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Ask Slashdot: Is Today's Technology As Cool As You'd Predicted When You Were Young?
"How does the actual, purchaseable consumer technology available in 2019 compare to what you -- back in the 1960s, '70s, '80s or '90s -- thought consumer technology might look like around the year 2020?" asks Slashdot reader dryriver.
Is today's consumer technology as advanced, inventive, groundbreaking and empowering as you imagined it would be 30, 40, 50 years ago? Or is the "technological future that has now actually arrived" different, in various ways, from how you'd hoped/imagined it might be a few decades back?
If so, what was different in your "future technologies imagination" than what is available to buy today?
Each generation received different dreams from the pop culture of their time. Back in 1969 an 18-year-old Kurt Russell starred in a Disney movie with a malfunctioning mainframe. By 1984 one TV series showed David Hasselhoff with his own talking self-driving car. But how close did your own personal predictions come, asks the original submission.
"Do today's technological gadgets manage to live up to how you imagined tech around the year 2020 would be, or do they fall short of what you hoped/imagined might exist by today?
If so, what was different in your "future technologies imagination" than what is available to buy today?
Each generation received different dreams from the pop culture of their time. Back in 1969 an 18-year-old Kurt Russell starred in a Disney movie with a malfunctioning mainframe. By 1984 one TV series showed David Hasselhoff with his own talking self-driving car. But how close did your own personal predictions come, asks the original submission.
"Do today's technological gadgets manage to live up to how you imagined tech around the year 2020 would be, or do they fall short of what you hoped/imagined might exist by today?
except for processing information, everything is just basically at a standstill. We still have the same roads and houses I had growing up in the 1980s.
Nobody predicted the modern smart phone. So much science fiction got it so, so wrong, even fairly recent stuff.
It's 2019; we should have sex robots indistinguishable from real humans.
I assume this is a universal that children's imaginations are a on average one hell of a lot better than this fucked up dystopia shit. YMMV, IDGAF.
I thought we would be further along than this.
One thing we have that I hoped for: video chat.
One thing we donâ(TM)t have that I had imagined: flying cars (a la The Jetsons).
I assumed that we'd have a nudie button on our TVs by now, where one could press the nudie button and see all the TV personalities in their birthday suits. Well that is what I thought back in the 70's. I'm sort of glad it didn't come to pass yet.
I thought we would have had much better computer voice recognition by now but the web and mobile devices are far more capable than I ever imagined they would be. The biggest disappointment is space technology which is far behind where I thought it would be by now although SpaceX is helping it get there.
for the paperless office.
Seriously, on more than one occasion back in the 1970s I heard how companies like Weyerhauser and Georgia Pacific were worried about how the advent of computers was going to destroy their business within a few years. But whenever I've looked around the various offices and labs I've worked in, and all I see is paper and more paper.
#DeleteChrome
CPU is much better than expected.
GPU is much better.
OS and games work well on the consumer side.
Storage is low cost.
Bandwidth is up from the acoustic modem years.
The free and open internet was great while it lasted.
Did not expect the virtue signalling, SJW, censorship, shadow banning, reporting, account removal, payment processor problems the internet would have.
That side of political control for speech on the internet was something out of Communist nations.
PRISM and the global collection efforts of the GCHQ and NSA got published. That was something that was expected for historians in 30 to 50 years.
The amount of direct internet censorship demanded by NATO nations NGO's, NATO nation think tanks was unexpected.
The extent of EU nation trade laws to tax and block US computer brands was unexpected given who well Microsoft and Apple products sold to consumers in EU nations.
Expected movie making and music to get better as more skilled people got low cost tools to be creative with.
Did not expect movie reviews to get banned on the internet.
Seeing streamed US comedy shows getting banned by nations with blasphemy laws.
The trust put back into big US brand crypto after the news about PRISM, BULLRUN was unexpected.
Political meme skills was a good change given the levels of censorship and gov demands to control the internet.
That a funny political image could hold back gov and NGO demands for more censorship.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
For me, it's like pundits' and SiFi writers' predictions: some big hits, some big misses. For example, I'd have thought that fusion generation would long since have been solved, and I'd be paying a utility to power my house with it (which I'd say qualifies as consumer-purchasable technology). And yet solar energy is now just about off-the-shelf price competitive most places.
What I've noticed over time is that the things we do have now are difficult (in time and effort) and even if they just seem to pop up or have become so ubiquitous that it's hard to imagine not having had them anymore, these "simple" things have required many, many advances by large numbers of people incrementally over a long time, and then yet more time for us to figure out how to best use them. It's just hard to see that unless you look explicitly or are in it.
It's just as easy to grossly underestimate the time a prediction might take as it is to miss a blindside breakthrough.
I don't have to decide between guns or butter in my imagination. When I was young, I imagined cool robot friends and trips to other worlds. Now, I have a Roomba and travel internationally, but most technology that I imagine today involves clients and difficult trade-offs. My focus on imaginary technology now is limited by what I can have the company I own, sell to someone with money (no equity deals, please.) Children don't have the same practical concerns, and (thankfully, in my country) aren't worried about how feasible something is. There isn't much of a difference between science fiction, and fantasy, when you're young. If you come from a stable background, you can dream a lot when little.
Also thankfully, I never imaged how awesome financial technology could be when young. It's awfully nice having a visa card that works almost anywhere on earth, in any currency. I'm happy I didn't think about money when a little kid. The same for medical technology. I'm still happy no one in my party has died from dysentery, or a horse kick...
This question is really How limited of an imagination did you have when young, and how unrealistic and uneducated an understanding of technology do you have now?
Elon Musk is the exception. That guy builds some seriously cool stuff, about as cool as I imagined when I was little.
When I was a kid in the early 1980's, the only programming books that the library had was about COBOL and payroll. Thank God that kids today don't have to learn about either one.
when I was in High School, I begged my parents for a TTY with a punched tape device and an acoustic modem for Christmas.
So all these years later with TBs of local storage, Multi MB connection to the Internet, streaming video, cell phone... It's pretty miraculous.
What isn't too surprising is the avarice of companies, the lack of privacy and assholes and control freaks in general.
Computers in general were supposed to make the world a better place for everyone.
I'm still waiting for the Playstation 9, they announced it forever ago why is it taking them so long to actually release this?!
I grew up in the 90s.
I remember visiting actual computer stores, which had isles and isles packed with the latest greatest gadgets, games, peripherals, and other random accessories. I remember the GPU revolution that started in the late 90s and gave birth to the Voodoo 2 PCI, GeForce 2 MX, ATI 9800 series, etc. I remember seeing sound cards going from ISA to PCI and some truly revolutionary tech like A3D (Aureal 3D) come and go. I remember buying numerous joysticks and gamepads, because a lot of games could make use of them, and some of that stuff was really neat as well (like the Microsoft Force Feedback 2 units- the FF on those things could break a small child's wrist when it was cranked up to max, and it was fucking awesome with Mechwarrior).
I remember buying and using a Palm, then later upgrading to a Pocket PC (specifically an iPaq). Yeah, the software was a bit glitchy but I didn't care. It let me take notes on the foldable keyboard and play SimCity 2000 on the go (plus DOOM and some emulated Sega games), which was awesome enough. I had the latter in my pocket for well over a decade before it became unusable with modern day software.
I remember buying printers- some were expensive, some weren't. The best printer I ever owned was a Canon BJC-6000. It had a removable print head (and came with a spare holder for one) that you could swap if you had the photo head instead (which took more cartridges), and even a scanner unit that would let you scan stuff instead of printing it (granted, it was a bit slow since the head still had to go back and forth to scan the entire sheet). The cartridges were just cheap plastic tanks that you could refill super easily because they were transparent, Canon used an optical level sensor on those units which consisted of a tiny prism at the bottom that either refracted light or didn't based on how much ink was left.
The internet was pretty chill too. I loved chatting to people over IRC using my Seanix Pentium 75mhz computer with 16mb of RAM and a 2mb Trident SVGA graphics card. This was over dial-up, but it didn't matter much because most websites were optimized for that sort of thing. Nobody was trying to track me, things like Facebook didn't exist, and for the large part it was just a massive online community of knowledge and information.
I got to see things evolve and refine themselves, and the future seemed like it was going to be so fucking wonderful- and then it all came crashing down.
I guess it happened when the corporations got interested in things- or maybe it happened when people started demanding exponential increases in profits, who knows.
