Ask Slashdot: Is Today's Technology As Cool As You'd Predicted When You Were Young? 352
"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?
Nudie Button (Score:5, Funny)
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: (Score:2)
/sarcasm Because there isn't enough (celebrity) porn on the internet already? :-)
I guess you could always watch the news naked [nakednews.com] =P
Re: (Score:2)
But that's only because the definition of "celebrity" went downhill.
Re: Nudie Button (Score:2)
Did you really have to add yet as in, ' glad it hasn't come to pass yet'
Depends (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
What are you talking about? Voice recognition is pretty much amazing!
No, it is not. Only yesterday Siri on my Apple TV was failing so badly to understand my spelling of a password that I gave up in frustration and watched the CBC show on my laptop. Voice recognition "sort of" works but it is not always reliable, even slight background noises can distract it and it still needs training. At least that is my experience speaking English with an English accent.
Re: (Score:3)
Alexa is way better than Siri at speech-to-text. Siri has one microphone. Alexa has an array of four to seven microphones (depending on the model) which makes it way easier to focus on a single voice and tune out background noise.
But the biggest problem is not speech-to-text, but the semantic understanding of the text. That will require GP-AI, and is still a long way off.
I'm still waiting (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
In the last 3-4 years, the amount of paper that I go through has finally dropped to an insignificant amount. I probably use 90% less than I did 4 years ago.
Re:I'm still waiting (Score:5, Insightful)
At least secure paperwork makes them have to physically enter a building.
Re: I'm still waiting (Score:2)
I haven't used paper in my work in years (Score:3)
Hit and miss; and often hidden or forgotten (Score:2)
For me, it's like pundits' and SiFi writers' predictions: some big hits, some big misses. For example, I'd have thought that fusion generation would long since have been solved, and I'd be paying a utility to power my house with it (which I'd say qualifies as consumer-purchasable technology). And yet solar energy is now just about off-the-shelf price competitive most places.
What I've noticed over time is that the things we do have now are difficult (in time and effort) and even if they just seem to pop up
No Imaginary Trade-Offs (Score:2)
I don't have to decide between guns or butter in my imagination. When I was young, I imagined cool robot friends and trips to other worlds. Now, I have a Roomba and travel internationally, but most technology that I imagine today involves clients and difficult trade-offs. My focus on imaginary technology now is limited by what I can have the company I own [noventum.us], sell to someone with money (no equity deals, please.) Children don't have the same practical concerns, and (thankfully, in my country) aren't worried ab
Payroll... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Thank God that kids today don't have to learn about either one.
Yeah, COBOL is all but dead, and they're not getting paid...
To be honest (Score:2)
when I was in High School, I begged my parents for a TTY with a punched tape device and an acoustic modem for Christmas.
So all these years later with TBs of local storage, Multi MB connection to the Internet, streaming video, cell phone... It's pretty miraculous.
What isn't too surprising is the avarice of companies, the lack of privacy and assholes and control freaks in general.
Computers in general were supposed to make the world a better place for everyone.
No, it fucking sucks. (Score:5, Interesting)
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: contemplate this (Score:3)
Re:No, it fucking sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Informative)
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. (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
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.
It's of course true that software becomes more bloated but the reason likely is that it's not worth the time to optimise it since resources are more than ample to run it at adequate speed in its bloated state. Further, despite this bloat, there is still a huge net gain for the end user. So resources more than compensate for bloat. I analyse data and it's incredibly obvious how much more I can do per unit time on a modern desktop machine compared to 10 years ago. Graphics quality in games tells a similar sto
kid/teen who loved sci-fi in 1970s (Score:3)
What we're missing that I imagined we'd have:
flying cars that could hover
holographic tv
rotating space stations
moon and mars colonies
undersea cities
fusion power
cure for cancers and viral diseases
cures for genetic diseases
mind/computer interface
robot to do all house chores
no poverty
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Mixed bag (Score:5, Interesting)
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,
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
>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..
Re: (Score:3)
Finland has a pretty low population density, and I think we're doing pretty well with our internets. Of course, there's always going to be a cabin in the woods with lousy signal, and the overall pop density doesn't mean much when you look at urban areas.
