Forcing teenage girls to carry every foetus to term, no exceptions, claiming they’re not mature enough to care for their own bodies, while claiming they’re mature enough to care for and raise a newborn before graduating high school.
that unless you were at home or in an office, you were completely free of communication. no phone calls, no texts (there were none). no emails. just time for YOU TO DO YOU… how I miss that.
The modern concept of the smartphone in its entirety. I was born in the late 80s and when I was a kid, the best we had was flip phones with 144x160 color LCDs. I vividly remember when they first introduced flip phones with secondary displays on the outside of the top half, as well. The Samsung Galaxy phone I’m typing on right now is probably several orders of magnitude more powerful than our first home computer, an HP Pavilion with Windows 95 we got for Christmas of that year, complete with CRT monitor that had analog knobs for screen adjustments. (I still have that monitor, too!)
The modern concept of the smartphone in its entirety.
Well, tadpole, I’m gonna nitpick with you a tiny bit. The concept was around when I was watching Star Trek with their “communicators” twenty years before your time. It’s the reality of the smartphone that took awhile.
@phendrick I figured it was fairly obvious I was referring to the execution of the device itself (which began in the early 2000s) and NOT any possible science fiction device or concept that could be interpreted as similar to a modern smartphone by today’s standards. I’m 34 so don’t really appreciate being referred to as a ‘tadpole’, either.
@PooltoyWolf “fairly obvious I was referring to the execution” – nope, not at all, when you said “concept”.
I didn’t mean to diminish your maturity, so apologies there; I was just trying to be humorous on a relative age comparison. But anyone who has years to go to get to half my age is a youngster to me.
@phendrick@PooltoyWolf
One of my most favorite shows when I was a kid was Get Smart. It came out the same year I was born, 1965 and ran until 1970. Maxwell Smart, a.k.a. Agent 86 had his shoe phone right from the very start so the concepts been around since at least 1965. His shoe phone was everything to me as a 5 year old child! Like it was yesterday, I can still remember playing with my dad’s shoe to my ear, and my sister’s sliding double door closet made a great dome of silence! (which sometimes doubled as a elevator) Lol …
@Lynnerizer He just needed 3 cords. Buy two 2-packs if you have to. The electrons don’t care what the plug color is. Lowe’s/HomeDepot should have them in the “electronics/TV/stereo cables” section. They’re still used for stereos. So buy an extra red/white pair and pretend one of them is yellow.
@mike808
Yes, that’s what we told our nephew, it was for him. In the process of moving next door he misplaced his. Very quickly he’s becoming THAT needy neighbor!
Lol
My parents had a TV and appliance store, sales and service, over the years my sister and I learned a lot about repairs, shortcuts and hacks. My dad taught us well!
How far flash memory has come and storage capacities in general. You’re telling me I can fit every video game in Toys R Us dozens of times over onto this card that’s small enough to stick up my nose?
@brennyn Well, I’ve known several kids over the years, and the size of the object is almost irrelevant to the ability of a kid to put a thing up a nose.
Though I do get your point about the miniaturization of storage devices being incredible.
@katbyter@yakkoTDI 20 megabyte hard drive here. Drives had to be manually formatted for their intended computer; for IBM PCs (and compatibles), the common method was through the dedicated controller (sold separately) by invoking its BIOS with g=c800:5
@brennyn@katbyter@yakkoTDI I was working in the industry about 20 years ago and was involved with the MMC card (which led to the SD card we know today.) At the time the early parts were 16MB (not GB). So that would only hold a few highly-compressed MP3 songs, not even a full album. But that was for development; it was going to be released in larger sizes like 64(MB) or even 256MB that year.
A guy I was working with said “someday, you will be able to put a whole movie onto this” – a DVD movie at the time, not HD, would be about 4GB. It seemed ridiculous to me at the time…
@katbyter@narfcake@yakkoTDI At one point, I had four Seagate ST238 drives connected to my AT&T PC6300. Yes, two of them were external - and still connected via the old IDE interface. 120Mb was considered an absurdly huge amount of disk space back then…
I look at microSD cards today and I am just amazed that while the largest I own is only 128gb my first 3.5" hdd was only 852mb.
