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Ask Slashdot: Were Developments In Technology More Exciting 30 Years Ago?
dryriver writes: We live in a time where mainstream media, websites, blogs, social media accounts, your barely computer literate next door neighbor and so forth frequently rave about the "innovation" that is happening everywhere. But as someone who experienced developments in technology back in the 1980s and 1990s, in computing in particular, I cannot shake the feeling that, somehow, the "deep nerds" who were innovating back then did it better and with more heartfelt passion than I can feel today. Of course, tech from 30 years ago seems a bit primitive compared to today -- computer gear is faster and sleeker nowadays. But it seems that the core techniques and core concepts used in much of what is called "innovation" today were invented for the first time one-after-the-other back then, and going back as far as the 1950s maybe. I get the impression that much of what makes billions in profits today and wows everyone is mere improvements on what was actually invented and trail blazed for the first time, 2, 3, 4, 5 or more decades ago. Is there much genuine "inventing" and "innovating" going on today, or are tech companies essentially repackaging the R&D and knowhow that was brought into the world decades ago by long-forgotten deep nerds into sleeker, sexier 21st century tech gadgets? Is Alexa, Siri, the Xbox, Oculus Rift or iPhone truly what could be considered "amazing technology," or should we have bigger and badder tech and innovation in the year 2018?
They were
Falcon 9 landings are pretty awesome!
SGML was a big innovation; combining it with Gopher/FTP to make the web was good stuff too. Ever since then we have focused on new ways to sell distractions to the bloated consumers. The market is about to correct our over-estimation of what that is worth, but in the meantime, I got into tech to change the world, not connect refrigerators to Twitter.
Alternative Right.
This question reminds me a lot of people who say "Music was so much better in the 1990s" or "Comic books are garbage now but they are so innovative in the 70s". Basically these people were more passionate about their hobbies (music, comics, computers, or whatever) when they were young than they are today. Therefore, anything going on "back in the day" was - almost by definition - so much more amazing than the pedestrian stuff we have today.
I would say the idea that there were more exciting developments 30 years ago is ludicrous. In the last few years we have virtually the whole of human knowledge at our fingertips, we've had a huge resurgence of neural nets, we have rockets that can land themselves (!), actually useful brain-machine interface (for example deep-brain stimulation for epilepsy), self-driving cars, actually cool VR, electronic communications becoming ubiquitous, cheap single board computers that even a child can use (e.g. Raspberry-Pi), electric vehicles becoming mainstream, a technology for currency that is actually threatening to upset the applecart, and on and on and on.
I was a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s and was deeply passionate about technology. I was excited about the Amiga, Unix, and C++. Those days have NOTHING on today.
You're just old. It's common for things to feel fresh and exciting when you're young and then you feel cynical and apathetic when you're old. Young nerds are always excited about the new stuff. Old nerds tend to shrug off the new stuff because they were there to see what preceded it. I mean, you can feel like a trail blazer because of the computer work you did in the 80s, but that's no different than how my dad boasted about being a trailblazer for the computer work he did in the 70s. You can keep going back until you get to the nerd that invented the abacus.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
To answer the question, yes, the passion was different then and not just in the developers, but with the users/clients. The users/clients were excited about the new techologies promises and look to the developers to lead them to the promised land. The developers were there because they wanted to be, not just because of the promises of riches or there high school counselor said CS would be a good job. Many of the people I worked with in the 80s and 90s were self taught even before getting into college. The passion was organic and the exicitment of the new computer paradym feed that passion.
I hope this caused some synapses to fire.
We reached peak smartphone with the iphone 5. Past that, it's more crap we don't need (eye candy, tendrils of the surveillance state, ever more pixels).
Alexa devices and Homepod are just a commercialized version of what geeks were doing 15 years ago, minus privacy and autonomy and self-sufficiency.
The interesting stuff, imho, is happening outside of obvious IT stuff and more where it intersects with other niches. Electric cars, sure. But electric bikes, too. Drones. Blockchain.
If phones were about serving their owners or make the world better they would use their location-awareness to mute their ringers in offices and movie theaters and waiting rooms and turn off their creepy "Hey siri" crap in bedrooms. There'd be undefeatable-via-software LEDs to indicate when cameras were being used, we'd have exact control over what apps got what data and to whom they could send it. And they'd have user-replaceable batteries.