What I do know is this:
- Everything I use is encrypted in some bullshit way that removes control from me, the owner and user
- The last printer I owned tried to tell me that my perfectly good ink cartridges were "expired" and refused to use them
- Everyone is trying to track me on the internet or advertise to me somehow
- Simple things like IRC somehow turned into Discord, a bloated abomination built on Electron that sucks up 32x more RAM than my original IRC computer had to do the same fucking thing
- Computers no longer listen to my wishes in general- ie, don't fucking update yourself because I have actual work to do and everything works fine as-is
- Ditto for most consumer electronic devices that think they know better than me
- Mostly everything is built to break down after the warranty expires and/or be as unrepairable as possible (my Palm and PPC had user replaceable batteries)
- Software has turned into a big old black box that nobody really understands, including the vendor, since the answer to most things is "reinstall/reformat and try again"
Maybe I'm lucky... Maybe I only have fond memories of things because it was truly a time of user innovation. But it just seemed like everyone wanted to produce a good solid product back then, and making money was just a side effect of having something consumers WANTED to buy- not something that they NEEDED to buy
Graphics are better. Security is worse. Understanding is worse. RAM is cheaper but software just wastes more of it to compensate. Same goes for CPU speed; CPUs are much faster but software is just slower to compensate. Bandwidth is overpriced as fuck. Dishonesty runs rampant in the industry, causing permanent erosion of the public trust.
What we're missing that I imagined we'd have:
flying cars that could hover
holographic tv
rotating space stations
moon and mars colonies
undersea cities
fusion power
cure for cancers and viral diseases
cures for genetic diseases
mind/computer interface
robot to do all house chores
no poverty
Computers are pretty damned fast and cheap compared to the days of the 1 MIPS $3000 IBM PC with 3 360k floppy disks and a monochrome monitor. The rise of Arduino and Raspberry Pi make it possible to stick computing in almost anything for less than $20, and in some cases under a buck!
Bandwidth is far MORE expensive than I predicted... I expected full duplex gigabit for $50/month by now... it amazes me that cable TV is still a dominant way of delivering data to the masses. I predicted that you'd be able to have a full duplex video feed (Facetime anyone) between any 2 points in the world for $50/month.... we never made it.
Operating Systems are now far LESS reliable and secure than the days of MS-DOS. You could always write protect your OS disk, and easily make copies of it. You could trust copies to work years later, and everyone understood how to make them. You didn't have to worry about your hardware getting bricked.
Video and Cameras are amazing, I had no idea how cool things could get.
Wireless / Cellular networks are way better than I expected, but again the monopoly pricing structures are weird.
There are lots of cool surprises, Wikis, Blogging, Video Sharing, Podcasts, Ebay, Amazon, 3d printers and milling machines for cheap. Open source software and hardware,
I have a 65" 4k TV that is as close to 1970's sci-fi as I could imagine. My LG K8 (bottom of the barrel) smartphone can let me have two way conversations with people that speak languages that I don't, using Microsoft Translate. Space X lands stage one rockets, and reuses them. I stream TV without commercials. I could go on and on, but won't. Man, the future is great!
The tech is great, but I never expected the dystopian part... TVs and cars and phones that spy on you..etc..
The stuff behind the tech is a mess. I figured we'd have the software engineering thing figured out by now, but we've regressed. The COBOL programmers have taken over, or as Dijkstra said, people who have been permanently brain damaged as programmers (that is, it works once on their desk, so that's good enough, release it. Then they wonder why their bug tracker is full).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's a relative question isn't it? If you are in your 20's then you probably aren't that impressed or not as much as I am.
Strange to think a CD is antiquated now.
As a teenager a Walkman was hi-tech.
Now I can stream music wirelessly from my watch to little buds in my ear.
My phone knows my face and I can ask it to turn on music in any room in my house.
I can video chat with my mother on the other side of the planet in high definition video and audio.
Yet with the car industry we're still driving the same shitty combustion engined machines we did as a kid.
The electronics and safety are better.
What happened to the big dreams of space exploration?
Oh yeah, that's right, we decided it was more important to turn our tech on deep sea exploration for hydro carbons to power those shitty combustion engines.
Turns out that prediction fell through, answer: No, technology is not as cool as I wanted it.
Serial processing speeding up so much that no-one thought easy parallel programs were worth the bother?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
In the 90s I thought that the internet was a cool new frontier, opening up endless opportunities for the betterment of mankind. Nowadays I mostly think that it's a means of mass espionage that turns people into assholes.
Still 25 years away, always.
Except in Canada we have a company doing it that's only 5 years away, always.
Also, I hoped people in general would have more of a f**king clue by now. About empirical, verifiable reality, you know? About how to think better. But no-o-o-o!
It's a good thing the machines are going to be thinking for us soon, cause on average, "we're stupid and we'll die."
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I'm an Air Force brat. In 1969.I watched with my family as Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon. That was an OMG moment, which set unfulfilled expectations for years to come. Instead of OMG moments, we've had a steady advance in tech, better every year, but never with an OMG moment like that.
So, I'm disappointed that I cannot vacation on Mars. At the same time, the steady tech revolution has changed the world far more than most of us would have thought possible.
In 1982, I took a philosophy class at UC Berkeley. For my final project, I predicted when the AI singularity would occur. My hypothesis was that we sim[y lacked the compute power, and when we had enough such that for $1M in 1982 dollars, any mainstream university could afford a neural network with the same capacity as a human brain, then some a-hole would come along and program it to actually be intelligent.
I predicted, based on Moore's Law, 2025....
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
The Prius is handy: It will get 50 mpg. It has a lifespan of 20+ years, and over 200,000+ miles. It produces only a small amount of pollution. The new high speed trains are energy efficient, and travel over 200 mph. You can watch almost any movie from your home, at a moment's notice. In windy places, wind power only somewhat more expensive than natural gas. Houses are more energy efficient.
Instead of flying cars, we get self-driving morons, and pizza delivery drones.
I was in elementary school knee deep in science fiction books July 20, 1969. 2001 didn't seem overly optimistic. But instead of space stations and a moon base we had dotcoms and cellular telephones. The advent of consumer smartphones felt like the futuristic booby prize, cool but nothing like The Menace From Earth or The Girl Who Was Plugged In, which we seem to be approaching along with Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up.
Oh yay so we got all this cheap enough to be almost free bandwidth, computer games are prettier but no more interesting, lots of time saving stuff in the house but it hasnt truly improved in 30 years (my dish washer is no better than my ancient one, just uses less water and has more buttons that do nothing), I still work 50+ hours a week, my commute is longer than ever but oh gosh my tv went from 13 to 65 inches, so that makes up for it or something.
Same shit, just faster and bigger.
Facebook and other wasted crap on the net is not an improvement. They are just faster and more efficient ways of passing notes or scribbling on,the bathrooms] walls in school like we did when I was a kid. So now a million people can see someone bitch about their ex instead of just the locals who might actually know them both. I would argue they make society worse. Thank god for such tremendous advances in science.
Where the fuck is my flying car? My vacation to one of the moon bases? The free power from the fusion plant? The cures for all sorts of horrible diseases we have poured hundred of zillions of dollars into?
Crap. All crap.
Just.. no..
I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.
Today's world is fabulous technologically speaking. I remember MIT's first attempts at self-driving cars in the 80s. I worked on one of the first telephone with voice recognition (it sort of recognized 10 digits after hours of training). I dreamed of a portable computer I could take with me everywhere, and being forever-connected to the rest of the world.
Now all these things are a reality, and so ubiquitous people feel the need to wonder if they're cool on Slashdot!
What I didn't expect is the reasons why these technologies came about: as I kid, I thought research was done to better humanity, and give more people access to education. Wrong! It's done to squeeze money out of people and put them under surveillance. It's also used by religious crazies, conspiracy theorists, and to post videos of cats.
In short, all these mavellous things have been invented for nefarious purposes, and used mostly by an ever-dumber population. That's a letdown...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't say that it is.
In some ways, it is cooler in ways that I couldn't have imagined. By 1990 when I was 23, I knew at some point music and movie media would move beyond the optical disc, but I believed it would be in the form of cheap high capacity ROM chipped cartridges the size of a matchbook that would be bought in a store. I didn't think of data compression or high speed online distribution or streaming. I knew computer hardware and software would continue to get faster, cheaper, and better but I didn't envision tablets and smartphones arriving so soon.When I was caught up in the excitement of our digital utopia envisioned by magazines such as Mondo 2000 and the new Wired mag, I looked forward to our bright and glorious digital future.