IIRC, my first 3.5" drive was 80Mb. It might have been smaller. I recently ran across a stack of ancient 2.5" drives in a closet, and they ranged from 60Mb to 500Mb. Those got summarily “retired”.
@brennyn@katbyter@pmarin@yakkoTDI Years ago I read a prediction that if compression algorithms and storage density both kept increasing at current rates, everyone would be able to store every song. Not every song you like, EVERY song.
When I can pickup a 14TB external drive for a couple hundred bucks, I think we might be there.
@blaineg@brennyn@katbyter@yakkoTDI Not to get “too real,” but look up “NSA Data Center Utah” – pretty sure every song ever made, as well as potentially all your emails and texts and net searches and phone calls are already there.
Pretty much everyone was appalled that they chose to put a huge data center, with it’s massive cooling water requirements, in a desert environment that has had water concerns for decades.
Some clever fellow looked up the NSA’s water consumption in public records, and made an educated guess on its capacity based on cooling requirements. The NSA came unglued, and tried to have public utility records classified.
@blaineg Oh so you probably know all the stuff related to that. Like allegedly paying the local Sheriff department to maintain a presence on the public roads surrounding the obviously-not-secret facility, asking people why there are there and telling them to “move along” even though they are on public roads…
@pmarin Well, I’m not in the neighborhood, it’s about 30 miles down the road. But a friend went by to check it out while it was still under construction, and he was rapidly greeted by armed security.
It’s not at all a secret location, it’s easily visible from I-15. And in a few years will probably be engulfed by the southern end of the Salt Lake valley urban sprawl.
@blaineg@pmarin I was a systems SW engineer before retirement. The NSA was a customer of one of our products and they ran into a problem. I attempted some phone support for them, but when I asked “What were you trying to do when you encountered the problem?” the response was “Um, I can’t tell you.” So, debugging support was a bit difficult, to say the least.
We finally agreed that they would come up with a standalone test case that demonstrated the problem. Only, they were forbidden to send it to us using any electronic means, so they had to make a paper listing of their test program and mail it to us. Our admin typed it in, then I cleaned up and compiled the program, and debugged the test case. Fortunately, I was able to duplicate the behavior they had seen and then fix the problem in our product and give them an updated version. But it was certainly a long way around the barn.
To my knowledge, we never heard from the NSA again and I have no idea what they were using our product for.
@katbyter@narfcake@yakkoTDI@pmarin@werehatrack When I started my first real SW job out of college (1979 gulp), we were developing SW on 8085-based workstations (no PCs back then!) using single-sided, single density 8" floppy disks with a whopping 128K byte capacity. The days were filled with Bzzt-Clack-Clack sounds as the workstations ground away doing builds. We usually had time to go get coffee and maybe pick up any print jobs waiting in the printer room or yak with coworkers while the code compiled.
But try telling that to the kids these days… And get off my lawn!
When I was a kid, we were promised flying cars before the end of the century. Lots of things were thinkable that haven’t happened. Now, if you want to discuss things that could only have been done for a CIA black budget level of money, yes, this drone qualifies.
Every time this comes up in discussion I remind people to look at the broke down cars on the interstate after the first really hot day here in Florida. Cars that broke down due to poor maintenance. Then I ask, “Do you really want those people flying over your house?”
@macromeh@yakkoTDI Honestly, I know a few people in the aerospace field who could explain (in truly excruciating detail) why we will NOT have “flying cars” as a practical public-commute option at all, ever, period. (It would require the development and perfection of technologies currently accepted as being impossible within the realm of physics as we understand it, at the very least.) If someone disagrees with those folks, I’m going to ignore their opinion - because that’s all they’ve got.
Being able to order something on a whim and have it shipped to your house within 48 hours or less and in the same vein, not requiring a trip to the store for everything only to find out that the store doesn’t have the part/thing you need.