The same sort of stuff is happening, but business has a better handle on marketing, press releases and so on.
So there's a lot of do-nothing 'advances' that clog the tech media drowning out true innovation. It creates a lot of cynicism to see so many hollow articles impersonating innovation, but it's just promoters dominating what you see better than they ever have before.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Desktop PC's moved from CGA (4-color palettes) to EGA (16 colors), VGA (256 x 320x200 colors) to SVGA/SXVGA 16-bit and then 32-bit color. CPU performance was doubling in performance. Every Intel/AMD chip had some super optimization that Byte magazine would document every few months. There were all sorts of different accelerator boards based on i860's, TMS340x0's, transputers. Audio boards just came out. Adlib Soundblaster etc... I still remember the first 256-color demo I saw for VGA, the first four 24-bit color images I saw from the Hercules graphics boards.
Today, we've got desktop PC's with dual socket motherboards, quad SLI with hundreds of streaming processors, CPU's with 16+ cores, gaming wall projectors, VR, real-time computer vision with OpenCV (that's what the i860's and TMS340x0's were used for back then), tablets and smartphones with more powerful GPU's than SGI workstations from the 1990's.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Up until this point, I had to suffer with b&w on my friend's TRS-80. I guess that was 36 years ago, still things were revolutionary up until about 2000. Everything since has been copies and copies of copies. No TV -> 40x40 black and white @ 16fps is a much bigger jump than 300x500->8k retina resolution in 3D at 120Hz.
I guess to answer the question more correctly, 30 years ago being 1988, the high tech nerdy stuff was OS/2, windows 2 and MINIX, the roton, and the DC-x. Now we have spaceX doing this, but the first time is always the best. GPS is about the last truely innovative technology that I can recall
But that's mainly because I was 30 years younger back then and everything was pretty new and exciting whereas I'm now middle-aged and jaded by the Microsofts, Googles, Apples, and Amazons of the world.
A lot of things happened during the PC revolution that were revolutionary, particularly from the point of view of users and businesses. Spreadsheets, for example, had a huge impact on business (for better or worse). I argue that smartphones are as as revolutionary today.
In some ways the pace of innovation has slowed. In other ways it's sped up dramatically in recent years.
It would be more accurate to say that we're seeing a lot of technologies we've dreamed about for decades finally maturing. There's been voice recognition software since the 80s, but now we have true accurate and for the most part free, voice recognition. We have actual self-driving cars on the road today, granted in a very small form, but it's coming very quickly. We have actual gene-splicing happening on actually humans. We have actual cloning. Space travel is rapidly becoming available to citizens. It's a lot, all at once, and I think the root of it is is that a lot of technologists have a lot of money right now to pushing the fields that aren't necessarily just for profit.
I think there's more to it than that - not only were you more excited in your youth, but you had far less personal perspective. The progress of your youth was no less incremental, but you hadn't already spent decades watching the precursors.
There's also a legitimate external component though, if you're discussing computer technology specifically - 80s and 90s were sort of the golden age of computing: impressive computing power had just becoming accessible to the public, and its performance was accelerating rapidly. Meanwhile the entire field of computing and information technology was still very much in its infancy - the enabling technology had only just become affordable enough to be widely explored, and there was a resulting explosion in surrounding innovation as people figured out just what could be done with the new tools at their disposal. Absolute progress is probably no slower today, but we tend to see things in term of relative progress, and by those lights there's a much bigger difference between 2 and 3 than between 19 and 20.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Using Internet and overlapping networks, thousands of men and women in 17 countries swap recipes and woodworking tips, debate politics, religion and antique cars, form friendships and even fall in love. But the networks that link tens of thousands of computers 24 hours a day also allowed the computer virus to spread much more rapidly, and with far greater potential for damage, than any previous electronic invader. That frightens many network visionaries, who dream of a "worldnet" with ever more extensive connections and ever fewer barriers to the exchange of knowledge. "The Internet is a community far more than a network of computers and cables," Stoll said. "When your neighbors become paranoid of one another, they no longer cooperate, they no longer share things with each other. It takes only a very, very few vandals to ... destroy the trust that glues our community together."
Good thing THAT never happened!
