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
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 have to disagree. Many of us swim in more bandwidth than we ever expected to be as cheaply available. Especially those of us who thought 3kbps V.42bis brought us was the cats meow!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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
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
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.
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!!
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
Man! I just realized that I have been on Slashdot longer than several of my team members have been alive!
Fuck :O 20 years!
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
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.
I didn't see that people would actually be getting killed by swatting, that doxing would be a thing, that people would make an avocation out of hounding others to suicide ... and yet others would get un-self-consciously self-righteous about virtue signalling and the terrible problem of the scary SJW.
[I mean, seriously, you're virtue signalling by complaining about virtue signalling? No shit?]
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.
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.
In this article, every single person born in the 1970s or before says YES!! Esp the guy who loves his TV!
Every single person born from 1980 onwards except maybe one person says NO WAY!, including me.
I was part of the internet revolution of the late-90s early-2000s. Things went to shit circa 2006 and never recovered. Just gotten worse and worse and worse.
I had hope with The Snowden Revelations of 2012, but nothing happened so now I'm just exceptionally apathetic.
I'm really starting to believe that Gates, Zuckerberg, et. al. maybe are just figureheads for enslavement tech released by the deep state. Have YOU ever tried to innovate and seen how fucking hard it is to get your product seen?!
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
I’m in my fifties, and I think the most useful tech from a practical point of view is live, GPS-enabled maps. I used to drive around with a Thomas Guide on the passenger seat... but no more.
Not very sexy, I must admit.
#DeleteChrome
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.
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.
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/...