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?
But regarding computers, the books I had back then were predicting that my computer in the year 2000 would be a 100 MHz GaAs machine running Occam, so that turned out to be quite a bit better.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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
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,
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.
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
In the late-1990s when I joined Slashdot, I would never have imagined that in 2019 we wouldn't have Unicode / UTF-8 support. I didn't discover UTF-8 until 2002, but still...
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
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.
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.
Agree. Audio/hifi equipment is of poor quality. TV's got bigger but the content did not improve (ok, we have on demand). Most household devices have a limited lifespan, and the ones that seem to last are made before 1980.
The smartphone was a predictable invention, although i had imagined it with a keyboard - and still wish they had. Computers did got faster but software got worse, resulting more often than not in a slower computer and a more annoying experience - an MS-DOS PC was very predictable, modern windows PC not so.
So, while there are improvements i don't have the feeling of 'living in the future'. The quality of many items just sucks. Partly because of low cost, partly because of an economic strategy - the 'fail by design'.
As far computer games go - it seems that people in the 90's had just as much or maybe even more fun on their nintendo consoles or MS-DOS pc's than nowadays, with spammers scammers and cheaters ruling the online platforms, and games showing off fancy graphics but do not necessarily have good game play, exceptions there. Then there seems a huge market for 'pay to play' which more resembles gambling than gaming.
Education has got worse, not better, according to many. Modern tools not help and personally i think an 'iPod' school is an horrible idea. For sure people's attention span got worse, millennials seem to think it's normal to be interrupted by an electronic device every other minute.
But the biggest issue i see in how politics are failing. I'd imagined a relative peaceful world, with smart engineered technological advances. Meanwhile we keep burning coal to waste CO2, just to mine bitcoins. Because our financial system became both big brother, unreliable and expensive. Govs like to play big brother in general. The average person is not trusted and often screwed over by the system, that itself often cannot be trusted. There is political instability even in the modern countries like France and the UK. There seem to be so much struggle that any long-time strategy is forgotten as politicians only think about their next term, not about our next generation.
So yes, in overall, it doesn't feel the world improved a lot. Yes, there is promising technology. Yes, we can go into space and build fast computers. But the average person still works 40 hours a week for a shitty salary and a lot of stress and the average lifespan did not increase over the last 2 decades. And our food got worse. And the internet is a great invention.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
Strange to think a CD is antiquated now.
And yet you can still buy them. I buy all of my music on CD (including new releases) because what is truly antiquated is the concept of privacy. I don't have to worry about being tracked when I pop my CD into my circa 1990s CD player. Oh, and both cassette and vinyl sales saw double-digit growth last year. You were saying about antiquated?
Yet with the car industry we're still driving the same shitty combustion engined machines we did as a kid.
Those "shitty" combustion engines have 10x the safety, 2-5x better gas mileage (hybrids), and last 200,000 miles or more if you take care of them. And you can still buy an inexpensive new car for around the same price I paid for one almost 15 years ago. Slightly used cars remain a good deal no matter what decade.
As far as EV evolution, there are many models of electric vehicles, which are also some of the fastest in the world and can travel hundreds of miles on a single charge with battery packs that can last a decade. A charging infrastructure is now nationwide across the US. WE have a CHOICE to drive a "shitty" combustion engine now.
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.
No, war happened (and continues today). Then the cold war happened, which saw most of our space exploration funds go no further than our own orbit as we spent trillions to spy on the planet.
It's more insidious than a deep state. They actually do this stuff right out in the open, but then they compromise education (mostly by not funding it, but also through other means) to produce low-information voters who will support them anyway. Talk about a race to the bottom.
Things are turning out exactly how I thought they would as a teenager. Lots of cool new tech, used to subjugate the people.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Rotating space station almost happened, unfortunately it ended up rusting at a parking lot in Japan. NASA was paying for it, but ran out of money and couldn't schedule Shuttle flights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...