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Gadgets, Then & Now

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the weekend-nostalgia dept.

An anonymous reader writes in to tell us about "A funny article about gadgets from the 70's & 80's compared to gadgets of today. Amazing that you can fit 25,000 5 1/4 diskettes on one 8GB compact flash, and phones weighed 11.5 pounds! "

6 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Wow, what a great comparison of 70s-80s vs now by bogie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A whole six items. *cough*

    --
    If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
    1. Re:Wow, what a great comparison of 70s-80s vs now by arminw · · Score: 5, Insightful

      .....Actually that's also true if you compare it to 1902."....

      The cancer and heart attack rate in 1902 was much less than today. People died from infectious diseases, such as TB, flu, pneumonia, polio and others. However, the death rate today, overall, is still exactly what it always was, 100%.

      --
      All theory is gray
  2. The downside by Doubting+Maxwell · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The downside is that techology seems to be getting more unreliable, from a user perspective.

    I'm on my third PS2 right now, but my Atari 2600 (still fun!) works like new...

  3. "The tchotchke society" by dpbsmith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Someone--I think it was Robert Kuttner but can't find the reference--was trying to explain the "paradox" that all of the economic figures seem good, yet polls consistently show U. S. citizens are pessimistic about the economic future.

    His belief is that the problem is that the official inflation figures contain a mixture of prices for things like consumer electronics gadgets, which have continuously decreased in price, and things like healthcare costs and college tuition, which have continuously increased in price at far faster rate than "the" inflation rate.

    The problem is that things like healthcare and education are much more important ultimately than cellular phones that can show video.

    He said that we are turning into "a tchotchke society," rich in frivolous gadgets but poor in literacy rates, infant mortality, etc.

    I love my iPod, but I'm worried about my medical insurance.

    --

    "How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!

  4. Re:Holy Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Batman! by hackstraw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Remember when computers looked like this?

    For those that don't know, "computer" used to be a job description. They were typically women that did parallel processing and redundant calculations by hand for places like NASA and the government.

    Its amazing, at least to me how fast computation has gotten, and how slow computation is still for scientists and engineers today. Even if a supercomputer could give an answer immediately like a google search, they will still find things that will burn CPUs for days, weeks, months, or years.

  5. Funny thing though by Xcott+Craver · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Back then, when I pressed "record" on a tape recorder or the shutter button on a camera, it did what I wanted instantaneously.

    None of this goddamn 2-second delay, or booting into the OS for 30 seconds to figure out how to record from the microphone.

    Nowadays I am reluctant to buy any technology unless it does the basic things that technology used to do for me in the 1970s. There's no way I'd go back, of course, but I think one of the great failures of consumer electronics today is that much of it is incapable of basic features 30 years back---largely as a matter of priorities and crappy user interface design.

    Xcott