A friend of mine had gigabit service at home in 2003, though I recall it was one of the test sites of an ISP. I can currently have GbE at home for 60 eur/month, but I have no need for those speeds. Instead, I pay 5 eur for 50/10 Mbit, and I can still enjo
Hell yes it is! (Score:3)
The tech is cool (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Dijkstra was ahead of his time, mostly because he was preaching about concerns that were mostly anal-retentive academic non-issues on the computers computer science majors in the 80s and 90s were familiar with.
On a computer like the Commodore 64, or even an Amiga 500, a program that hijacks the interrupts and takes control is lord and god of its environment. "Works for me" IS good enough, because there aren't many ways it MIGHT work differently on anybody else's identical hardware.
When you fast forward to c
I just turned 50. Hell yes. (Score:3)
It's a relative question isn't it? If you are in your 20's then you probably aren't that impressed or not as much as I am.
Strange to think a CD is antiquated now.
As a teenager a Walkman was hi-tech.
Now I can stream music wirelessly from my watch to little buds in my ear.
My phone knows my face and I can ask it to turn on music in any room in my house.
I can video chat with my mother on the other side of the planet in high definition video and audio.
Yet with the car industry we're still driving the same shitty combustion engined machines we did as a kid.
The electronics and safety are better.
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.
Re:I just turned 50. Hell yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I just turned 50. Hell yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2, Interesting)
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 bu
I thought I would have more friends (Score:2)
Turns out that prediction fell through, answer: No, technology is not as cool as I wanted it.
Social networks (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Social networks (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear fusion power (Score:2)
Except in Canada we have a company doing it that's only 5 years away, always.
Also, I hoped people in general would have more of a f**king clue by now. About empirical, verifiable reality, you know? About how to think better. But no-o-o-o!
It's a good thing the machines are going to be thinking for us soon, cause on average, "we're stupid and we'll die."
Cooler than I expected, but not the same at all... (Score:5, Interesting)
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....
Technology yes, how it's used no (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
2001 (Score:2, Funny)
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't say that it is.
Yes and No (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Mixed bag (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
Better than expected! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Looking back 50 years... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Self-driving cars (Score:2)
What I didn't expect from "Today's Tech", is that we'd have self-driving cars. My child is in pre-school right now. There's a good change they might be able to get there driver's license, but that there'll be hardly any need to use it.
Well...no (Score:2)
Can I have intelligent conversations with my computer: no (no HAL 9000)
Are there regular commercial flights to the moon, and a permanent base on Mars? no. I can't even fly in a supersonic passenger plane anymore.
Fusion reactors? No. Flying cars? No. Undersea cites: No. Humanoid robots helping me round the house: no.
We have fallen far short of what was predicted when I was young. Of course that may be because the predictions were crazy, not because we have in some way failed.
My feeling is that we fail
My biggest miss was replacement organs. (Score:3)
My biggest miss was replacement organs - especially teeth. In about 1958 I expected implanted replacement adult tooth buds, far better than drilling-and-filling, to be available by about 1978 (when I might start to want them myself).
Now it's a half century after the prediction. Fillings have drastically improved and I have a couple titanium implants. But serious work on replacement organs is just getting under way.
Yes (Score:3)
Yes. Back when I was in college, I would have literally KILLED for the kind of computer, phone, and wireless 24/7/365 connectivity I now take for granted & have anxiety attacks without. And I say that as someone who HAD a 1200-baud modem in 1986, and spent the summer after 10th grade staying up all night using PC-Pursuit to connect to bulletin board systems around the world for free at a point in time when a long-distance call to a BBS a hundred miles away cost approximately $15-20/hour, and even fsck'ing QuantumLink cost around $2.50/hour.
The past 10-15 years have been kind of a disappointment in the PC realm, but even circa 2002 when I was playing with my shiny new PalmOS phone, I wouldn't have dared to fantasize about being able to use a service like Youtube as a free music streaming service (ignoring the videos) while driving across the Florida Everglades, let alone play 3D videogames and use it as a 2160x1440 display host for virtual reality software. On the other hand, if you'd told me in 2001 that circa 2010, the display market would be totally stagnated around 1920x1080 monitors and it would take literally YEARS to get back up above the kind of resolution available on a $4,000 2002-era Thinkpad (1920x1600), I would have thought you were kidding.
Ditto, for storage. If you'd told me in 1990 that someday, a MOUSE DRIVER would have approximately 200 megabytes worth of files... and that I wouldn't care, because my computer had a 2-terabyte hard drive, a 1-terabyte removable hard drive in the optical bay, and another 512gb that was like a persistent ramdisk performance-wise, I would have thought you were utterly and completely insane.
