HACKER Q&A
📣 Ozzie_osman

Concepts the modern tech industry falsely believes it invented?


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.

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!)


  👤 gitgud Accepted Answer ✓
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...

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

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


👤 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.

👤 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.

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

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)

👤 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.

👤 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


👤 mellosouls
Scrum. Originated from business studies in manufacturing firms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(software_development)#H...


👤 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


👤 captn3m0
What's Dotted line reporting?

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

👤 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.

👤 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

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

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

👤 Trav5
Slide to unlock

👤 vidanay
Work from home.

👤 Animats
Kanban.

👤 clircle
Machine learning

👤 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.


👤 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.