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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?
Falcon 9 landings are pretty awesome!
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.
Things definitely seemed to move faster. I was watching a video about the 8 bit ZX Spectrum today. It ended production in 1992, and by 1995 we had the Playstation. In comparison my current computers are mostly over 5 years old and the latest models are not really noticeably better for most tasks.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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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
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!
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.
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.
If you asked me 30 years ago if we'd have real AI by now I would have said yes.
If you told me 30 years ago that state of the art VR in 2018 is cardboarding your phone to your face I would have said "Fuck you."
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.
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
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.
It was pretty easy, especially considering that many of us had access through a 2400 bps modem (we called them 2400 baud, but I think they were 600 baud technically). Most of what you needed to find over Gopher was text files, which made things like troff/nroff very handy for formatting text files very nicely on terminals.
Is the new technology more powerful and flexible? Without a doubt. On the other hand I didn't need an ad blocker back in those days. And people weren't remote exploiting my out-of-date gopher client, or running bitcoin mining tasks in the background on 286. One valid point about nostolgia is that sometimes the old days were simpler and safer, if harder.
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Business interests have taken over. The next major development is underway now with qbits. The big problem is the storage cartels. They're conspiring to keep manufacturing limited, HD capacities relatively low, & prices inflated.
The Spectrum was launched in 1982.
My point was, you can't point to Spectrums in 1992 as evidence of rapid progress. The Spectrums on sale in 1992 were the last gasp of a dying company selling 10 year-old hardware. There's 13 years between the introduction of Spectrum and Playstation.
Tyler Cowen, an economist, wrote an interesting paper about how we've hit the great stagnation. All the low-hanging fruit of economic innovation has been realized, at least in the US. Women participate in the workforce, we've mostly maximized the productivity enhancements of technology (assembly lines, basic robotics, office automation), we've tapped into (and in some cases, nearly tapped out) cheap and simple energy sources, and so on.
It's not to say there aren't marginal improvements, but they come with such large marginal costs that it's debatable whether they produce real productivity improvements and certainly not the productivity improvements their previous generations did when they were adopted.
Office computers are a great example, when I started working in a large office there was no email or calendaring and there was a ration of about 4-5 workers for every 1 support worker (principal job to deal with the administrivia of the worker -- scheduling, typing, copying, etc). That ratio went to something like 20:1 or smaller 5 years after email and I'd say a good chunk of what was left was semi-symbolic for senior executives or more like a personal assistant for a specific group capable of contributing in some small way to the work product itself, not just the coordination.
But since then (last 20 years, give or take) there haven't been any real increases in productivity other than small marginal increases in capability -- bigger documents, more storage, etc, but nobody is really more productive and the support costs of the technology have increased with the dependence on it.
In terms of computing technology, I think it really has stagnated in the last 5 years. Virtualization and SSDs seem to be the last big breakthrough technologies that actually improved productivity and those appear in many ways to have hit productivity improvement ceilings. Virtualization seems to be getting more complex mostly on a feature-addition basis and I've talked to customers who have an entire cluster deployed for management tools for their...cluster.
I think you can really see it in the prices of 10+ gb ethernet and SSDs. SSDs have gotten a lot cheaper but I'm still seeing prices in the thousands for enterprise SSDs. It took less than 5 years for ethernet to go from 10/100 to ubiquitous 1 gb. It's taking way longer for 10+ gb to get adopted because the vendors have held the line on pricing for that and enterprise SSD because they have nothing else to offer. It's the end of the line.
Sure, there are ways to max them out further, but now you're back to huge marginal implementation costs -- new cable plants for 10 gb, massive bus reorganization for improved flash performance, all with productivity enhancements that may not even cover their marginal costs.
Software and operating systems seem stuck in stylistic and rent-seeking iterations without even claimed productivity enhancements. It's all driven by vendor profit enhancements, tracking, advertising, not productivity utility. A brand new PC/OS with a flash disk doesn't deliver anymore average productivity than a 5 year old model and the actual worker productivity itself probably hasn't improved in 10-20 years.
My point was that from the ordinary user's point of view, the kid who got a computer for their birthday or the adult looking to buy a machine for games or applications would have been considering machines like the Spectrum, Commodore 64 (discontinued 1994), Amiga, Archimedes and low end DOS/Win 3.11 PCs.
Computers back then had a much longer shelf life. The speed of developments seemed more rapid to people.
Having said that, the Spectrum was 1982, and in 1985 we had the Amiga, and later machines like the X68000. The PC-Engine with CD-ROM was only a few years after that, going from a few kilobytes on a slow loading tape to 650MB on an optical disc.
Compare with PCs from 2008. Core 2 Duo era. DDR3 was new. The relative difference compared to 2018 is much smaller.
SSDs are as fast a RAM from a decade ago, which is insane. But the 880k floppy drive on an Amiga could read 40k/sec, which is actually much faster than the base 16k Spectrum and I think maybe even the 48k version. Having said that, it also cost a lot more. It's hard to find like-for-like comparisons.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC