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

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.

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 ;-) .

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: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.