CPU-wise, I'd have to say yes and no. In 1988, a 1-GHz 2002 CPU would have seemed like science fiction. In 2002, a 4GHz CPU would have seemed like a sick joke, even when you account for cores, cache, and overall performance.
In terms of keyboards, computers have totally gone to shit. Even Thinkpad keyboards suck compared to the keyboards they USED to have 20 years ago, and suck even MORE compared to the literal low-profile clicky keyboards early-90s high-end laptops used to have. Modern mice are a billion times better than the mice we had in 1990, but I'd take a thumb trackball (with modern optical sensor instead of rollers) over a flat touchpad any day, unhesitatingly. I LIKED thumb trackballs like the one on the DEC HiNote Ultra, and didn't mind first-generation touchpads that emulated thumb trackballs. I absolutely DESPISE modern touchpads (which are designed for people who can't type, and who use them with their index fingers, as opposed to people who keep their hands over the keyboard and try using the touchpad with their thumb).
I miss resistive touchscreens. Capacitive touchscreens are handy for detecting blunt touches, but resistive touchscreens with real DSPs were a thousand times better for things like Graffiti. To this day, I have yet to use a non-rooted Android phone whose CPU governor isn't disabled that's capable of doing Graffiti as accurately as a 16MHz Palm Pilot III.
IMHO, the industry abandoned IrDA long before it had a good replacement... and waited WAY too long to replace 1.44mb floppies with just about anything that was better (Zip drives and LS-120 were too little, too late... but LS-120 would have totally rocked back in 1992, even if they'd only been 25-50mb/disk).
Space exploration? Meh... and yeah. Elementary-school me (late 70s, pre-shuttle) would have been thoroughly unimpressed by today's space program. The entire shuttle era just seemed lame and anticlimactic. My first sentient thoughts regarding space travel involved watching men walking on the moon... and thinking it was a totally normal daily occurrence (because for someone who was born after the first Apollo mission, but was old enough TO remember seeing the final ones live on TV, it WAS a totally normal daily occurrence)... and it seemed like everything NASA did after I finally got to kindergarten was just a step down.
On the other hand, the past
No (Score:2)
It is mostly boring and suffers from the same problems as back then, with some really serious ones in addition.
The good that came true! The unexpected bad, too! (Score:2)
ANTICIPATED: Handheld computers and wireless data.
EXPECTED: An almost 100% sure thing we'd get there.
UNEXPECTED: That same technology that was supposed to be our tool to free us and make us better is used by default to track us, monetize us, maintain and resell portofolios on us.
DISAPPOINTED: The success of the cell phone and tablet effectively kills other pieces of dedicated or unique hardware implementations (MP3 player, a physical chess set that you can play against another friend anywhere in the world,
One correct prediction (Score:3)
Back around 1979-1980, I was talking with my mother about the various minicomputers that were available; I was using a PR1ME at the college, and she had some kind of HP equipment (HP3500 ?) at work. Some of the early home computers running BASIC were available, but it was already obvious that these things were like toys compared with the multi-processing and multi-user big iron. Considering how much larger and complicated programs could be made in FORTRAN, compared with the line-number BASIC of the time, I speculated, that some day, we would have small home computers that could run the same kind of FORTRAN programs.
She said she thought that was unlikely.
As few years later PCs became powerful enough to actually be able to do this (PC/AT, with the 80286 running Xenix). And these days, there are the pocket-sized Raspberry Pi, Rock 64, and others, that are more powerful than all that large hardware from the 1970s.
De-Evolution (Score:2)
Programming typical internal CRUD apps got harder, not easier. I don't know why, but it just takes more lines of code and typing to do the same stuff as the 90's.
There are tools and stack tunings that can perhaps approach it, but most* managers won't approve such; it's not "in style". Face it, people, style and fucked-up web "standards" are fucking CRUD productivity in the bum. It may make other tasks or domains better, but not CRUD. One bad size fits all?
I had Jetsons-like tools, but industrial insanity ya
Complete devolution (Score:3, Insightful)
No. Hardware evolved at an insane pace, with every new generation exponentially faster and more capable. Software was exciting too. You could download some warez and open up a whole new realm of possibility. Data could be stored and converted into various common file formats and exchanged using open protocols.
