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Ask HN: Concepts the modern tech industry falsely believes it invented?

48 points by Ozzie_osman ↗ HN
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!)

53 comments

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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.

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.
vidanay
And it sucks when your dotted line zigzags across the Atlantic a couple times like mine does (both above and below me).
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.

cbanek
It's when you have more than one boss, which brings you to such brilliance as:

Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses, Bob.

Bob Porter: Eight?

Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it.

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.
scarface74
A corporation shouldn’t have financial or social responsibility for its workers. The main reason that the gig economy is such a big problem in the US is that we tie health insurance, disability and unemployment insurance to the employer.
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.
aaron695
Blockchain I'd say definitely is one, but came or became obvious after the quote.

So I think there are still another two.

(Not sure about PageRank, it might be one of the two)

sideshowb
Public key encryption? though diffie hellman was around in the 60s and public in the 70s
hirundo
Little known fact: Before the 1970s spreadsheets used to be implemented on cellulose pulp, processed into flexible "sheets" by deposit from an aqueous suspension. Then we'd update them with a cylindrical device consisting of a thin rod of graphite encased in wood.

It was wild.

aaron695
Jokes aside, I'd hope we know a ledger is not a spreadsheet :)

Spreadsheets are a very amazing abstract.

It was a heck of an invention. There's a reason spreadsheets control so much of the current world.

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.

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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.
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...

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

[3] 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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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

Animats
Kanban.
scarface74
I’ve never heard of a discussion about Kanban that didn’t reference factories.
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.
gumby
Quite a good list but virtual memory predates os/vs1 by a decade at least.
GregarianChild
The invention of the concept of virtual memory (as opposed to it's first implementation) is usually attributed to Fritz Rudolf Güntsch’s doctoral dissertation from 1956, see [1, 2] for brief discussions. (There are other, probably better, references, but they seems to be behind paywalls.) I imagine that as natural a concept as virtual memory was independently invented multiple times. For example Denning's 1970 text [3] does not cite Güntsch’s work.

[1] L. Robertson, Anecdotes. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1369143

[2] Retrocomputing Stackexchange, Was there a clearly identifiable "first computer" to use or demonstrate the use of virtual memory?. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12697/was...

[3] P. J. Denning, Virtual Memory. https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse451/17wi/readin...

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