know where involved heavily in OOP back when it was the "next big thing". They basically said it would never really work. Until people spent 10 to 20 years getting the base objects well defined. But then they would be 5 to 10 years out of date. Rinse, lather, repeat.
It really is a shame that Thefacebook.com died in its crib. As everyone who was invited to the site can confirm, it was a very friendly community, one that really lived up to its nickname as "the social network." Yes, I know that it blatantly violated the patents of SixDegrees. But I do wish that they had worked something out. It was so much easier to mass-mail your friends on Thefacebook than it is on SixDegrees!
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