Now if it's not mobile crapware it's infested with trackers and trojans, and software compatibility is so poor that the most common way of sharing something is to turn it into a noisy JPEG. Everything still superficially speaks the same protocol, but it's just used to wrap ad-hoc formats and ill-defined APIs that can change without notice. If you can even get at the raw data at all.
Instead of tricorders we got shitty selfie-tablets that can't last a day without a recharge. Instead of empowerment and distributed networking, we got nanny admins and centralization. Instead of a rich medium for computation, we got a kitchen sink of broken ideas, so convoluted it requires a monopolisti company to farm the collective attention of the world in order to pay for its upkeep.
Cyberpunk dystopia is here, and it wants you to like and subscribe.
I thought we'd be further along... (Score:2)
...in the fields of battery and medical technology. Yeah, modern smartphones can do some amazing stuff, but playing Pokemon Go still chews up your battery like nobody's business. Consumer UAS technology in DJI's drones is way more advanced than anything I could've imagined when I was a kid, but they're still hindered by incredibly short battery life. On the medical side, I'd have assumed we'd have a cure for HIV/AIDS by now, along with most other major diseases.
As for the negative repercussions of today
The internet changed everything (Score:2)
In some respects it has either stood still or gone backwards - the US and Russian space programmes being an example of both.
But in broad terms, the direction that the future was supposed to take was defined by the HAL9000, Androids (dreaming of electric sheep) and space travel. Just about the only person who foresaw an internet-type thing was John Brunner in The Shockwave Rider and he didn't focus on one hel
Strange but true (Score:2)
Technology turned out... (Score:2)
... to be a disaster because the average person is a fucking moron.
The internet finally revealed what many of us always knew - our species is a race of god damn morons. Many of us nerds never imagind the overwhelming level of stupid that people would give up their rights to own videogame software and enable invasive and orwellian drm and enable the theft of software by Valve and other software companies.
The average person getting internet has allowed companies to wage war on general computing at every lev
I'm still waiting (Score:2)
Yes and No (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Aside from the internet, not as cool (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
No (Score:2)
No. (Score:3)
I predicted it would be better than in the 1970s.
Current tech is abysmal, Windows becomes unstable merely downloading patches, Linux' legendary reliability is no more. Tech peaked in the mid to late 90s and has gone downhill since.
When were Microsoft OSes ever stable? (Score:2)
I've been using them since DOS 1.0. NT 3.51 was the best that I can remember in terms of stability but it was a snap to break into (it was do that or fight with our IT department to install software). But I've always had to deal with applications which can break the system/violate the core functions.
I'm reasonably happy with the current version of Ubuntu - although I guess if it were truly "stable" there would be no updates and no reason to.
Yes (Score:2)
I wanted a clear flat colorful non-interlaced display with as little space between pixels as possible, with individually lit pixels and as little delay as possible when outputting a frame. We now have 4k freesync OLED and microLED displays.
Powerful game consoles and PCs, cheap computing devices, very powerful portable devices, large HDDs and portable storage, SSDs, wireless internet, even things I didn't know I wanted but can't live without, like high tech washlets. VR is coming along and is quite cool.
Sure (Score:3)
I already thought it was cool when I got a Hercules graphics card for my PC, which could show 80! lines of text, can you imagine?
Also my first HP500 Color printer for 1500$ was cool as hell, much better than the near letter quality needler I had before.
My first Postscript Laser Printer for only 12000$ was beyond bliss.
Now people have a computer on their wrist, that checks their heartbeats, a small phone that plays music, games and videos and talks to satellites to see where it is exactly on the planet, people talk to their Bluetooth speaker and they even answer, some of them even will bring you beer if you ask them, albeit only the next day.
Rockets come back to the place they landed 7 minutes later after they put dozens of satellites in space and electric cars can be bought that are way faster and cooler than Ferraris or Lamborghinis for a fraction of the price.
And the young whippersnappers just think: Meh.
And now get off my lawn.
Re: (Score:3)
Heinlein had them in "Space cadet" in the late 40s. Clarke had them in "Imperial Earth" in 1976.
Re: (Score:2)
Heinlein had them in "Space cadet" in the late 40s. Clarke had them in "Imperial Earth" in 1976.
Also: Cheste Gould's Dick Tracy used his two-way wrist radio starting in 1946 (and a similar device showed up in a story arc on the Superman radio show the same year). It was upgraded with video in 1964.