When I was a kid in the 80's, sci-fi shows were all about flying cars, fast planes, spaceships etc. Sure, sometimes the moon exploded due to nukes and started traveling through the galaxy, but still there was a moon base on it. ;)
In almost all aspects, we are not there. In some areas we have even regressed - we no longer have supersonic commercial planes, our manned spaceflight is also more limited.
Science fiction was too optimistic about all technology... except PHONES. They did not even come close to imagining our phones!
Seriously, I have a Xiaomi Mi Mix 2 which is not only a reasonably priced an beautiful phone (shameless plug because I enjoy it so much more than the expensive Samsung it replaced), but it is also way more advanced than anything imagined in Sci-Fi. There were videophones but they were usually too bulky, there were small phones, but just communicators, even the 24th century tri-corders could not do most of the things the little pocket computer communicators we have now, and they did not look nearly as nice.
So it seems for all the things we miss, we get phones, I guess that's where most "innovation" goes these days. If you go by Apple, they do seem to have stagnated a bit in the last 2-3 iterations, but we'll get more fancy things soon I bet (perhaps folding displays, or large batteries that don't explode).
The two areas I feel are the most disappointing is computers and space exploration. Those were the advances I was most interested in following. Every CPU (and for a while GPU) generation was a huge leap in performance & abilities, the 80's, 90's and early 00's (until the P4 basically) were exciting times. And you followed the Voyager probes reaching their targets, the space shuttle getting 7 people up at a time (albeit exploding now and then), which was not as exciting as the 60's but still.
Anyway, with SpaceX I have a renewed interest in space, perhaps we'll get back there and continue exploring, so there might be some exciting times ahead in that regard.
As long as we don't blow ourselves up
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
The Mac was always really just a PC. CPU, ram, rom, hard drive, video controller, I/O controller(s), power supply.
Airplanes are actually a good example. Most of what we currently know as commercial airplanes were pretty much solidified by the late 1960's. Most changes since then feel very much like incremental optimizations.
1. Amiga graphics
2. Macintosh resolution (although just black and white)
3. Doom shareware - and creating a multiplayer LAN
4. Star Control 2 music (mod files)
5. GLQuake with a 3dfx Voodoo card
6. Maybe SGI computers. Maybe ATI and nVidia graphic demos. I can't say anything else has really made my jaw dropped. I loved changing technology and couldn't wait to see what came next, but these day everything is just blah, but maybe that's just me getting older.
Is Alexa, Siri, the Xbox, Oculus Rift or iPhone truly what could be considered "amazing technology," or should we have bigger and badder tech and innovation in the year 2018?
None of that shit is innovative. The word that fits is flashy
Innovation is: Reusable rockets, manned space stations, and unmanned war-fighting machines, it's full take surveillance, and social networking. It's genetic therapy, and integrated cybernetic prosthetics. It's 3D printed houses, and drinking water from thin air. It's self driving cars being prevalent enough to kill people, and a rich guy shooting one into space because he can. It's high profile hacks, and the buying and selling of personal information on a massive scale.
The real innovation IS happening- the masses are just so brainwashed by marketing not to notice, or so conditioned to fulfill base desires that they just don't care. The real innovation is just not sexy enough to distract from the 24/7 crisis feed, or the force-fed media spun garbage, and AAA video-game distractions. It's easy to miss innovation when it's so far out of reach for 99% of us.
Today, the rich step over dead homeless persons in the shadow of Amazons giant circle-jerk bubble erected in the heart of the city I grew up in. They call it innovation.
Adding rounded corners is somehow called innovation. Expert systems are not new, but media calls them innovative- and I demoed VR Googles at the grand-opening of Blockbuster Video, in my home town, before Windows turned 2000.......
Now got off my lawn you whiney little chit, there aint no goddamn Pokemen here.
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most amazing things I have been seeing
Anything you can share?
In college, I worked in a university library sound archive, and my job was to catalog old 78's all day. I didn't need to listen to the music, but I could, if it seemed necessary to find some piece of information for the catalog record, and I would often make up excuses to listen the records to identify whether a particular instrument, for example, appeared on the track.
What I found, is that music of the 20's-40's was almost uniformly terrible. We don't think of those decades as a bad time for music, because we think of Ella Fitzgerald and the other good stuff. But in reality, it's like 60% Bing Crosby records (he's actually awful) and the other 39.9% is even worse. Good stuff exists, but it was definitely the exception.
