
The Computer Chronicles – Visual Programming Languages (1993) [video] - ak39
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEkweKSdnHM
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codetrotter
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.

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

~~~
codetrotter
Oh, makes sense. Thanks.