Re:phones - Doc Savage/The Mote in God's Eye (Score:2)
Doc Savage and his crew had individual radios that could "call" out to regular phones and were described in books written in '33-'34.
The Mote in God's Eye describes connected smartphones/tablets.
I'm sure there are even earlier references. The cell phone/personal communications we have today is something that "futurists" and writers have seen the need for/advantages of for a long time.
Re:phones (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody predicted the modern smart phone.
Mark Weiser [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org].
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: (Score:3)
Mark Weiser [wikipedia.org] predicted the smart phone (and the tablet) in 1988
Alan Kay predicted it in 1968 and a few years later he was already in the process of implementing it.
Re:Not really (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, why didn't we get Occam anyway? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Serial processing speeding up so much that no-one thought easy parallel programs were worth the bother?
No. We have plenty of parallelism in modern computing, with threading, multiple cores, GPGPU, and clusters. The problem is that Occam used the wrong model: Private memory and slow interconnects based on message passing. What happened in the actual future timeline was symmetric multiprocessing with shared memory, and even shared L3 cache.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that Occam used the wrong model: Private memory and slow interconnects based on message passing.
To me, there's no clear indication that this is "the wrong model". That's basically a distributed actor architecture. We may still be forced to do just that one day.
We do that today. We wrapped half an OS around it (Score:2)
>> Private memory and slow interconnects based on message passing.
> To me, there's no clear indication that this is "the wrong model". That's basically a distributed actor architecture. We may still be forced to do just that one day.
We in fact do that today, private memory, slow interconnects, and pass messages. We just added more software than the old model amd re-arranged it some to work better. We call it virtualization and REST.
Remember an operating system is defined as the software l
Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re: (Score:2)
You had an awfully cheap imagination then!
I had 100 Mbit in college in 2000 and my home didn't catch up until 2017. Thank you, Comcast!
Re: (Score:2)
You know someone lacks imagination about the future when they miss the bus and wish they had a Star Trek transporter so they could beam themselves to the next bus stop.
Re: (Score:2)
So you disagree that all we have improved is information processing by telling me you have cheap bandwidth? ...I see.
Re: (Score:3)
Some of the leading tech like computers and TVs are pretty cool actually - and that we can have all we have on a small USB stick in our pocket.
The bad parts - well, that was predicted by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and by the TV show "Max Headroom".
Re: (Score:3)
Orwell predicted that the government would mandate telescreens in homes so they could spy on people. He never considered that people would actually _voluntarily pay money_ to put telescreens in their homes! (Google home, Alexa, etc)
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. Back in the 80s, I envisioned 2000 and beyond to be a high tech utopia (or possibly dystopia). All houses and buildings would be updated to "space age" materials instead of wood or rock and to be more arcology-like. Flying cars, robots, cyborgs and cloning would be commonplace in every day life. Computers would be at the point where even the oldest, cheapest ones would be fast enough to process anything instantly. We'd have a colony on Mars and robots on the moons of the outer planets.
The future tu
Re: (Score:2)
It's because of the anti-profit-sharing psychopathic CEOs that keep laying off people like us and hobbling our ideas.
The more I age, the more I am convinced that these silicon billionaires are all patsies for the Elites who just give them the tech to enslave us.
Re:Not really (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:2, Insightful)
Homes today are 1000 sq ft larger than in 1973 [aei.org]
sort of (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: Not really (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re: Not really (Score:5, Funny)
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: (Score:2)
I try once a year to convince the admins to give me the username back - I've no idea the credentials I used to login with and even if I had I wouldn't have cont
Re: Not really (Score:2)
Standstill is spot-on when people still have to wash their dirty clothes in one machine, and dry them in another instead of simply loading them(dirty sneakers and all) in one and teleporting them to the other--without the dirt and ketchup stains. Am impressed that Roddenberry even thought about starship laundry back then
Re: (Score:2)
Hang on Deckard nearly died fighting one of those.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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?]
Re: (Score:2)
Enjoy reading about PRISM and BULLRUN AC?
Re: (Score:2)
Minitel stay as the internet AC?
Re: (Score:2)
Have you even bothered to talk to tweens or teens of today?!
They are JADED AS FUCK and usually have NO OPTIMISM in even their own near futures, and usually have never even thought of what the world will be in like in 20 years.
Seriously.