Recently, I've been cloning an old popular BBS door game from the early 90's. The game is wonderful, and playing it, you might think developers of that time were finding all sorts of clever ways to create engaging, powerful games in 80x25 extended ansi. That's actually not true though. Most door games were terrible, but that's the one my friends and I chose to play every day after school. It's obvious why. Some day, long from now, people will marvel at all of the amazing software that emerged on the app stores of the two-thousand-teens. They'll be wrong though. In conculsion, all culture is mostly garbage.
The movie Hidden Figures had many excellent and authentic moments but one of them was when one of the women got unintended access to "The IBM" (as they called it) and picked up a book on FORTRAN and taught herself how to program. With access and basic grasp of logic she built herself a career.
That's kind of how it happened for me and my peers, although we didn't have to steal our books from the whites-only section of the library. There were already good courses and professors in Computer Science at the university but their real value was mostly in giving the nascent programmer access to equipment on which to learn.
In that day you could easily have a thousand people using one computer such as a CDC 6600. A hundred people for a PDP-11 in timesharing was not uncommon. Today I have easily more than 100 Intel cores for my personal use and access to many more. My Macbook Pro alone has eight cores and more storage, compute, network power than an $20M supercomputer complex had back in 1970.
So for me access was the key. Not everyone could get access to computing capability that could do anything meaningful. Back then programmers looked more like a mysterious priesthood what with their exclusive access to special locked rooms and intimidating looking equipment and the ability to command "thinking machines". Being a member of the club I suppose had an attraction.
All the same I think I am having more fun today than I did then. There are so many more interesting things to play with.
In some ways it was more exciting back then, in other ways it's more exciting now.
In terms of what you can actually do, there's no comparison: today is much better. And a lot more is known about how to do things like testing and integrating large systems. But you don't so much stand on the shoulders of giants today as you do on great masses of talented but basically ordinary people. Back in the day if you didn't like the way a library worked you made your own routines. Today the volume of source required to produce the kind of applications we use today is so large you pretty much have to resign yourself to working around the mistakes of others.
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I.T. seems to be going in the direction of a better e-leash. How to better track your location via your phone, car, etc, how to track your habits to better throw ads in your face, how to sell things that used to be a one-time fee to you as a service paid monthly, how to keep connected to your boss 24/7, how to track citizens' travels as a government. Pardon my cynicism.
On the other hand, recent developments in biomedical science, electric cars, renewable energy and private space travel have been amazingly cool. So it really depends on the actual technology.
A very crude tool back in the 90's. Not until recently have we got a tool we can actually use to make some interesting tech. Thats why computer sales are going down, the computer we have are pretty good.
[($)]
To go from CGA to EGA was an huge leap, in a world where monitors were not very many and most were monochrome. Compare to your phone going from small bezel to no bezel/curved screen or something.
More examples -- from Wolfenstein to Doom, from home computer to a PC (or even Amiga), from no modem to modem and the world of BBSes...
Human senses -- that includes the mental faculty -- are logarithmic in nature. From not eating any sweets to eating dark chocolate is a much bigger leap than to go from dark chocolate to sweet chocolate. To get the same technology delta today would require a breakthrough on the order of working quantum computers.
The survivors of the 30-year test of time probably look better than today's who haven't survived.
Almost like there is a bias in the survivorship. Someone should come up with a name for this bias for noticing survivors.
There was hope, well for me at least.
Future was ever possible, Star Trek, Star Wars, amazing technological leaps, nothing bad could happen. I had no idea of the world we live in, economically, ecologically, socially. This place, I have no faith anymore, I have none. I do not in any way suspect we'll "make it". Not as we are, not as we've been. The inertia of global warming, the attitudes of the common man. The decisions of government.
The only thing which could excite me right now would probably be a a rogue planet on a collision course here, aka Melancholia.
Slightly less sombre, I said to someone just this past weekend, the only thing which could give me faith for our future, would be an Arrival (movie) situation, we might stand a chance then. If someone were to come, peacefully and offer us advanced, seriously, incredibly advanced tech. Maybe we'd figure shit out.
Unlikely though, extremely.
The key technological developments of 30 years ago were things you could buy and hold in your hand or put in your house/car/whatever.