But now, 25 years later, the digital age looks far more like Brazil/1984 than anything found in Disney's Tomorrowland. Privacy is practically dead, free speech is practically dead as one has to practice self-censorship to avoid wrathful social media mobs, hardware and software are rife with vulnerabilities, toxic mountains of obsolete hardware, ubiquitous surveillance thanks to better cameras and cheaper/greater storage capacity, identity theft via hacks of centralized financial and business databases, and a myriad of nuisances one could never have imagined (pop-up ads, spam, click bait, fake news, bots, phishing, etc.). It all makes me yearn for the days of 8- or 16-bit computing and BBSs. Things may have been slower and less convenient then, but it was also safer and saner.
Computers have evolved beyond I think anyones wildest expectations. We have seriously star trek level machines in the palms of our hands. And holy shit the internet.
Space travel has been a *major* disapointment. Hopefully this push to mars gets us back on track, but its like we hit the moon, got some space station action happening aaaaand then had 30-40 years of lost years.
Cars kind of feel boring, but if we're honest the modern car is miles ahead of anything we knew in the 1970s. No flying cars however. No hover cars. And the monorails are terrible.
We still haven't cured cancer yet!
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
The shear level of computation power and memory that we have access to is mind blowing.
The dystopian aspects regarding technology are also way higher than expected. People may see this as a negative but I see it as an opportunity for knowledgeable programmers and hackers. Yes, it is true that our collective commercial technology is "a massive flaming pile of trash that I really don't want to deal with" but nobody is forcing you to use it. Nobody is forcing you on social media, nobody is forcing you to have a "smart" phone/tv/house/etc and yet so many do. For those of us who recognize how awful these things are and have the discipline to avoid them, it's a great opportunity to have fun.
But OMFG, how is it that Cisco still makes routers that have shit security? I mean, you had one job and it's a serious train wreck. I honestly thought their stuff would be impenetrable by now. Also, I'm still baffled as to how everyone thought Systemd was a great idea. I think either Red Hat bought off a bunch of people or they are way dumber then I give them credit for.
TL;RD: the cyberpunk present does not disappoint in that everything is entirely hackable.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The Pluses:
My particular interest is Radio, and a good SDR (NetSDR+ with SDRConsole) is vastly more capable than the best radio (even military grade) of even thirty years ago.
Computers are much faster and cheaper than was expected, although our operating systems are stil very poor.
(Windows and Linux have been way out-paced by the developments in hardware).
The Internet has brought an astounding improvement in the access to information for most people.
Cars are much better (and cheaper) than we expected, and the coming EVs will result in an even greater step forward.
The Minuses:
It shocks me how badly our standard of living has deteriorated:
Economic Equality is utterly broken:
Employment conditions and rewards have greatly deteriorated.
The decline of Consumer Rights, Public Transport, Education, and Medical Insurance are an outrage.
And the cost (and quality) of housing is now shameful.
What I didn't expect from "Today's Tech", is that we'd have self-driving cars. My child is in pre-school right now. There's a good change they might be able to get there driver's license, but that there'll be hardly any need to use it.
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Can I have intelligent conversations with my computer: no (no HAL 9000)
Are there regular commercial flights to the moon, and a permanent base on Mars? no. I can't even fly in a supersonic passenger plane anymore.
Fusion reactors? No. Flying cars? No. Undersea cites: No. Humanoid robots helping me round the house: no.
We have fallen far short of what was predicted when I was young. Of course that may be because the predictions were crazy, not because we have in some way failed.
My feeling is that we failed at space. The other things turned out to be harder than we expected.
My biggest miss was replacement organs - especially teeth. In about 1958 I expected implanted replacement adult tooth buds, far better than drilling-and-filling, to be available by about 1978 (when I might start to want them myself).
Now it's a half century after the prediction. Fillings have drastically improved and I have a couple titanium implants. But serious work on replacement organs is just getting under way.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yes. Back when I was in college, I would have literally KILLED for the kind of computer, phone, and wireless 24/7/365 connectivity I now take for granted & have anxiety attacks without. And I say that as someone who HAD a 1200-baud modem in 1986, and spent the summer after 10th grade staying up all night using PC-Pursuit to connect to bulletin board systems around the world for free at a point in time when a long-distance call to a BBS a hundred miles away cost approximately $15-20/hour, and even fsck'ing QuantumLink cost around $2.50/hour.
The past 10-15 years have been kind of a disappointment in the PC realm, but even circa 2002 when I was playing with my shiny new PalmOS phone, I wouldn't have dared to fantasize about being able to use a service like Youtube as a free music streaming service (ignoring the videos) while driving across the Florida Everglades, let alone play 3D videogames and use it as a 2160x1440 display host for virtual reality software. On the other hand, if you'd told me in 2001 that circa 2010, the display market would be totally stagnated around 1920x1080 monitors and it would take literally YEARS to get back up above the kind of resolution available on a $4,000 2002-era Thinkpad (1920x1600), I would have thought you were kidding.
Ditto, for storage. If you'd told me in 1990 that someday, a MOUSE DRIVER would have approximately 200 megabytes worth of files... and that I wouldn't care, because my computer had a 2-terabyte hard drive, a 1-terabyte removable hard drive in the optical bay, and another 512gb that was like a persistent ramdisk performance-wise, I would have thought you were utterly and completely insane.
CPU-wise, I'd have to say yes and no. In 1988, a 1-GHz 2002 CPU would have seemed like science fiction. In 2002, a 4GHz CPU would have seemed like a sick joke, even when you account for cores, cache, and overall performance.
In terms of keyboards, computers have totally gone to shit. Even Thinkpad keyboards suck compared to the keyboards they USED to have 20 years ago, and suck even MORE compared to the literal low-profile clicky keyboards early-90s high-end laptops used to have. Modern mice are a billion times better than the mice we had in 1990, but I'd take a thumb trackball (with modern optical sensor instead of rollers) over a flat touchpad any day, unhesitatingly. I LIKED thumb trackballs like the one on the DEC HiNote Ultra, and didn't mind first-generation touchpads that emulated thumb trackballs. I absolutely DESPISE modern touchpads (which are designed for people who can't type, and who use them with their index fingers, as opposed to people who keep their hands over the keyboard and try using the touchpad with their thumb).
I miss resistive touchscreens. Capacitive touchscreens are handy for detecting blunt touches, but resistive touchscreens with real DSPs were a thousand times better for things like Graffiti. To this day, I have yet to use a non-rooted Android phone whose CPU governor isn't disabled that's capable of doing Graffiti as accurately as a 16MHz Palm Pilot III.
IMHO, the industry abandoned IrDA long before it had a good replacement... and waited WAY too long to replace 1.44mb floppies with just about anything that was better (Zip drives and LS-120 were too little, too late... but LS-120 would have totally rocked back in 1992, even if they'd only been 25-50mb/disk).
Space exploration? Meh... and yeah. Elementary-school me (late 70s, pre-shuttle) would have been thoroughly unimpressed by today's space program. The entire shuttle era just seemed lame and anticlimactic. My first sentient thoughts regarding space travel involved watching men walking on the moon... and thinking it was a totally normal daily occurrence (because for someone who was born after the first Apollo mission, but was old enough TO remember seeing the final ones live on TV, it WAS a totally normal daily occurrence)... and it seemed like everything NASA did after I finally got to kindergarten was just a step down.
On the other hand, the past
It is mostly boring and suffers from the same problems as back then, with some really serious ones in addition.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
ANTICIPATED: Handheld computers and wireless data.
EXPECTED: An almost 100% sure thing we'd get there.
UNEXPECTED: That same technology that was supposed to be our tool to free us and make us better is used by default to track us, monetize us, maintain and resell portofolios on us.
DISAPPOINTED: The success of the cell phone and tablet effectively kills other pieces of dedicated or unique hardware implementations (MP3 player, a physical chess set that you can play against another friend anywhere in the world, etc).
ALSO DISAPPOINTED: How freely the common person would cash in their privacy for free services.
HOPED FOR: That "everyone" would finally be online and that you could do real things (and significant things) online.
EXPECTED: More individuals connecting with even more individuals.
UNEXPECTED: Reaching the tipping point where you're expected to be online or you can't access some desired information. (My offline parents complain about this quite regularly.)
SKEPTICAL: My dad telling me (circa 1980) that computer graphics would be good enough one day to make cartoons just as good as I see on TV. Even further in the future, maybe even something that might look like real life!
UNEXPECTED: Just how far we've surpassed even that dream of believable computer graphics in standard definition and in real time.
PROMISED: Useful and interactive household robots.
DISAPPOINTED: Roomba and a few small toys.
PROMISED: Television will keep getting better and better.
EXPECTED: High quality and lower cost hardware.
