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Gadgets, Then & Now
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! "
Gee willikers! Remember when cars looked like this?? Wacky! Or remember when the earth looked like this?!!? Times sure are a changin'!
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
I can fit anything on my flash cards. They're so small I just pile it all on top of them.
Once I put a cup of coffee on my flash card, technology is awesome.
Woah woah woah! Are you trying to tell me that progress has been made in the past 30 years with regards to technology?!? I'm glad this is finally getting some press...
This guy's the limit!
A whole six items. *cough*
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
TFA isn't very deep, I was expecting an interesing and in-depth read.
As the old joke goes: Nostalgia just ain't what it used to be.
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
This article took all of what, 5 minutes using Google Image Search to throw together? Brilliant!
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
Thing is, as clunky as all that stuff was back in the day, the same some exists now, only in sleeker, more refined format. If you look especially how much a lot of stuff like phones and computers have shrunk in the last 20 years while increasing capacity, it's enough to make you believe that powerful, wearable and unobtrusive computers etc will be common within say 15 years. The hype we get over new products that disappoint is often enough to make you say "it's all crap", but comparatives like this is a reminder that real progress is made.
(It used to mean "that thing that you plug into the wall that lets you talk to other people far away", for you kids. Yes, outlets in the wall, at your home.)
I wonder how you'd explain todays über-gadgets to someone from the eighties. "This? Oh, it's my .. um, tricorder. Yeah, that's it."
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...
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!
I used floppies more than I'll ever use flash. I only used the big mobile phone for a few weekends as Dutyman, but it was more important than my cell is now. Everything else is just cosmetic. My old 8088 PC pretty much does what my current one does.
The big difference is the WWW, especially search engines. I used to spend lots of time in libraries and with the Yellow Pages.
I've spend a bit of time on www.c64s.com lately, and found out that a lot of the games of the time really weren't worth the effort of loading in. Remember listening to 30 minutes of peeps and squicks to find out that you just loaded an amazingly crappy game? (luckily you got a cracked version from a copied tape for free anyway) The were some real quality games (Commando!!) with very cool sound etc, and the memory just biases to think that all games were better that time. Hell no!
By the way: did anyone ever manage to play Monty Mole with success? I never found out wath the goal was!!! Or Mission Impossible (with the buildings where you had to search lockers), I think I never finished that one
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
I also remember him being amazed at the performance of the first 486 laptop we got in. For a long time it was the most powerful computer in the company. It really is a pity that chain smoking and the probably toxic fumes of the environment we worked in got to him. The industry's really come a long way since those days and I think he would have enjoyed watching the progress. Not to mention smaller cellphones for the men's room...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Exactly. Try misplacing 25000 floppy disks.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
A much better source for this kind of stuff is the Retrothing Blog. Definitely a favorite of my RSS feed list.
"Computers may be twice as fast now as they were in 1973, but your average voter is still just as drunk and stupid as ever."
Joking aside, why is this news? Here, to save time I've got your next article right here:
Six things to do instead of reading this non-story
...eh, this ain't getting any funnier. Best stop with three.
barack to the future?
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
...is the anachronisms you get in "near future" movies and TV shows of the recent past. I still smirk whenever I remember RoboCop walking through a room of reel-to-reel data storage machines before plugging himself into a crime database, or Misato calling NERV headquarters on a bulky corded car phone.
The thing about near-future cinema is they always spend more time thinking about the big technology changes than the little ones.
In the end of the 80s the most popular removable storage media was the 5 1/4 inch diskette, capable of storing 360 KB (later 1200 KB). If you compare that to a big compact flash card of today, you could store close to 25 000 diskettes on ONE 8GB CompactFlash card
At the end of the 80's, the most popular removable storage media was the 3.5" floppy. They actually came out in the early to mid 80's. They were also around a dollar each, as opposed to the $480 for the SanDisk 8GB CompactFlash.
Geez Louise! Talk about comparing apples to kumquats!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
No wonder techies are getting fatter these days. In the past at least carrying 25000 disks and a mobile phone would be equivalent to a decent gym session. Now all you do is carry a key ring and phone smaller than your big mac you had at lunch!
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
Exactly. Try misplacing 25000 floppy disks.
I'm sure it's possible, Enron lost a hundred or so boxes of documents.
Take the bus.
I think it involves trying to get all the money you can. In one of the games, you need to impress a fiancee and need as much money as possible.
In either case, it's a game that requires creating a very big map - especially since it branches and has airports that bring you from one area to another.