The key technological developments of today are not "things"; at best they are "things as a service". The Echo is essentially a powered microphone with a wifi connection, which could have been done a decade ago. Alexa, however, is not a thing you can hold or kick or even own.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Many have noticed that almost all big software ideas were invented/discovered by the 1970's and that most new stuff is merely refinements of those ideas.
You can add neural networks to that list. The recent "deep learning" networks are just a smart application of prior ideas, with a big dose of computing power not available in prior eras to both test neural network configurations and run the AI applications.
If you want startup ideas, I'd suggest dynamic relational. It's not revolutionary, but a tool I wish existed for rapid prototyping and rush-job RAD. (It's not my fault it's a rush job, I'm just following PHB orders.) You can make money by releasing an open-source version, but also sell an "enterprise" version and/or support contracts, similar to the PHP Zend model.
Another idea is to follow ARM and Android OS model by creating a content sharing standard to make it easier to share content among different OS's, CMS's, and social networks. It's almost like a file system standard, but with better or more consistent meta-data, including more powerful categorizations that cross beyond the mere hierarchies of files. Most content has or needs elements such as: title, synopsis, author, categories (list), intended audience (personal, friends & fam., work, public, etc.), create date, change date, expiration date, etc.
The company wouldn't charge to use the standard, but one would have to pay a fee to use the product name or get a copy of the formal specification. Big co's would typically pay to use the Foo logo, but small co's or amateurs could only say "Foo compatible" to avoid fees. (You don't have to pay Google to use the Android OS, but you do if you want to call it "Android" and use the green Android logo.)
Table-ized A.I.
Back in the day, there were lots of new applications and interfaces that tried to do things in new ways. Some worked, some didn't.
However, we seem to have gotten stuck in one of the neural network sub-optimal potholes. Email apps today are basically identical to Eudora. Calendars still suck. Even tools like slack are just warmed-over IRC.
Just look at the UI for Kai's Power tools. Whoa!
While there may be an optimal UI for various use cases, there's no particular reason that the Eudora UI should be the one that got standardized on.
It seems the creativity left the industry once it became a valid career path.
But even without the internet, the computer has had a fairly profound impact in terms of disruption. I graduated a year before www hit, and had been using the internet for nearly a decade before that, but mostly for sharing data and designs. But was doing significant work on stand alone computers (or more accurately mainframes) that would not have been possible before without the computer.
I hate to use them as examples, but the Nazi's had a lot of innovation in the field of aviation during WWII. Most of it failed, but they tried some really crazy stuff and were first to space with the V-2.
As someone with a 60 year view on things I can say excitement about technology wanes and waxes with time, but currently we are in a waxing phase. Voice activated AI is starting to permeate our lives, self driving cars will be arriving soon, space has become exiting again with SpaceX.
Here are the main upticks in general interest in technology as I see them, starting before I was born.
1920s Travel by Car
1930s Electricity delivered to the home (wide adoption).
1940s True air travel and widespread radio use.
1950s Atomic Age, Automation, TV
1960s Space Age, Mainframe Computers
1970s First Lull, we did get VCR's and time shifting
1980s Video Games, Personal Computer (OK both arrived in late 70’s, but this is wide adoption)
Early 1990s Another Lull, Personal Computing great for business – home use doesn’t live up to promise, Video Games cool a bit.
Late 1990s, Cell Phones, and the Internet (again wide adoption)
Early 2000s, Another Lull, though the Internet was continuing to pick up steam, computers are truly useful at home now.
Late 2000s, HDTV wide adoption (finally TV is improving at a rapid pace)
Early 2010s, Smart Phones wide adoption
Late 2010s, Voice recognition AI, AI in general is rapidly improving and being used widely in business, cusp of self-driving cars, Virtual Reality is now out of the lab, SpaceX has given us back the space-age.
Compared to previous decades I think this one is only getting hotter and hotter – Not quite yet at 1960’s Space Age general interest in technology, but a close second (and the decade isn't over yet).
Letter To Iran
The internal combustion engine is merely a steam engine with the heat produced gas expansion happening in the cylinder instead of an external boiler.
A jet engine is simply a turbocharged engine with the piston and valves removed from the internal combustion engine.
Looking back at these innovations, there isn't much difference between a steam engine from 1700 and a jet engine from the mid 1900's
A Raspberry Pi is a personal computer.
It's just not an IBM compatible PC.
