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?

Comments

Re:Not really

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.

Nudie Button

[eric31415927]

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.

Re:Not really

[fred911]

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!

I'm still waiting

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Re:I'm still waiting

[AHuxley]

The paperless office the world enjoys now is getting accessed by criminals, police and governments via open networks and junk crypto.
At least secure paperwork makes them have to physically enter a building.

Payroll...

[The Original CDR]

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.

No, it fucking sucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:No, it fucking sucks.

[TeknoHog]

Back in the 90s, all the cool kids used to laugh at us nerds for having a (social) life around computers and electronic gadgets. Fast forward about 15 years, and those cool kids start flocking to Facebook and getting addicted to "smart"phones. Eventually, it doesn't help if you stay away from FB yourself, the web is ruined for everyone.

On the actual tech side, the industry has become a kind of push-pull feedback system. Traditionally, tech was developed in a forward sense to become more capable, but due to DRM, a lot of effort is spent on pushing back on those capabilities. You're paying more to get less, because of all the anti-tech tech that has to be developed. For example, DRM in game consoles means you cannot program the hardware you own, with the PS3 as probably the saddest example. And as a consumer, you've paid for somebody to develop that DRM.

One symptom of both of the above issues is the appification of the web. I'm guessing things like Instagram want to keep users on the app rather than the web interface, in order to have more control on ads and tracking. I'm part of the problem as I use Instagram to promote my work, but the practical experience is kind of clunky: after using a real computer to make a video, you have to use a toy machine that runs the IG app to post it (I use Android-x86 on an old netbook).

To me, a central part of the dream/prediction was that computers become universal tools. For example, in 2000 I remember arguing that instead of the digital TV network, we should instead build better Internet infrastructure, because that would also work for TV programming, plus a lot more. Well, we spent a ton on the digital TV tech and people had to buy new receivers. Of course, about a decade later they had a new cycle of upgrade to watch things like Netflix. Meanwhile, I'd been using computers to watch movies and TV series since 2001, but I guess I was spoiled by fast campus Internet, and didn't realize how long it would take to get similar speeds to the masses.

Well, that was kind of a detour -- the TV did get integrated with the computer eventually. But the general appification/smartphone trend is what's breaking the ideal now. You can't use a single general-purpose computer to do everything online, because some things are only published as smartphone apps (and running Android-x86 on a VM doesn't quite cut it). I guess people really want different appliances for different things, such as "smart" TVs for watching Netflix.

Still, I'm mostly happy with how the tech has progressed. I can mostly stay away from the social media rat race and focus on doing my own thing on faster and better hardware. At the same time I'm a bit wary of how things are going. I try to hold on to good hardware as I'm not sure if general purpose computers will be available forever.

Mostly everything sucks.

[Narcocide]

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.

Re:Mostly everything sucks.

[xonen]

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.

Mixed bag

[ka9dgx]

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,

Social networks

[peppepz]

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.

Re:Social networks

[zidium]

What happened was that sometime in the mid-to-late 2000s, young women started using social media in droves.

This has killed not only the Internet but plummeted birth rates and is destroying / has destroyed an entire generation or two or three of women.

We geeks should have never allowed this to happen! If the Internet were still our geek bastion, then the entire world would be much better off!

Re: Social networks

[peppepz]

Another sign of the times is that back in the old days, it would have been obvious to me that your reply was sarcastic. Nowadays I can't be so sure ;-) .

Cooler than I expected, but not the same at all...

[WaywardGeek]

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....

Re: Not really

[zidium]

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...

Technology yes, how it's used no

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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...

Re: Not really

[zidium]

Man! I just realized that I have been on Slashdot longer than several of my team members have been alive!

Fuck :O 20 years!

Re:Not really

[Stoutlimb]

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.

Re:I just turned 50. Hell yes.

[zidium]

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?!

Re:I just turned 50. Hell yes.

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Re:phones

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:I just turned 50. Hell yes.

[drinkypoo]

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.

sort of

[astrofurter]

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.