In Impossible Mission, searching lockers sometimes gives you a picture of some sort - there are 36 pictures in total. The objective is to take these pictures and place them one-atop-another to create a solid rectangle - up to 9 in total. Obtaining and orienting each rectangle in the correct direction gives you 1 code letter. You may sometimes need lift resets and
For reference, you have six hours to complete the game. Getting killed takes 10 minutes. Using the phone hint system costs a couple of minutes. Note that the C64 versions that are commonly available have a major bug - if a robot shoots off the left side of the screen, you die. Naturally, this results in an insta-kill in some layouts.
Impossible Mission II is similar - although the objective is to collect 6 our of 8 tapes from the building subsections. However, you need to find code numbers to leave a subsection of a building.
...PCs today still ship with floppy drives. I know people who will tell me, with a straight face no less, that there are times that having a 3.5 floppy drive is handy.
Maybe because they DO come in handy every once and a while? Though I do admit, I very rarely use the floppy drive on my home machine.
I already know some of you will just think I'm an old fart fondly remembering a simpler time and confuse it for a better time but that really isn't what I'm trying to do here.
I liked the styling risks that some companies took back then. I get the sense that it was easier to take risks with consumer products back then.
My favorite car radio of all times was the Sanyo Tachard radio. It was shaped like a tachometer and locked with a key so that you could remove it. There were a couple of different models, I think one was 8 watts and the other was 32 watts. For the day, the sound quality was excellent and it made the inside of my Fiat 850 Spyder look almost space age.
RCA made a bedroom stereo that looked like an astronaut's helmet! When you lifted the face shield, the eyes were the controls, the nose the frequency dial, and the mouth was the eight-track deck.
Initial technology was always interesting too:
The VIC-20 from Comodore was an exceptional started computer that didn't cost an arm and a leg. It ran a form of basic that was fun to learn and use. It really was a toy and could be used to play games.
The Sinclair ZX-80 was an ultimate cheap computer. In many ways it was terrible (especially the keyboard) but it represented a starting point for so many inventive people to perform exparaments and modifications that I have to say it did a lot for the hobby computer industry and probably launched more people into computer related careers than anything else ever has.
Sometimes what was right and what was commercially successful were in two different worlds.
The eight-track won out over the cassette at first, despite the fact that it was more complex and lower quality. It litterally took a decade for people to wake up!
Sony Betamax was hands down better than VHS. It was visibly superior and actually less complex.
Communications technology was always a big deal.
My grandfather was a big baseball fan. For Christmas one year he was given a transistor AM radio with one of those really lousy ear-pieces. From April through October it was almost welded to his ear. It was that big a part of his life, I would even call it a life-changing thing for him. He no longer had to miss the game no matter where he went.
My friend was the first on the block to get color TV. I was so jealous! One night we watched a cop show on his TV and the flashing lights were blue - which made no sense to me because where I was from all cop cars, fire trucks, and ambulances had red lights. It really confused me.
My hometown was fairly small and dial phone technology came late. I was able to pick up the phone and tell Sarah, the operator that I wanted to talk to my mom and she would actually track her down or if she couldn't she would offer to call one of my grandparents for me! This is one place where technology may actually have been a hinderance for small towns. Today, the operator is likely in a different time-zone and has no knowlege of your town.
My dad was a volinteer fireman and we had a "fire phone" in our home for years. If the phone rang steady, you picked up the phone and listened and you would hear the actual person reporting the fire or, in the event of a "second alarm" or "mutual aid" call a dispatcher. Us kids were taught to always listen if dad was home or to try to ignore the call if he wasn't (we always listened). Most of the cafes and bars in town were also wired into the fire phone system so that they could pass the word to their fire-fighting customers. I think today's system is far superior to the old solution but not nearly as much fun.
My '64 Buick had a speed buzzer and auto-dimming headlights. Features I loved. I would almost rather have the buzzer than cruise control today. I really wish my truck had auto-dimming headlights. I am really glad that it corners better and stops faster than my '64 Buick did though. Believe it or not, my 2000 Dodge 5.2L RAM gets about the same MPG as my '64 Buick did and, the '64 Buick had a 401 CID "Wildcat 445" engine and a 4bbl carb!
Also having a floppy drive is more useful than having to incorporate driver disks onto a CD before installation of an operating system. There are times when having a floppy is handy - those people who say that to you with a straight face are probably just considering more factors than yourself.
I still have a system on site with a 5 1/4 inch floppy for the purposes of being able to read old disks as required.
Believe it or not, a Model T Ford did about the same MPG as an average modern car. Sure, it wasn't os fuel-efficient as today's engines, but then again there were no windscreen wipers, no radio, no aircon, no ..... :) Same MPG, makes one think.
"Good news, everyone!"