I think the huge leap forward was the 50's, with everybody finally getting vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators and penicillin. Those feel like era-defining upgrades. The way people lived their lives 30 years later was not fundamentally different. The music got better, but the tech behind way people lived, worked and entertained themselves did not. Moore's law and the internet finally changed everyone's lives, and that too feels pretty era-defining.
I built my own 8-bit system with a Z-80A. Lots of us old codgers out there that programmed with paper tape, cloads, and binary front panel loads.
There are products, sure.
We went from a pair of wires for internal networks to coax, to twisted pairs, to fiber, to wireless, with branches for telco-supplied interconnect and carrier supplied interconnect. Carriers used CSU/DSUs along with telcos until networking protocols evolved, then fiber became practical. Some carriers still use DSL because they're cheap.
We went from ASR-33 and TWX terminals to DecWriters, 5250s, 3270s, Televideo terminals to micros with RF modulators to CGA, until HDTV and UHD became monitors.
Operating systems went from CP/M and Apple DOS through MS-DOS while BSD evolved and became Solaris, NeXT, MacOS, and Linux in the middle.
The original Lisa and Mac were the first mainstream GUIs that Microsoft desperately tried to copy into Windows, a couple dozen versions until they beat IBM at that game, and it kind of worked at Windows 7.
But UI is now UX. Crappy window managers no longer are used.
My bag phone in the 1980s became smaller and smaller until GSM got smart and moved towards GPRS and beyond, and LTE is pretty good-- but it was iOS and Android standing on the shoulders of Palm and others that made the UI tenable on smartphones.
The browser wars continue to this day. They subvert the operating system GUI/UI/UX and have become most people's window on the world.
Before there was GPS, there was LORAN.
So it's all evolving, incrementally, ruled by Moore's Law and consumer demand (businesses and people). It's easy to get stoic when you've seen a lot of change and evolution, but revolutions are really rare, and you know them when you see them. Sometimes it's getting in front of a parade, then dragging the marchers forward, like Elon Musk, a very crazy visionary, like Jobs before him. Both had visions and set the bar high, failing, but succeeding more than failing, catching the public's fancy on the way up. There will be more like them.
And there will also be crooks, liars, and the disillusioned, those that ran out of money, and those that ran into cabals and monopolies. Not much changes but stays the same. Business ecosystems evolve services, and it never was Google's intent to do good, rather, to make money, and it's Amazon's job to bust business models in its favor. Somethings will never change, and building monopolies is a natural defense against the innovative.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Yeah, they did. Read "The Age of the Pussyfoot" by Frederik Pohl, first published (serial form) in 1966 and then re-released in book form in 1969. Not only did he come very close to imagining what we have now, he imagined things we don't yet have, but probably will eventually.
There's a lot of great SF out there; I'd be really careful about presuming someone didn't think of our current tech in one form or another, cosmetic differences aside.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
When I read the article, the first thing I thought of was a singular event that defined for me the transition between hands-on and brains-in enthusiasm for new technology versus passive disinterest or boredom with new technology. Byte magazine. For those who never had the opportunity to read it, it was hard core nerd stuff, printed from 1975 to 1998. In those burgeoning early days of IC's and PC's, it was a great way to learn about digital and computer technologies. It was not a technical journal. It was a general interest magazine, but Byte stories got in-depth on processor architectures, fab methods, system building, application programming, peripheral interfacing, and so on. It was a great way to stay informed about what was then a genuinely innovative and exhilarating set of new technologies. Remember, this was the era of Space Invaders, Pac Man, Tron, Tandy, Commodore, Lotus, VisiCalc, and early PC-Mac. Then, in the early 1990's, the internet started to gain traction. General public enthusiasm bloomed with the dot-com era of the later decade, but in the early decade, the days of Netscape and Mosaic, Byte saw the future and decided to shift the magazine's focus. It went all in on the internet, changing name to byte.com.
I remember reading the first new edition, where the publisher explained the shift in focus. However, instead of adhering to their admired focus on technology reporting, they reported on where the internet could take you. Imagine a world class automobile magazine that was exalted for its in-depth articles on engine design, torque and hp, engine machining, carburetor specs and tuning, tire manufacture, highway engineering, and traffic control systems. Then suddenly in the 1960's, suburban shopping malls start popping up, so Auto Magazine then switches its entire format to describing what you can buy in the stores at the mall, which of course the car will take you to. It reports solely on where and how to go to the mall to buy shoes and clothes for a Sunday jaunt, or tires or a battery at Sears Auto, or fuses at Radio Shack. You could even buy other stuff at the Mall. Wow! That is what Byte became, a guide to online places and experiences. Bye bye Byte.
