
Ask HN: Concepts the modern tech industry falsely believes it invented? - Ozzie_osman
To rephrase, it would be something that someone new to the tech industry might falsely assume is an invention of the modern tech industry (ie in the last 10-20 years) but has actually been around for much longer.<p>EDIT: Removed my initial list of examples because people were making fun of them (and rightly so, the lists in the comments are far better!)
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gitgud
Some examples of _modern_ tech, which might not be that modern:

[1] Reactive programming, seems fairly modern, but can be traced back to the
1970's.

[2] Microservices/Serverless, are basically the same as CGI scripts from the
early 90's.

[3] Software As A Service (SAAS) can be traced back to the 60's apparently...

[1] [https://spring.io/blog/2016/06/07/notes-on-reactive-
programm...](https://spring.io/blog/2016/06/07/notes-on-reactive-programming-
part-i-the-reactive-landscape)

[2] [http://rickcarlino.com/2019/07/20/what-were-cgi-scripts-
html...](http://rickcarlino.com/2019/07/20/what-were-cgi-scripts-html.html)

[3] [https://bebusinessed.com/history/the-history-of-
saas/](https://bebusinessed.com/history/the-history-of-saas/)

~~~
tootie
As someone who wrote a lot of CGI, it was definitely not the same at all as
microservices or serverless. That was the earliest mainstream way to do
server-side programming for the web, but none of the modern design principles
were applied.

~~~
snazz
Yeah, I'm not sure where the comparison comes from. CGI usually meant one
script per page, which only bears a slight resemblance to microservices. It
doesn't really have anything to do with service encapsulation or API
consistency.

AWS Lambda and other serverless function things seem a little more like CGI
scripting, but the way that each one was designed and used differs immensely.
You might have been able to approximate serverless functions with CGI scripts,
but I don't think that people did that.

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asveikau
Taxi dispatch, food delivery, things like that. People think it's novel since
it has an app. But the business categories were around before, just a little
more manual, less centralized, etc.

~~~
threeseed
Taxi and food delivery are novel though.

They managed to reclassify employees as "gig workers" to avoid any sort of
financial and social responsibility. And the way they flagrantly ignored laws
and regulations in so many countries and over so many years was definitely
unique.

~~~
inimino
You might be surprised to learn some of the history of the traditional taxi
industry.

~~~
hhfy5332
Yes, Uber _is_ pretty good at PR.

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seattle_spring
Are these really things people definitively think the tech industry invented?
I'd say most people just think the tech industry popularized things like this.
I'd also say they would be right.

~~~
paloaltokid
I think what the OP means isn't that folks in the tech industry act like they
truly invented anything. I think most folks with just a little experience
understand that there is rarely a single inventor for anything.

But, it is true that it is a major tendency for folks in tech to act like our
industry is the origin for a lot of things. When in reality, computers are
still a very young industry, and many ideas we use all the time have been
imported from elsewhere.

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mellosouls
Design Patterns were lifted as a concept from architecture (actual
architecture, not software)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_(architecture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_\(architecture\))

------
mhh__
I think you could make an argument that although not invented, programming
language design has slowed quite a lot. There is a lot of new research going
in safety and abstraction, but our business languages have arguably not moved
on much from ALGOL in the 60/70s (Go, of course, being the elephant in the
room in that regard)

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leoh
This is silly. Product managers are not "brand managers" — a good one is far
more technical. Google has never claimed to "invent" 20% time — 3M and a great
number of other organizations have doubtlessly used something akin to it, but
it was hardly heard of in the 2000s. And dual ladders? What? You don't need
Dupont for this, of course some companies had technical individuals in the
C-suite. Silly post IMHO.

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mellosouls
File systems. It may seem obvious, but I'm not sure how clearly we associate
them with the originals.

We take the file systems of Windows and *nix etc for granted, but they are
essentially computerised versions of the physical classification systems that
go back as far as humans have wanted to categorise things and put them in
related boxes and particular orders.