DISAPPOINTED: Everyday "broadcast quality" video quality has improved, but not as much as I'd thought.
A cure for obesity that is easier than diet, excercise and surgery.
Linux on the desktop. Using Linux since 2001, but Gnome 3 and SystemD fucked it up big time.
Ubquitious net neutral uncapped uncensored internet anywhere in the world. All the major networks are going to fuck up 5G.
Firefox and other browsers getting rid of Internet Explorer. Yet it was replaced by Chrome which is worse as it is ran by an adverising and spying company.
A universal source of knowledge that would replace expensive universities and schools. Yet wikipedia is full of reverting pov pushers and lots of useful knowledge is deleted as “not noable”.
A DRM free universal streamng service. But copyright trolls won’t let us have nice things.
Back around 1979-1980, I was talking with my mother about the various minicomputers that were available; I was using a PR1ME at the college, and she had some kind of HP equipment (HP3500 ?) at work. Some of the early home computers running BASIC were available, but it was already obvious that these things were like toys compared with the multi-processing and multi-user big iron. Considering how much larger and complicated programs could be made in FORTRAN, compared with the line-number BASIC of the time, I speculated, that some day, we would have small home computers that could run the same kind of FORTRAN programs.
She said she thought that was unlikely.
As few years later PCs became powerful enough to actually be able to do this (PC/AT, with the 80286 running Xenix). And these days, there are the pocket-sized Raspberry Pi, Rock 64, and others, that are more powerful than all that large hardware from the 1970s.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Programming typical internal CRUD apps got harder, not easier. I don't know why, but it just takes more lines of code and typing to do the same stuff as the 90's.
There are tools and stack tunings that can perhaps approach it, but most* managers won't approve such; it's not "in style". Face it, people, style and fucked-up web "standards" are fucking CRUD productivity in the bum. It may make other tasks or domains better, but not CRUD. One bad size fits all?
I had Jetsons-like tools, but industrial insanity yanked them away from my cold productive hands. They were cold because I didn't have to type/click so damned much to get a decent app.
Git off my slow-growing lawn!
* Yes, a few shops allow it, but they are rare. So don't reply just to say how great your exception is. It's okay to say why they are great with details.
Table-ized A.I.
No. Hardware evolved at an insane pace, with every new generation exponentially faster and more capable. Software was exciting too. You could download some warez and open up a whole new realm of possibility. Data could be stored and converted into various common file formats and exchanged using open protocols.
Now if it's not mobile crapware it's infested with trackers and trojans, and software compatibility is so poor that the most common way of sharing something is to turn it into a noisy JPEG. Everything still superficially speaks the same protocol, but it's just used to wrap ad-hoc formats and ill-defined APIs that can change without notice. If you can even get at the raw data at all.
Instead of tricorders we got shitty selfie-tablets that can't last a day without a recharge. Instead of empowerment and distributed networking, we got nanny admins and centralization. Instead of a rich medium for computation, we got a kitchen sink of broken ideas, so convoluted it requires a monopolisti company to farm the collective attention of the world in order to pay for its upkeep.
Cyberpunk dystopia is here, and it wants you to like and subscribe.
Because we're living in it. No sign of the tech that was supposed to bring -- genetic engineering is still a fantasy and brain-computer interfaces are nowhere to be seen.
...in the fields of battery and medical technology. Yeah, modern smartphones can do some amazing stuff, but playing Pokemon Go still chews up your battery like nobody's business. Consumer UAS technology in DJI's drones is way more advanced than anything I could've imagined when I was a kid, but they're still hindered by incredibly short battery life. On the medical side, I'd have assumed we'd have a cure for HIV/AIDS by now, along with most other major diseases.
As for the negative repercussions of today's technology, I didn't anticipate the retail apocalypse. I kind of miss being able to go to RadioShack and poke around through the parts drawers. As others have already mentioned, there's also social media making it ever-so-easy for misinformation/superstition/idiocy to spread like a plague. Even Disney's Spaceship Earth designers didn't see that one coming. If they did, the ride would end with "Putting the power of the computer in everyone's hands in hindsight, wasn't such a great idea."
Honorable mention also goes to flying cars. I don't know why it never dawned on sci-fi writers how impractical flying cars would actually be, but they sure managed to convince quite a few of my generation that we would've had them by now. When I show people my DJI Spark, I just tell them "This is the flying car I was promised as a kid. I expected something a little larger."
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
I was in the VAB for the stacking of the Saturn V moon rocket and watched man set foot on the moon on TV.
I had no illusions of Star-Trek-y things like teleportation and warpdrives, but I certainly expected personal computing (which has pretty much happend as I expected except that I did not forsee social media or streaming video) and the increasing use of automation and compostites. I expected that by the 1990s we would certainly have a full-time presence on the moon along the lines of the "Space 1999" depiction (minus aliens and the moon being blasted out of orbit of course). There were ZERO technical hurdles to that, and indeed we could do it today - the key is LARGE amounts of energy and nuclear fission will do for that - with enough energy you can process raw material on the moon to make structural elements, process air and water, etc.
The thing that completely blind-sided me was the self-doubt that overtook much of American society in the 1970s and struck again (and stayed) in the 1990s which replaced a "can do" attitude with a "don't you dare offend me" attitude. I found it shocking that people turned against supersonic flight, killing the SST project and any follow-on, and that the nation abandoned the moon, abandoned the Skylab station, and came within a couple of votes of never building the shuttles (and simply abandoning manned spaceflight rather than doing something better). I was also suprised to see all the rejection of nuclear power even though it never killed anybody in the USA, unlike all other forms of power, and the rejection of plastics and petroleum (ignoring the millions of lives made better by them) and the waves of lawyers filing suits against so many tech companies, making the whole society much more wary of unleashing new stuff.
I also never expected American politicians to sell-out to the Chinese Communists, making trade with them "free" while over-regulating business in the US, thereby encouraging whole segments of American manufacturing to move to China - so that many vital technologies (from electronic components to pharmacuticals) are only available from outside the USA. This makes many consumer products superficially cheaper, but actually impacts everything from innovation to national security and makes it more likely that the tech Americans personally experience will be cheap consumer tech manufactured in China, rather than industrial-scale tech like tube trains, flying wing or blended wing airliners, large-scale nuclear plants etc.
Consumer gadget tech is great as a way to pacify a large number of inward-looking "consumers" (the new "opiod of the masses"? - I have yet to see any truly productive use of the junk), but I am simply not convinced it is good for a nation of free and independent citizens looking for a truly great future - that would require large numbers of young engineers and techs working on BIG projects rather than widgets and toys and web sites.
Are you a moron? From the wiki - The Apollo missions marked the first event where humans traveled through the Van Allen belts, which was one of several radiation hazards known by mission planners.[32] The astronauts had low exposure in the Van Allen belts due to the short period of time spent flying through them. Apollo flight trajectories bypassed the inner belts completely, passing through the thinner areas of the outer belts.[25][33]
Astronauts' overall exposure was actually dominated by solar particles once outside Earth's magnetic field. The total radiation received by the astronauts varied from mission to mission but was measured to be between 0.16 and 1.14 rads (1.6 and 11.4 mGy), much less than the standard of 5 rem (50 mSv) per year set by the United States Atomic Energy Commission for people who work with radioactivity.[32]
I certainly didn't envision in the early 80's that Microsoft would slow tech advancement to a crawl with DOS/Windows and their monopolistic tactics. Home computers were showing the promise of educating people then, not turning them into mindless drones. Thanks for nothing Billy Gates.
In some respects it has either stood still or gone backwards - the US and Russian space programmes being an example of both.
But in broad terms, the direction that the future was supposed to take was defined by the HAL9000, Androids (dreaming of electric sheep) and space travel. Just about the only person who foresaw an internet-type thing was John Brunner in The Shockwave Rider and he didn't focus on one hell of a lot of its consequences.
The only area where technology has surpassed expectations has been in electronics. Although that has been held back by the massive historical bloat and baggage that software has created. We are starting to make inroads into biological developments, though none of those are "household" products and some drugs of the future could be truly revolutionary. For the few people who will be able to afford them.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I came into computers before I could walk. My first memories were sitting on a piano, with the lid closed, with the commodore 64 keyboard sitting on it, connected to a monitor sitting atop the piano (it was originally hooked up to the living room TV, but I didn't get to play on it at that time.)
