Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
>I expected full duplex gigabit for $50/month by now.
You can get this in lots of other countries (Japan, Korea, Eastern European former Soviet Republics..etc)
The issue with that is not technical, but corruption..
Speak for yourself about same roads and houses. The standard of living in Western countries where I live has consistently gone downhill since the 1980s. Personally I can't even imagine owning the kind of houses my parents could afford back then. That kind of good living is out of reach for me.
Nobody predicted the modern smart phone.
Mark Weiser predicted the smart phone (and the tablet) in 1988, and also predicted much of the technology that would make them work. He coined the term Ubiquitous computing.
He was a visionary (and a coding wizard). Unfortunately he died in 1999, so never got to see his complete vision fulfilled. RIP Mark.