It is easy to get beguiled by something solely because it is new. Back then, the internet was new, and it was exciting. But the underlying technology per se was perhaps too arcane or unseen for most people to care. The applied internet was what caught attention, those things that ordinary people could do with it, but not the physical infrastructure underneath. Even for the hobbyist or hacker, you couldn't just tap into an internet trunk on your own, so the technology itself became less tangible.
It depends on how you define technology. Wireless is a great new technology that has radically altered how we do things. But, "wireless" is just radio, telephone, and pc all comingled, and each of those are old technologies. Are iterative improvements or logical machine hookups the same as fundamental new technologies? It does seem that a lot of the new technologies of the past 30 years are iterative extensions or market driven mashups of prior genuinely novel advancements.
You know it. We all know it. Enjoy the ride; we can't stop it.
I was there 30 years ago and IT just keeps getting more and more interesting. It was cool geek fun back then however now is fucking awesome and it seems to get better and better. Only problem is that it has attracted some real dicks to get involved, they need to go.
My 2c
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I think in the 90's and definitely the time before that, there were physical/hardware limitations to a lot of ideas, where a lot of the time, people knew the value of this stuff, its just that it had never been done before, and sufficiently powerful hardware didn't necessarily exist either. In other words, there were lots of situations where tech could be implemented to improve processes, and just make it easier to do stuff.
Where we are at now, hardware has definitely stagnated. The last 3-5 years, I'd say no appreciable improvement in anything and no one really cares either. In the past, it didn't take a tech person to realise that an electronic calculator was superior to the slide rule, but what replaces an electronic calculator? Software may still have a way to go, but the obvious productivity improvements are either realised, or not economical. I believe that the tech sector is at an advantage here, because invariably the successful ones have been able to use their people to create their own tools and implement business innovations, which for other companies would be too costly. Any software a tech company produces, has the possibility of being useful by other business' and can be a product to sell.
I'm starting to think that things like smartwatches, VR, digital assistants, etc. they are all things symptomatic of stagnation. Most of them are solutions looking for a problem and demonstrate why there's such low adoption and general indifference to them. In the past, when some programs or devices were released, again, it was quite obvious of their value, Visicalc comes to mind where lots of people could see how it could provide useful information. Maybe those devices are looking for a killer application that makes them relevant, but I don't know what it is or could be.
Back then, each development brought something new, something you couldn't do before. Nowadays? Not so much: a decade ago my computer could render beautiful worlds in real time, or stream full-screen HD video from the internet, and today it still does that. Yes, the shadows are slightly softer and the hair is a bit more realistic, but those are refinements, not entirely new capabilities.
Thirty years ago, having sampled sound was magic. The ability to manipulate objects the size of the screen was magic. Having (primitive!) 3D was magic. Having the unlimited storage and speed of a harddisk was magic. Those were new things; they opened new vistas, new possibilities, new applications, new ways of thinking. I cannot think of a single recent example of a development that did that.
Technological advances 30 years ago were for the benefit of their users. Technological advances today are for the benefit of their maker.
I prefer to be the user to being the product. That's why they were more exciting and actually something to look forward to. The question back then was "how do I get it?" The question today is "How do I turn it off?"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
When I switched from a green text-only monitor to a Color Graphics Adapter, I thought I was living in the future.
Also, when I bought my first Levis Jeans on Compuserve in 1989 I thought, this is the way to shop.
The first moving graphics were awesome as well.
Then in 1991 we started to buy all our books via Mosaic (on books.com if memory serves) we were already a bit blasé about it.
Because I didn't have 30 years of learning how much bullshit is spouted by people with hidden money in the game.
This closely related to why politicians keep wanting to reduce the voting age.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
"Back then" I could really feel the need for more processing power and all the things it would enable. Now, I'm not so sure I imagine as much "new" as I do "more" from developments.
But I did have a puzzling experience around 2000 when I was reading a number of CS papers that had roots in the Linux/open movement, and I found it was in large proportions repeating research done in the 60s/70s/80s. Not being aware of what has gone before was not what I expected of the CS community. I'm sure that research was exciting, just as it was the first time around. Are we still doing this?