I feel like that's cheating though, as by the same mapping process we get

mail

networks

etc

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mellosouls
Scrum. Originated from business studies in manufacturing firms.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(software_development)#H...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_\(software_development\)#History)

~~~
quicklime
For a number of years now I’ve felt ashamed that our industry was responsible
for unleashing scrum onto the wider business world. Now I know we’re not to
blame, and I feel a lot better. Thank you!

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emersonrsantos
Open Source: 1953 UNIVAC A-2 system

Computer emulation: 1964 - IBM OS/360 (IBM 1400 emulator)

NoSQL databases: 1966 - MUMPS System (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility
Multi-Programming System)

Virtual memory: 1972 - IBM OS/VS1

CI/CD: 1999 Extreme Programming (XP) CruiseControl

~~~
analog31
Amusingly, I've always assumed that open design predates even the computer
itself. Electronics hobbyists published designs in ham radio magazines, and
scientific experiments were published in a way that made them reproducible
since antiquity.

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captn3m0
What's Dotted line reporting?

~~~
acwan93
If I understand correctly: it's the idea that you have a direct manager who
handles your HR related things (direct line report), and you have product
leads and other people you report to who are not directly in your org or team.

~~~
lol636363
A lot of devs don't realize that other than your HR manager, you can ignore
others. Anytime a PM asked me something unreasonable, I simply said no and if
They pretended like i need to obey them, I got my real manager involved. It
always worked out in my favor.

It saddens me to see so many devs especially the H1Bs getting abused by PMs.

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krapp
A lot of people seem to think it was impossible to make cross-platform
applications before Electron came along.

~~~
scarface74
I’m sure that most tech workers know the history of Java.

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thisispete
I can’t even start to count how many things came from literature film and art.
The tech industry isn’t really about inventing new things, its about making
things that were previously ideas into reality and profiting by putting it
into everybody’s hands. Sure new things are invented along the way, but
overall? Hard pressed to think of things tech created that wasn’t previously
science fiction, or taking some real world thing and putting it on a computer
screen, or improving it by making it more accessible / portable / available to
everyone.

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thisispete
Augmented Reality/ Virtual Reality. Concepts came from scifi writers back as
early as the 30’s and video artists and scientists started making working
experiences in the 60’s & 70’s

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voisin
Sharing. Though to be fair, it did invent charging people to share.

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thoughtstheseus
Perhaps nanotechnology? It’s a bit older though.

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Trav5
Slide to unlock

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vidanay
Work from home.

------
Animats
Kanban.

~~~
scarface74
I’ve never heard of a discussion about Kanban that didn’t reference factories.

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clircle
Machine learning

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aaron695
> modern tech industry (ie in the last 10-20 years)

Famous (badly mangled) quote -

"There has only been 3 things invented in the tech industry since the 70's"

I know spreadsheets is one of them. No idea about the other 2.

~~~
cousin_it
PageRank and blockchain? :-p

~~~
sideshowb
Eigenvector centrality has been around since at least the 70s, and idiocy is
as old as humanity itself

~~~
amelius
> Eigenvector centrality has been around since at least the 70s

Yes, but the novel part is formulating the problem as such.

~~~
sideshowb
Agreed that's kind of fair for pagerank though to qualify as a "big three"
invention I'd be looking for more novelty

~~~
amelius
Yes. I wonder if Google even still uses pagerank. The true novelty, e.g. how
to deal with SEO, is kept a secret.

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sdenton4
Smartphones: Around for decades, but used to be called "newspapers."

Less snidely, there's a fine line between adaptation and invention. Shoulders,
giants, standing, etc. Good artists and great artists, re: the stealing. For
many of these, the more useful approach would be figuring out exactly in what
ways these re-inventions are the same or different from their historical
predecessors. eg, apps for taxis are new, taxis are old, and centralized surge
pricing is a major difference between the two.

