alt Hacker NewsIt comes over as so incredibly insane to me that people from the late 80s (people working with computers! Reporting on them!) would look at their current technology stack and basically go: "I have no idea whatsoever what else we can do with these things, we've reached the end"
The lack of imagination is just disturbing.
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That's not so different than today, wherein:
All we really have to look forward to in the future of increasing-performance personal computing is doing the same things as yesterday, but doing them faster.
The future after today will probably turn out more interesting than that, of course, but we can't know that until it happens.
And the future after 1988 certainly turned out to be a very interesting time in computing -- but they had no idea what was in store. Perhaps you can use your time machine to go back and let them know?
It's easy to mock in hindsight, but the failure mode isn't lack of imagination. It's extrapolating linearly from physical limits that were real at the time. In 1989, DRAM refresh cycles and bus bandwidth genuinely were bottlenecks that seemed fundamental. What nobody predicted was that the industry would sidestep those walls entirely (caches, pipelines, out-of-order execution, then multicore). Architectural innovation tends to appear orthogonally to wherever the current wall is.
The first 80286-based system (IBM PC AT), 80386 (Compaq Deskpro 386), and 80486 all had people writing about their suitability as servers, with the consensus's implication being that normal people didn't need them.
The Pentium is the first one, I think, that this didn't happen, because by then it turned out that people need a computer that can do what they are currently doing—but faster—much more often than they need servers.
On the other end, you have people who have no idea how insanely fast computers are today, and how little computing power is "really" needed for most things that computer users do - or how much you can do with one average machine ("Oh no, 1000 requests per second - let's erect another rube goldberg machine to handle that!").