Tomorrow's World was a popular Technology/Science show that laster from the 1960's into the 1990's. It was must-see TV in the 1980's! lots of cool technology and gadgets and innovations. Some of it was wild and out there. A lot of it never saw the light of day, but it was fun and exciting.
By the mid-late 90's, they discovered the internet, and it was never very interesting to look at. Technology was still progressing but it lacked that "WOW!" factor. And the show really lost a lot of popularity, and was axed in the early 2000's.
I think it could be resurrected though. We're seeing more interesting things again. Segways, 3d printers, smart homes, self driving cars, and cars in space.
There are too many fads and companies aping each other these days. Someone puts a notch in the screen, now all do it. Someone invents "material design" defying 50 years of usability research and it becomes the latest and greatest. It is a sad time in technology when eliminating features is celebrated like a huge accomplishment.
See The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The shift is now in the monetisation stage. Everyone was excited when aniline dye was invented (see Synthetic dye.) They were expensive and rare. More dyes followed and now you can choose from the whole Pantone pallet.
Do we really need rooms in 100,000 colors?
Do we really need iPhone 12? Samsung 15?
Be patient, another shift is coming
In other words, we're burned out. You can only have your mind blown for so long.
I bought an Apple ][+ with my parents in 1980. It came with a neat reference manual that had a printout of the ROM's assembler code and a schematic. You could tinker with component-level stuff then, I soldered in a potentiometer to the 555 timer that controlled repeat-key speed (for variable speed repeat, hey I was only 15)
Modern computers don't allow for such work, it's all board swaps and e-waste disposal. I doubt many current geeks have ever used a soldering iron.
There are still Fun Things to Tinker With. The past few years I've been hacking up stuff with Arduino and ESP8266 They've brought new life to my workbench and re-ignited my love of electronic tinkering.
Highly recommended for any geek.
Trolling is a art,
The Space Shuttle was new, back then, and it was totally the cool technology. Way more cool than VR or 3D modeling
30 years ago, RISC CPUs were just coming to the market.
SPARC, ARM, MIPS and PA-RISC were all being released in the mid-late 80's, and it wouldn't be long until they were joined by the likes of Alpha.
If you could afford them or had access to them, these RISC based machines were a step change in computing power compared to contemporary CISC CPUs of the time, which would have been 286 or 386 (if you were lucky) or 68K. They destroyed even the mini-computers of the time, such as VAXen. It must have been an exciting time to have such a jump in performance on your desk.
Add in the likes of Atari ST and Amiga, and 30 years ago was quite a time for personal computing advances.
It's just a shame the UNIX wars fucked it up for everyone and we ended up stuck with DOS/Windows.
It's like REM said... Standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold.
We're all standing on giants who were standing on giants who were standing on giants, and so on back to the stone age.
The question is pretty pointless. They may as well have just asked: "How much older do you feel today than you felt 30 years ago?"
Try 40 years ago. I remember visiting the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto and being totally blown away by all the cool tech there. Millenials will never ever be as cool as this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I too miss the incremental upgrades of the 80's from 300 bps to 600 bps modems.
Typical psychological bias. You were younger back then, and there were fewer advancements back then, so they seemed more important. Its purely perception, not reality.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Many of the Big Leaps were killer apps that made people buy a computer for the sole purpose of running that app. Things that changed what people did with computers. Think spreadsheets, desktop publishing, WWW. We've had a convergence of networked data since the early '90s. What next?
The last big leap (WWW) was a while ago. I can see why people might view tech as stagnant. It is. Computers have gotten faster, more capable. But they don't do anything new.
...laura
But not because they were better. Things were more exciting 30 years ago because we had time to get excited over every new thing (well, not me, I wasn't born yet, but in general in that "30 years go to 20 years ago" timeframe). Nowadays it's NEW THING! NEW THING! NEWER THING! with such a rapidity that not even we attention-deficit hyperactive millennials can keep up with it well enough to be suitably excited. So to extrapolate backwards, I guess things probably were more exciting then, you lucky old farts.
Film at 11...
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Speak for yourself. I own everything on my systems. Of course, I don't use cloud services to store anything, and backup my own data.
The old tech still works...most people just don't know how to use it.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain