Venkatesh Rao

Just met Mike Zyda yesterday, a key figure in 90s VR research. He argues in this article that the current VR generation has 90s amnesia. http://mikezyda.com/resources/Presence-Vol-25-No-2.pdf …

Also UAVs, driverless cars... for lots of stuff, the foundation was laid in the 90s, much of it promptly forgotten, then jankily rediscovered/reinvented by tech sector in a software-eaten form. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.

2 reasons I think. First, 90s were a transition era between paper and digital, and a lot of stuff just fell through the cracks in janky early digital transition. It’s often not on google. Bad early webpages have vanished. Many journals and magazines kinda unraveled.

Second, software and cheap computing/sensors was a genuine game changer. The 90s version of a lot of tech was just over-engineered and underpowered, and a half dozen Moore’s law doublings later, you could solve problems in simpler, cheaper ways. 90s solutions were obsolete.

I kinda feel like the 90s were a secret little decade for those of us who weren’t part of dotcom boom (I caught a piece of the action at tail end, 2000-01, but it just wasn’t a big part of my life in the 90s... it was there and cool, but like most people I was doing other stuff)

The 80s though, that was a big-thinking decade. Great Events were afoot all over; no single thing could suck all attention. Basically, in the 90s we overindexed on charismatic internet and forgot other stuff. After 2000 it was big enough that the attention level was warranted.

Analogy: the 90s are a cache-invalidation decade. In many ways the achievements represented the peak capabilities of industrial era. But the invention of the internet kinda invalidated everything that didn’t have internet thinking wired in as a first principle.

Another analogy. What do you think was the best piston-powered fighter ever built? You might think Spitfire, Mustang, Zero, Me109,... famous WW2 planes. Correct answer is probably the Vought Corsair. Built tail-end of WW2... after jets had already changed the rules.