I got to visit a half dozen of the more than 30 computer stores in my area at the time (around 100 miles northeast of silicon valley.) It was an amazing time where there was something new and different to look at in every store. But it was also the time when computer stores started dying out. It took another 15ish years for them to fully consolidate, from small mom and pop shops peddling everything under the sun, with dozens to hundreds of different companies catering for your attention. Then it was a few dozen for each kind of product. And now it is mostly 2-3 for any component you can imagine. Only 2 major non-embedded platforms, only 3 major oses sold in stores, all corporate chains struggling to stay relevant...
And as if they wasn't bad enough, the gut punch is that a combination of tech traitors, bros, and collective human scum have managed to coopt all this tech, taking the dystopian sci fi novels of our childhood (or even parents/grandparents childhoods) and used them as a how to manual for systematic and global oppression, rather than using it to raise all of society up to a better level.
On the bright side I think a reckoning is coming. Maybe it will stop living in my mind and result in the mass purge needed to bring people to their senses once more. In the meanwhile the tech equivalent of breads and circuses seems to be enthralling the masses, even as they (in)voluntarily give up more and more rights, just like the Africans(soon to be Americans) and German-Jews did under their mistaken beliefs that (insert group) was either looking out for them, or only a passing fad without them rising up or emigrating quickly to avoid their inevitable enslavement.
Searching my mind I find I never hoped or imagined what would be for technology later in my life. Things just came when they came.
E Proelio Veritas.
I dreamt of a fun, reliable technology news site that would bring us interesting stories, reported accurately.
But the future gave us Slashdot - lame, inaccurate, unedited, with no desire to report the truth, and full of Nazi asci art and racist morons.
For some reason I always think the world is static even though I know it isn't.
So I am incapable of thinking that tech will be better in the future.
... to be a disaster because the average person is a fucking moron.
The internet finally revealed what many of us always knew - our species is a race of god damn morons. Many of us nerds never imagind the overwhelming level of stupid that people would give up their rights to own videogame software and enable invasive and orwellian drm and enable the theft of software by Valve and other software companies.
The average person getting internet has allowed companies to wage war on general computing at every level and now Microsoft is aiming to lock down the PC and turn it into an appliance.
So as a comptuer nerd from the 90's... The tech future turned into a tool for theft and larceny on behalf of corporations the like this world has never seen. That microtransactions, lootboxes, gacha in videogames are even things, speaks to the subhuman level of intelligence of our entire species.
It is complexity that you are reacting to, a complexity that is growing by leaps and bounds. I believe your discontent represents the growing disgust with the time and effort and loss of control that people are feeling in every area of their lives today. I believe there must eventually be a "complexity collapse," where people shed complexity and embrace simplicity. This may be a major part of the movement away from cable and to the internet: more control over the level of complexity in their lives. Think about what cable has become and the hoops that must be jumped through to deal with it. It isn't only about cost.
E Proelio Veritas.
I bet my sister $20 that we'd have visited Pluto by 2000. (manned landing). I expected we'd have fusion (although by the late 70's I'd figured out fusion was a con job). I expected we'd have general AI. I expected our average life spans would be closer to 90 or even 100 than 80. I expected cars to travel at speeds up to 200 mph and that mass transit would be common. I expected hypertext to be both ubiquitous AND useful. I expected that the US would have a national nuclear waste repository. I expected cloning to be much more common. Oh, what a foolish gullible youth I was.
Where the hell is my robot dog? Aibo sucked and newer offerings still don't measure up.
Anything space related is hugely disappointing. Most things involving society are disappointing. Software in general and Windows in particular tends to be disappointing. But I can make phone calls on my watch just like Dick Tracy. I can crank my car from my watch. I can adjust the thermostat in my house from another country. I can pay for things with my watch or phone. Voice recognition and chess programs are further along than I expected. So there are certain things that now appear mundane that my younger self would find cool.
In the 80s we had cool technology like high bias cassette tapes and 45s and IBM PC Jrs. Nothing today even comes close to how cool those were and still are.
No, it's greed and incompetence. Complexity can be solved.
I was born in 1968, so I saw the future through Star Trek and other science fiction that showed a world where technology was a gateway to a better world. It was a way to make life better and give people a purpose. Instead, every new "innovation" is about extracting more data, or slapping people with advertising, all in an effort to make some Silicon Valley douche a billionaire. I used to dream about the future. I thought the 21st century would be this amazing time where we had tech that improved our lives, reduced human greed, and opened up a world where we could pursue the betterment of ourselves and the lives of others. I couldn't wait to see what the future would bring. Now at 50 years old, I just want to buy a cabin in the mountain and get as far from this dystopian madness as I can and try to live a simple life while people destroy the planet in a bid to make assbags like Jeff Bezos as rich as he can possibly be. The 21st Century is a crushing disappointment.
I was looking back at some photos of New York City in the 30's - the Chrysler building. It struck me just how modern it still looks today. Photo's of gleaming cars in the show room lobby, the art deco style - it still inspires modernity. And lest we forget, the USA from the 20's saw an unprecedented rapidity of invention and innovation.
The future had already started, long before I was born and a ton of cool stuff was being produced and would be produced in the following decades.
I was born in the UK in 1968 and when I was a kid, it struck me just how advanced the USA was when compared to our very troubled country. There was the future, that was where all the cool stuff came from. But the UK was catching up and we got our first home brewed mass produced personal computer - the ZX80. The library up the road from me switched from paper cards to swipe cards in 1978. I had sci-fi comics and TV shows that promised an amazing future.
Sadly, the arms race seemed to be overtaking the space race and all thoughts of a cool technological future were put abruptly on hold, as we contemplated a 3rd world war.
But back then, I expected we'd see flying cars, jet packs, a moon base and androids. Maybe even world peace.
The reality is, incredible marvels of technology have been produced, but they have become mostly invisible and ubiquitous.
A great deal of it is just a series of continued improvements on existing technology.
The single most amazing thing that was somewhat predicted in science fiction, has been the internet.
In the grand scheme of things, 50 years is a very short time and most of the technology we have today, existed when I was born.
No, it sucks--but not from a lack of advancement. Rather, as a child I failed to foresee the extent to which technology would be used against the common people.
>> Private memory and slow interconnects based on message passing.
> To me, there's no clear indication that this is "the wrong model". That's basically a distributed actor architecture. We may still be forced to do just that one day.
We in fact do that today, private memory, slow interconnects, and pass messages. We just added more software than the old model amd re-arranged it some to work better. We call it virtualization and REST.
Remember an operating system is defined as the software layer that abstracts the hardware and manages multiple programs running on that hardware. Most of the OS, we now call the hypervisor - it abstracts the hardware and manages the multiple programs running. We added a bit of OS to each application and called it a VM.
By the year 2000, we were supposed to have flying cars which flew themselves. Cold fusion and warm superconductors would make electricity free and non-polluting. Much more would be automated in the home, like cooking meals. Commercial space travel would be commonplace, with hotel resorts on the moon. By 2000, we were told that fossil fuels would be depleted as supplies back around 1980 were running out. That might have been a good thing since we had no clue that global warming was coming.
Things are far less cool now than when I was young.
The progression of tech has been linear, except where it is unhealthy (wireless) or undesirable (surveillance).
Gates & Co. continue to cripple machines so that no matter how much memory they come with, they are performance dogs or just simply run out of memory (thx Chrome). Zero progress since Windows 3.x, and only modest progress since DOS -- basically when we found a way to get around the stupid high memory self-created problem.
Great operating systems get end-of-lifed. New operating systems are far worse than 20 year old ones.
The increasing ugliness of each new version of secure booting means the computer is less and less our own.
Smartphones have made less cool people.
Automated cars will mean we are less in control of when and where we travel.
Inflation -- thanks Obama for doubling the debt in 8 years -- means we are poorer today than at any time previously.
Auto-tune has ruined music.
GMOs and HFCS make food a minefield.
But at least we stopped feeding arsenic-laced feed to chickens. There is that.
Fluoridation continues to grow, increasing this unavoidable threat to young and old.
We cut out smokers from our buildings so that now we go outside our own homes in winter to smoke. Soon we will only be able to smoke when we have a finger up our butt. Then it will have to be a thumb.
The press today is 100% corrupt. Any period prior to this would be an improvement.
Religion? Allah Akbar comes with a drawn sword.
Smartphones costing $1000 that are pretty much identical to $100 ones, yet we all swarm to buy them?
Tech is far less cool, and humans are far more controlled and stupid.
Yay.
When I was a kid I never dreamed I would grow up to live in a cybernetic totalitarian dystopia. Yet here we are!
Ubiquitous panoptic surveillance, for-profit global censorship, rabid financialization, actual flying robots, actual killer robots (many of which fly), algorithms and "AI" constantly evaluating every aspect of our lives... The list goes on and on.
Sure sure, it's a boot stamping on a human face - forever But I guess maybe you could say the tech is cool.
I predicted it would be better than in the 1970s.
Current tech is abysmal, Windows becomes unstable merely downloading patches, Linux' legendary reliability is no more. Tech peaked in the mid to late 90s and has gone downhill since.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Doc Savage and his crew had individual radios that could "call" out to regular phones and were described in books written in '33-'34.
The Mote in God's Eye describes connected smartphones/tablets.
I'm sure there are even earlier references. The cell phone/personal communications we have today is something that "futurists" and writers have seen the need for/advantages of for a long time.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I've been using them since DOS 1.0. NT 3.51 was the best that I can remember in terms of stability but it was a snap to break into (it was do that or fight with our IT department to install software). But I've always had to deal with applications which can break the system/violate the core functions.
I'm reasonably happy with the current version of Ubuntu - although I guess if it were truly "stable" there would be no updates and no reason to.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I wanted a clear flat colorful non-interlaced display with as little space between pixels as possible, with individually lit pixels and as little delay as possible when outputting a frame. We now have 4k freesync OLED and microLED displays.
Powerful game consoles and PCs, cheap computing devices, very powerful portable devices, large HDDs and portable storage, SSDs, wireless internet, even things I didn't know I wanted but can't live without, like high tech washlets. VR is coming along and is quite cool.
Twinstiq, game news
Back in the 80â(TM)s, even 90â(TM)s and the early 2000â(TM)s....
I couldnâ(TM)t even begin to imagine being able to have a virtual globe and zoom in so far to see actual houses and gardens
It was only in the late 90â(TM)s that I envisioned using GPS to draw a giant, virtual penis on a local hill on a digital ordinance survey map. Nowadays you can watch someone draw one in real time anywhere on the planet!
Amazing
Considering that, when I was growing up, I expected to be living in a post-apocalyptic world of nuclear-bomb craters and anarchy (assuming I lived at all, which didn't seem likely), the future exceeds my expectations.
But even if we discount that particular horror, I think it's mostly better than I expected. Oh sure, there were the tales of flying cars and rocket-belts, but even as a kid I didn't expect most of that super high-tech stuff to come around in my liftime. Teleporters, talking robots and laser guns were things of the far-future, not something I would ever experience.
Mostly, I expected the world to continue more or less the way it had been, with incremental "under-the-hood" advancements; our cars would use less gas (or maybe use hydrogen), we'd swap out nuclear fission for proper fusion, and they'd make it so our record players would never skip and scratch. We might have self-driving cars (but only on highways where they laid down special control tracks) but I'd still be driving to work every day. Constructing a building would still take a lot of brute, manual labor. Food would still come from the supermarket, and oranges would be a special treat that were only really affordable at certain times of the year. But I was fairly certain that my adult life would be pretty recognizable to myself as a child.
And, largely, that has held true, but that's not to say there haven't been welcome changes. I would never have imagined the immense advancements in computing technology: a computer in my pocket that not only lets me talk to people anytime, anywhere, but gives me access to a huge worldwide database of information? 60" television screens so flat that against the walls they almost look like posters? Computers I can talk (and sometimes talk back) and they understand me? The ability to have almost any item shipped to me from anywhere around the world and have it in my hands the next day? All the music and movies and books I could ever want at my fingertips? Fresh blackberries in February? Things like this didn't exceed my expectations; they weren't even on the radar!
Sure, there are some areas we've fallen short, but we're coming close and none of these hopes -like switching to fusion - were really anything that would affect me directly. If there is one major disappointment, it's that we've almost gone backwards in our space exploration; after NASA's heydays in the 60s and 70s, we all expected things to continue apace; 2001 (the movie) didn't seem so far-fetched (well, except for the talking computer, but that was just fun sci-fi). Giant space stations, bases on the moon, manned flights to Mars, Venus and Jupiter; surely all these things would be accomplished by 2020. After all, we got to the moon in 20 years, right? That space would become a nearly forgotten side-show was as inconceivable to me as my owning a handheld computer.
Then again, I can still look up and marvel at a giant airplane that seems to hang by magic in the sky, or take a moment to appreciate that I can make light appear in my house simply by flipping a switch. I already live in a future unimaginable to my ancient forebears, with more power and knowledge at my fingertips than had even their gods. So what if I do not have a robot companion or the ability to visit Alpha Centauri; I'm still living in a high-tech wonderland and it amazes me every day.
(That said, ask me if the political and social advancements of the world today have matched my expectations; you'll get quite a different answer. Our tech is awesome, but I expected better from us as a people).
Larry Niven created teleport booths - and foresaw the implications. Flash mobs - instant crime -
I already thought it was cool when I got a Hercules graphics card for my PC, which could show 80! lines of text, can you imagine?
Also my first HP500 Color printer for 1500$ was cool as hell, much better than the near letter quality needler I had before.
My first Postscript Laser Printer for only 12000$ was beyond bliss.
Now people have a computer on their wrist, that checks their heartbeats, a small phone that plays music, games and videos and talks to satellites to see where it is exactly on the planet, people talk to their Bluetooth speaker and they even answer, some of them even will bring you beer if you ask them, albeit only the next day.
Rockets come back to the place they landed 7 minutes later after they put dozens of satellites in space and electric cars can be bought that are way faster and cooler than Ferraris or Lamborghinis for a fraction of the price.
And the young whippersnappers just think: Meh.
And now get off my lawn.
it's only my coworker's insistence on dropping crap on my desk that keeps my office from being paperless. For me I hate the stuff. I can't search it. I hate holding pens and pencils and it's a huge waste of money.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
When I was in my mid teens (say around 1980) I would daydream about one day being able to afford a subscription to an electronically searchable Encyclopaedia Britannica, and maybe the electronic versions of some scientific journals too. Of course I would also need to buy a desktop computer with the graphics to display useful pictures, which would be expensive, and there would be a second phone line and a modem too. When I was at Uni a few years later there were all sorts of competing LAN standards. The idea that you could walk into a building, plug in your luggable computer and start work was a pipe dream. The idea that you might not even have to plug it in... I also did some back-of-the-envelope maths which suggested that you ought to be able to provide enough bandwidth for low grade video via a cellular network if you could afford a cell station at roughly street level in busy places and every few streets in residential areas. But that was obviously never going to be a feasible business proposition.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
I was certain by the 1980's that computers were going to be a really big deal for everyone, despite only a tiny fraction of people in my neighborhood owning one. But I never could have predicted that people would use computers in such stupid ways as they do today.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Oooh loo koo koo!
The first meaningful use of computers was by the Nazis to catalogue Europe's people for slaughter. Computers have ALWAYS been machines of slavery and death. Pull your head out of your own ass.
But NOT Bush & Bush Sr. for creating this future NSA/CIA hellscape where dirty Arabs kill reporters with impunity? GO FUCK YOURSELF you political troll.
Shouldnt you be off helping kill some rhinos to grow tiny chink cocks Bill?? Those tiny chink cocks arent going to magically grow themselved without some powdered Rhino Horn Bill! Jesus Christ Bill! Get your head in the fucking game.. youve got hundreds of old chink cicks to suck off already!!!
Sorry your Grandparents were too busy being entitled to give you a livable planet. Get over it.
I was born in the late 1950s and medical tech today makes that era look stone age by comparison.
How different was it? Poet William Carlos Williams was our family doctor. He made house calls carrying the classic leather doctors bag (fascinating to child me). There were still many surviving but severely deformed polio victims. Anti-vaxxers weren't a thing. Cancer was a death sentence.
Fuck the past. It's overrated due to nostalgia. The present is underrated because people are jaded and ignorant.
> a major part of the movement away from cable and to the internet
I think that's more economic.
If you get full cable + internet + premium movie channels, it's over $200. That's fucking expensive.
I was writing up a somewhat lengthy screed about how disappointing the world of tech has become, but midway through I decided to shorten it up a bit.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s and I had big hopes for technology making life easier, like many people here. I've been bitterly disappointed.
The Internet's primary purpose is to distribute games and pornography to a growing population of people who are physical adults but psychologically perpetual adolescents. I am truly concerned for the state of society in my old age.
A large segment of people are borderline functionally illiterate. Any request for them to improve their writing to be more clear results in a belligerent reaction because they've been shamed, which makes me the bad guy.
Social media is the electronic amplification of the mob. They can turn on you in a second and ruin your life. I've been the (small scale) victim of the mob before (I dared to have a contrary opinion) and it's harrowing. I never want to live through that again, and I've withdrawn form all social media because of it.
Too much stuff is unusable because of bad development and design. There's no real help to be had, and there's no way to ever influence change to fix it. Much of the time there's no real alternative, because those alternatives are also badly broken, just in a different way.
Being spied on constantly has dealt a devastating blow to free speech (see social media mobs above) and has created a certain level of paranoia in my personal actions that takes a mental toll over time. There are now things I hesitate to do or won't do because I know someone is watching. Instead of bringing freedom, as many of us thought, tech has borough great pressure to conform.
Too much stuff just plain doesn't work. It's fatally broken, Period. My parents and grandparents never had this kind of trouble with their phone, TV, car, lights, coffee maker, potato peeler, anything. Capability has improved, but reliability has gotten indescribably worse.
I'm over it. I'm starting to actively hate it.
Tech is more cumbersome and tedious to use that in previous years. Mainly because things seem to always get either overly complicated or over simplified. Hiding options below layers of menus and config screens gets annoying, more so when things don't even look like a button but are actually a menu.
Take the clock radio - yes they still make them - but they only have a handful of buttons now, and only about 3 of which are used to set every setting the thing has. Press and hold for this, but tap for that. Every button changes based on the current state.
Hell, just to use headphones on some things now you need and adapter dongle...
The other problem is reliability. By that I don't mean things that physically break, modern tech has so many bugs and little issues that seem to get in the way just enough to annoy the fuck out of you. No product is polished anymore, it ships when it sort of works. Then the updates can make other problems and even take away features.
Modern tech is also rented, if a manufacturer decides to discontinue a product - well it might not even work anymore because it required a server/cloud bullshit just to work.
I actually don't know if what I imagined has ever come to pass - if it has, well I am sure it isn't easy peasy to use like I imagined.
I'm an Air Force brat. In 1969.I watched with my family as Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon. That was an OMG moment, which set unfulfilled expectations for years to come. Instead of OMG moments, we've had a steady advance in tech, better every year, but never with an OMG moment like that.
So, I'm disappointed that I cannot vacation on Mars. At the same time, the steady tech revolution has changed the world far more than most of us would have thought possible.
In 1982, I took a philosophy class at UC Berkeley. For my final project, I predicted when the AI singularity would occur. My hypothesis was that we sim[y lacked the compute power, and when we had enough such that for $1M in 1982 dollars, any mainstream university could afford a neural network with the same capacity as a human brain, then some a-hole would come along and program it to actually be intelligent.
I predicted, based on Moore's Law, 2025....
My dad was a teenager in the 50s and somewhat of a hoarder. I had read enough back issues of Popular Mechanics and whatnot to know that the future was not going to be as amazing as the optimists predicted. I never got caught in the trap of thinking we would ever vacation on Mars or even the moon (though my parents were much much older when they had me and I missed Armstrong by a long shot). By the time I studied AI at university, I realized that most software people were far too optimistic about AI as well. I don't believe that the issue is a lack of computing power but really a lack of knowledge, understanding of true intelligence, and perhaps a little bit of a lack of imagination. AI has solved some difficult problems, such as object recognition and things of that nature, but is still quite short on intelligence.
Bush created the deep state. Obama weaponized it.
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
... at the technological progress.
I wasn't impressed by the science fiction possibilities because the practicalities were boring to me at a young age.
I bought my first computer in 1978 (TRS-80) and THEN I started predicting and wishing and hoping. I particularly saw the Internet as a way to bring the world closer as plebes ignored asshole leaders and started communicating directly.
I was naive. I didn't know about marketing and the power of the crowds.
I should have picked up on that. It was the business model for radio, movies, and TV: Where there's a lot of people, flash advertisements in their faces.
That happened with the Internet, but a totally unpredictable thing happened: Data was the new gold.
That's the reason we can't have nice things.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
When I was kid (born in 86) computers were the "wave of the future".
Now every device is tracking/spying/advertising us and everyone is depressed. It's the exact opposite direction I expected things to go.
We don't seem to have any besides the romba
In most science-fiction books and movies there is a sentient computer.
The Matrix ...
The Six Million Dollar Man
Neuromancer
Westworld
2001 A Space Odyssey
Logan's Run
Knight Rider
The Terminator
Battlestar Galactica (both the kid-friendly original with Lorne Greene, and the re-do)
Yet here we are, 2019, and no sentient, or even near-sentient computers (yet?).
So, less cool.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
I was a teenager in the 80's and the first computer I ever owned was one I built myself literally on perfboard and wrote my own code for.
Since then we've got computers you can't 'build' that way, you can only buy pre-made PCBs and install them on a pre-made motherboard, and while there's Linux (which means you can theoretically write your own OS) and you can write your own software, too, for 99.9% of everyone there's no point anymore.
We've also since then got the Internet, which started out as a great thing with incredible potential.
But since then all the above has been subverted by corporations, governments, and criminal organizations, into spying, controlling, and evil things. None of it is really any 'fun' anymore, it's all about either money, control, or both.
If I thought I could make a decent living at it, I'd walk away from all of it and go be a forest ranger or something, and just ride my bikes and forget all about all of it.
Simple answer is tech has gone backwards on average in my opinion. The pieces are there for better gadgets but something always cripples the gadget that ends up on the store shelf.
disclosure: my predictions are not that old, can only go back to the 70s and all the predictions actually come from the 90s
With the 386, internet (not just the web at that point) , memory, OS's, electronics (PDA's, displays, etc) I thought we had the base features there and now the cool things could be built:
CPU in everything once cost came down from mass production and refinement, small always available computers with network, electronic files instead of paper, communication in multiple forms all the time.
We have crippled forms of all of this, but every time we get close to it being common, standard and "faded into the background" something happens that stops progress and it has to be restarted.
I was hoping desktop computers would "fade into the desk" , laptops and such are ALMOST there but not quite. Social networking using tech is ALMOST faded into common usage but not quite as FB and other silos fight over users and screw up personal data.
So my answer is "No, things missed what I predicted" mainly as a frustration that they ALMOST get there time and again then fall down.
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
Interesting. For me as soon as I read Ringworld and then got my first hand-me-down VIC-20 computer with a modem, I was thinking, someday, there will be a HUGE fucking database of all human knowledge, and we will have personal radio computer terminals (maybe like goggles? Or e-books?) to let us access and add to that knowledge whenever any world citizen is curious about something.
So, that basically came 90% true with Wikipedia, the real original user generated content and still, not too evil. I am totally stoked everyone has a mobile phone, that is the first step in collective brain enhancement.
I thought that by now we would have confirmed contact with alien intelligence, or time travelers.
Born in 1970, I never thought space travel would be a huge thing. So expensive, so much delta-V to get anywhere, and our short human lifespans to make any interesting journeys. You could tell the Apollo stuff was just a cover for the Cold War and the Space Shuttle was a loss leader, mostly useful for getting secret spy satellites into orbit. So, sort of met expectations there.
20 years ago I was super excited about DNA understanding, and I thought we would be sequencing custom animals to do household or commerce tasks. Nope, that really never took off as I expected.
What were my biggest losses though? When I first saw "the web" I thought it was shit. I didn't think a non-hierarchical display of information would ever scale. And I thought the colors and sounds were total bullshit. Honestly, I thought Usenet and Gopher were going to be the communication media of the future. I guess I am an idiot.
Back in my Apple II days I would daydream about a computer with more RAM and a faster microprocessor. I remember reading about the 68000 microprocessor. I remember thinking how cool it would be to have a computer with a 12MHz 68000 and 250K of RAM and something like 640X480 resolution (and 16 colors). My wildest imaginings couldn't see a computer capable of rendering in real time the what our modern machines do. Reality has WAY out stripped my imagination.
wheres my damn moonbase???!
I was born in the late 50's. As a kid in the 60's, there were visions of living on the moon, flying cars, robots running all over the place. About the only thing close is the "video phone" (smartphones).
... and for some years, amazing progress was made, just remember the Motorola v3688 or the tiny Nokia phones. Then something weird happened, and suddenly phone become bigger and heavier, battery life shorter and charging went from a 3-second battery swap into a many-hours-long procedure. The phones of today are really quite the opposite of what I would have expected the future to promise.
In my case it was circa 1953, in a country that had been flattened to rubble by the Germans and then ruled by iron-rice-bowl socialists. Compared to that, 2019 in Arizona feels strongly like living in the future of my dreams.
Because technology development is driven primarily by corporate, military and profit motivation the direction of development is limited.
Go well
Arround 1970 a home had electric light, centralised heating, refrigerator, clock, alarm clock, wrist watch, vacuum cleaner, washing machine, dish washing machine, stove, person scale, kitchen scale, toaster, telephone, tv, radio, phonograph, cassette recorder, photo camera, typewriter. electric drill, automobile. Since then the microwave oven has been added to the inventory, the VCR has been added and replaced by the DVD player. And we have the electric coffee maker and mixer and toothbrush. We no longer have an elecric coffee grinder. In 2030, most homes will no longer have an automobile.
Most people's visions of the future are what Hollywood comes up with yet I'm surprised that more Hollywood designers aren't employed by the gadget companies. The same goes for cars. Detroit (for want of a better word) always comes out with these concept cars that everyone goes nuts over but they never get produced and we're stuck buying the same boring crap year after year.
Yeah... I'm still waiting for the flying cars, cold fusion reactors, and Mars vacations that were promised to us back in 1980's Sci-Fi.
We did get the cool pocket computers and personal AI assistants, though.
I guess that we did get the killer robots, except that they fly instead of walk on land and they still need a pilot to operate. Still no cool mass produced handheld laser weapons, though.
Back in 00s I was disappointed since the home computer era was gone.
However I didn't really had a vision about the stuff we have now as for number of cores, SSDs and refresh rates.
On a shorter time scale HDD prising is a disappointment. Number of cores was another one. And the low resolution and picture quality of early TFT monitors yet another one.
The tech is way buggier and more irritating than I could have possibly imagined
They promised me I would be flying to work with my personal jetpack. I want my jetpack.
...when I realized you didn't know how to spell "aisle."
"Complexity can be solved."
I think you mean: complexity can be managed.
Futurologist Osmo A. Wiio said that people overestimate exponential growth in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term. For example, around the turn of the millennium I got interested in wearable computing and started reading about small single-board computers that might be applied to the idea with some hacking. A few years went by, and suddenly these consumer-friendly pocket computers were everywhere, in the form of "internet tablets" and early smartphones. We expect steady, linear progress based on what we know about today's tech, but in reality there's a mix of exponential growth (better tech helps you develop better tech) and sudden leaps (more marketing fads than genuine discoveries).
There's also a social dimension about smaller computers that helps explain the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets. If you had a computer at home in the 1980s, you usually had a dedicated computer desk at some remote corner of the house. It was a work/hobby thing, completely detached from social life and entertainment. Laptops changed things as you might bring one to a dinner table (obviously not during actual dinner, you insensitive clod) and converse with other people. It may have been rude, but at least you could have some face-to-face contact without a huge CRT at your eye level. So in this human contact sense, tablets and smartphones were the killer app, because they could be completely unobtrusive in a social setting. You could have your computer with you and still be present with your family, instead of being hunched in the corner in the glow of a CRT.
So the cool and social kids flocked to smartphones because you could have all these cool things without geeking out in the basement. But we all know it was downhill from then on. Because computers are so wonderful.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I was taught by my late father it's either "Science Fiction" or "SF" - nothing else.
SciFi, SyFy and now SiFi?
Computers were used to defeat the Nazis and those were based on machines built at US universities decades earlier.
Well I worked hard for my entire life towards a future like that. Maybe if children like you had pulled their weight instead of relying upon mommy and daddy, things might be different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I think we made a lot of progress in the sciences last year.. Just check out this video I came across that summed up 2018's most noticeable, and possibly world changing, scientific advancements and discoveries fairly well. https://youtu.be/xfQ2si7ksTY
Back in the eighties I was a teenager. Ain't nobody got time for predictions when busy flying model airplanes and collecting women's underwear catalogues.
I have thought a lot about Multitouch touchscreens and tablet computers, ever since the early eighties and I have to say we are basically there. Which is amazing, as what we have today for dirt cheap would be magic back in the eighties.
However, the problem of powerful Tools in untrained hands still remains. People by and large don't know yet how to deal with technology. That's why we have the problems in social networks and still have people using word to send images.
Other than that I personally am pretty happy with the technical state of things. Really can't compatible. A repairable smartphone with replaceable battery would be nice though.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
we live in an awesome time in tech, compared to what was possible in the 70's.
the problem is the constant abuse of the technology by companies.
and that spoils the fun for all of us.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I see people printing their emails to read them *facepalm*
still waiting on the flying car, and the 3 hour work week, as promised by the jetsons so, no, not as cool.
I had a recent Cholecystectomy. It was out-patient. Only took about 2 hours by the time I got to the hospital, the procedure itself was less than 15 minutes. I was up and walking by the time I got home. I had a water proof breathable bandaid that I can purchase was Walmart, allowing me to shower and I didn't have to remove it for a week. No stitches. Scars look like feint age spots. The doctor even said I would eat anything that I wanted immediately after surgery.
My computer boots in about 10 seconds, that's cool. Several of my games support streaming downloads, allowing me to start playing as soon as the first 200MiB download, which is only a few seconds. I have a 1ms ping to most CDNs, 6ms to most servers, and even when my connection is fully saturated, I still have less than a 10ms ping to the general internet.
I no longer have to defrag my harddrive. I can download an ISO, burn it to a $10 64GiB flash drive, and reboot within less than a minute if I know exactly what I need to do. Not having to go into my bios and flipping dip-switches on daughterboards and peripherals is awesome. USB, just plug it in. The quality of search engines brings almost all knowledge instantly. Programming frameworks and libraries are superb comparatively.
The overall quality of life dealing with technology is leaps and bounds better.
Yes, because of Moore's Law - my SmartPhone is more powerful than the mainframe the college used when I was an undergraduate.
No - space exploration has not advanced nearly as fast as I had expected. Fusion power is still ten years off (and has been for the last thirty years). And oh yeah - no flying cars.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Seriously, we are all steeped in ennui and entitlement. Computer in your pocket? Meh. Permanent, almost without-exception connectivity? Boring! Interfaces so easy to use that no one even bothers with "training" anymore? Sad!
Where are my jetpacks? Where is my rocket car?
We take so much good stuff for granted and we are always focused on what we don't have. OK, there's stuff we don't have. So what? There will always be stuff we don't have.
At some level, focusing on what we haven't accomplished keeps us questing, moving forward and making progress. However if you cannot recognize and appreciate what we really have accomplished, you wind up missing out on gratitude.
Remember when you couldn't just assume that any given computer had a color monitor? I do. Remember when you couldn't just assume that any given computer had graphics or sound abilities? I do. Remember when you had to worry about files that were too big? When was the last time you worried about that?
Remember when you got the Internet, and suddenly you could ask any question, and get some reasonable answer? Wasn't that the coolest thing ever?
Taking into account inflation $200 is cheap for what your getting. We've just become spoiled.
$200 is $23 in 1960 dollars. In 1970 dollars its $31. In 1980 dollars its $65.
Average wage in 1960 was $4007 so $23 was 6% per month. In 1970 average wage was $6000. Price is the same 6%. By 1980 it had gone down to 4%. For 2018 the average wage was $44,564. Price is 5% of that.
So it looks like to me that price has kept pace with inflation. But lets look deeper. In everywhere but the biggest markets most people were lucky to have 2 or 3 television stations and maybe a dozen radio stations in 1960. By 1970 some areas, typically those outside major venues, started getting cable, which carried mostly OTA channels from other areas. It wasn't until 1972 that HBO was founded to play movies on cable. In the 1980's local live channels started. Still no internet though.
Now for $200 we get hundreds of channels (which I keep hearing no one wants to watch.) For that price I get effectively unlimited data too, which I use way more than cable TV.
Yeah it would be great if I only had to pay $50, but I can't honestly say it's a ripoff. The price is equitable if inflation adjusted.
I'm a child of the 60's and 70's...
I think my view is best established by quoting something I wrote a couple of years ago to accompany a post I made to FB about a video from the ISS:
"I was a sci-fi nut and nerd extraordinaire back in the 70's... But if you'd told me that one day I'd be able to share super high resolution footage from a freakin' space station with friends across the globe using what amounts to a supercomputer that I carry in my pocket... I'd have thought you crazy. But here it is, just an average Tuesday and my supercomputer needs charging once I'm done posting."
So, yeah, way cooler. Most of the people who think it isn't, the basic problem is they made shit up and are now holding reality at fault for not living up to what they pulled from their asses in the first place.
Getting on the internet in 1994 when you had to install your own TCP stack on windows was complexity. Playing games on the previous generation of computers from the OP involved clearing enough memory in DOS, f'ing with config files to get the sound card running, etc etc etc. Some things have way less complex for users - even the "users' that built discord probably had less complexity and thus chose a substandard memory hog of a platform to build it on.