@zinimusprime I remember when I ordered a Colecovision Game console from the Spiegel catalog (circa 1983), and watching for the UPS truck to drive down my street for SEVEN weeks, before it actually turned into my driveway with the glorious, glorious Coleco
@crow OMG…my friend had a Colecovision system when I was a kid and I wanted one soooooo bad so I could play Zaxxon at my own house because he never wanted to play. Lol. Sadly, I never got one
@cory206sea@crow Coleco had so many QC issues that they had to abandon their plans to mass-market the Adam upgrade, and they’d invested so much in that product path that it basically killed them.
@blaineg More than a few of the current low-end econoboxen can wipe the pavement with a lot of those '60s “muscle cars” in a straight line, and vanish from their sight on a road course. Those old heaps of iron were crude, slow, wallowing, unreliable piles of manure by comparison to the most mediocre offerings of today, and we get gas mileage per ton that they could not have achieved at all.
My uncle had a '69 Camaro Indy 500 pace car replica. I loved that thing, but was too young to drive at the time.
I was surprised to find out a few years ago that the convertible had such poor structural integrity that vibration damping “cocktail shakers” were installed at all four corners to compensate. Each is a large can with a weight suspended by springs in an oil bath.
Adding weight isn’t exactly a performance modification.
Chevy claims the modern Camaro convertible chassis has nearly identical strength compared to the hardtop because they reinforced the convertible’s chassis.
I was in high school in 1993 when this AT&T commercial came out and couldn’t wait for Video Pay Phones.
But we could email and chat on AOL!
And I was already online gaming with my friends, playing Street Fighter II on Sega Genesis using the XBAND video game modem! By the time I graduated in 94, I had the Sega Channel with “on demand” game downloads.
We had a car phone, in bag.
My dad had this hand held game thing, that got over the air updates using a radio, you could play trivia games, read the news, and play Jeopardy live when the show was on TV. (I think it was Jeopardy, maybe it was Wheel of Fortune.) I think we were beta testers or something.
We were already living in the future!
The only thing I needed to wait for was mobile internet. In the early 00’s I would stream my mp3s using ShoutCast/IceCast and my friends and I could listen at work with WinAmp. I had a web interface to remote control the songs and playlist. And I could search for and download new songs using Gnutella remotely too, the songs got automatically added to the playlist at home and streamed out to everyone. I was like a DJ, taking requests over AIM, pushing out the tunes. I really wanted to listen in my car on my way into work too, but the ipod was a good stop-gap measure. Now I just listen to YouTube music or Sirius XM, all by myself.
I got a monaural reel to reel in 1961 and thought it was great. I patched in an AM radio and recorded hits off WABC in New York. I could not imagine the digital audio gear I carry in a pocket.
Driving like an asshole without the fear of death!
@yakkoTDI TBH, I was more likely to do that when I was a kid…
@shahnm You were driving [a car] as a kid?
@xobzoo I mean, relative to the age I am now…
@yakkoTDI Or getting rear-ended.
@detailer @yakkoTDI In a Pinto.
@blaineg @detailer
/giphy BOOM
@yakkoTDI Talk about anti climatic giphy.
The internet, and search engines that tell you whatever you need to know, whenever you want to know it…
@shahnm yes, but that is a very optimistic view of the inherent goodness of the internet and search engines.
@pmarin Nah. The big search engine companies are evil as fuck. The concept of search engines as a general tool is still pretty amazing, though.
@pmarin @shahnm Alvin Foo is onto something.
Influencer millionaires
All of the above, and so much more. Medical advances you wouldn’t believe, bikes with more than 3 speeds, electric cars, phones you carry with you…
@andyw Derailleur shifters providing 10 speeds were around in the '30s.
Forcing teenage girls to carry every foetus to term, no exceptions, claiming they’re not mature enough to care for their own bodies, while claiming they’re mature enough to care for and raise a newborn before graduating high school.
@mike808 Or you’re not old enough to smoke or drink, but you are old enough to carry this shiny new M4 into battle.
Access to the world’s information and entertainment in my hand anytime and anywhere.
That the childhood videos, carefully and expensively recorded on 8 mm, would be almost unviewable now.
@brainmist and then when people had them transferred to VHS tape for “permanent safekeeping.”
Celebrating gasoline getting back down to $4 / gal.
that unless you were at home or in an office, you were completely free of communication. no phone calls, no texts (there were none). no emails. just time for YOU TO DO YOU… how I miss that.
@pmarin When I take my bicycle out into the woods for a ride I leave my phone behind.
The modern concept of the smartphone in its entirety. I was born in the late 80s and when I was a kid, the best we had was flip phones with 144x160 color LCDs. I vividly remember when they first introduced flip phones with secondary displays on the outside of the top half, as well. The Samsung Galaxy phone I’m typing on right now is probably several orders of magnitude more powerful than our first home computer, an HP Pavilion with Windows 95 we got for Christmas of that year, complete with CRT monitor that had analog knobs for screen adjustments. (I still have that monitor, too!)
@PooltoyWolf
Well, tadpole, I’m gonna nitpick with you a tiny bit. The concept was around when I was watching Star Trek with their “communicators” twenty years before your time. It’s the reality of the smartphone that took awhile.
@phendrick I figured it was fairly obvious I was referring to the execution of the device itself (which began in the early 2000s) and NOT any possible science fiction device or concept that could be interpreted as similar to a modern smartphone by today’s standards. I’m 34 so don’t really appreciate being referred to as a ‘tadpole’, either.
@phendrick @PooltoyWolf Go back a few more decades to Dick Tracy comics.
@PooltoyWolf “fairly obvious I was referring to the execution” – nope, not at all, when you said “concept”.
I didn’t mean to diminish your maturity, so apologies there; I was just trying to be humorous on a relative age comparison. But anyone who has years to go to get to half my age is a youngster to me.
@phendrick @PooltoyWolf
(which sometimes doubled as a elevator) Lol 
…
One of my most favorite shows when I was a kid was Get Smart. It came out the same year I was born, 1965 and ran until 1970. Maxwell Smart, a.k.a. Agent 86 had his shoe phone right from the very start so the concepts been around since at least 1965. His shoe phone was everything to me as a 5 year old child! Like it was yesterday, I can still remember playing with my dad’s shoe to my ear, and my sister’s sliding double door closet made a great dome of silence!
@mike808
Just a few hours ago my guy was searching the house for some of those!
@mike808 That’s awesome!
DIPLOMAT! RAT-A-TAT! FAT CAT! AWESOME!
@Lynnerizer Is he back yet?
@mike808
Yeah, empty-handed!!
@Lynnerizer He just needed 3 cords. Buy two 2-packs if you have to. The electrons don’t care what the plug color is. Lowe’s/HomeDepot should have them in the “electronics/TV/stereo cables” section. They’re still used for stereos. So buy an extra red/white pair and pretend one of them is yellow.
@mike808
Yes, that’s what we told our nephew, it was for him. In the process of moving next door he misplaced his. Very quickly he’s becoming THAT needy neighbor!
Lol
My parents had a TV and appliance store, sales and service, over the years my sister and I learned a lot about repairs, shortcuts and hacks. My dad taught us well!
When I was a kid in the 70s a smartphone would be unthinkable.
I still think smartphones for kids is unthinkable.
@tweezak Not really though, see my post up above. Maxwell Smart, AKA agent 86 had been using his shoe phone since 1965. Jus sayen…
How far flash memory has come and storage capacities in general. You’re telling me I can fit every video game in Toys R Us dozens of times over onto this card that’s small enough to stick up my nose?
@brennyn I just came across an old tech drawer with 64mb compact flash cards, and one of my first thumb drives with 256mb storage.
@brennyn Well, I’ve known several kids over the years, and the size of the object is almost irrelevant to the ability of a kid to put a thing up a nose.
Though I do get your point about the miniaturization of storage devices being incredible.
@brennyn @katbyter I look at microSD cards today and I am just amazed that while the largest I own is only 128gb my first 3.5" hdd was only 852mb.
@yakkoTDI my first computer hard drive was 128mb. Never had a storage issue on it.
@katbyter @yakkoTDI 20 megabyte hard drive here. Drives had to be manually formatted for their intended computer; for IBM PCs (and compatibles), the common method was through the dedicated controller (sold separately) by invoking its BIOS with g=c800:5
/image Seagate ST-225 drive
@brennyn @katbyter @yakkoTDI I was working in the industry about 20 years ago and was involved with the MMC card (which led to the SD card we know today.) At the time the early parts were 16MB (not GB). So that would only hold a few highly-compressed MP3 songs, not even a full album. But that was for development; it was going to be released in larger sizes like 64(MB) or even 256MB that year.
A guy I was working with said “someday, you will be able to put a whole movie onto this” – a DVD movie at the time, not HD, would be about 4GB. It seemed ridiculous to me at the time…
@katbyter @narfcake @yakkoTDI At one point, I had four Seagate ST238 drives connected to my AT&T PC6300. Yes, two of them were external - and still connected via the old IDE interface. 120Mb was considered an absurdly huge amount of disk space back then…
@yakkoTDI
IIRC, my first 3.5" drive was 80Mb. It might have been smaller. I recently ran across a stack of ancient 2.5" drives in a closet, and they ranged from 60Mb to 500Mb. Those got summarily “retired”.
@brennyn @katbyter @pmarin @yakkoTDI Years ago I read a prediction that if compression algorithms and storage density both kept increasing at current rates, everyone would be able to store every song. Not every song you like, EVERY song.
When I can pickup a 14TB external drive for a couple hundred bucks, I think we might be there.
@blaineg @brennyn @katbyter @yakkoTDI Not to get “too real,” but look up “NSA Data Center Utah” – pretty sure every song ever made, as well as potentially all your emails and texts and net searches and phone calls are already there.
@brennyn @katbyter @pmarin @yakkoTDI Oh, I don’t need to look it up, the bloody thing is just a few miles down the road.
Pretty much everyone was appalled that they chose to put a huge data center, with it’s massive cooling water requirements, in a desert environment that has had water concerns for decades.
Some clever fellow looked up the NSA’s water consumption in public records, and made an educated guess on its capacity based on cooling requirements. The NSA came unglued, and tried to have public utility records classified.
@blaineg Oh so you probably know all the stuff related to that. Like allegedly paying the local Sheriff department to maintain a presence on the public roads surrounding the obviously-not-secret facility, asking people why there are there and telling them to “move along” even though they are on public roads…
@pmarin Well, I’m not in the neighborhood, it’s about 30 miles down the road. But a friend went by to check it out while it was still under construction, and he was rapidly greeted by armed security.
It’s not at all a secret location, it’s easily visible from I-15. And in a few years will probably be engulfed by the southern end of the Salt Lake valley urban sprawl.
@pmarin https://www.google.com/maps/place/Utah+Data+Center/@40.4857517,-111.9440355,89761m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x2a9a80b62fc3e9a9!8m2!3d40.4257606!4d-111.93408
@blaineg @pmarin I was a systems SW engineer before retirement. The NSA was a customer of one of our products and they ran into a problem. I attempted some phone support for them, but when I asked “What were you trying to do when you encountered the problem?” the response was “Um, I can’t tell you.” So, debugging support was a bit difficult, to say the least.
We finally agreed that they would come up with a standalone test case that demonstrated the problem. Only, they were forbidden to send it to us using any electronic means, so they had to make a paper listing of their test program and mail it to us. Our admin typed it in, then I cleaned up and compiled the program, and debugged the test case. Fortunately, I was able to duplicate the behavior they had seen and then fix the problem in our product and give them an updated version. But it was certainly a long way around the barn.
To my knowledge, we never heard from the NSA again and I have no idea what they were using our product for.
@katbyter @narfcake @yakkoTDI @pmarin @werehatrack When I started my first real SW job out of college (1979 gulp), we were developing SW on 8085-based workstations (no PCs back then!) using single-sided, single density 8" floppy disks with a whopping 128K byte capacity. The days were filled with Bzzt-Clack-Clack sounds as the workstations ground away doing builds. We usually had time to go get coffee and maybe pick up any print jobs waiting in the printer room or yak with coworkers while the code compiled.
But try telling that to the kids these days… And get off my lawn!
@katbyter @macromeh @narfcake @pmarin @yakkoTDI
Names almost unknow today; ed, edlin, vi, emacs…
@katbyter @narfcake @pmarin @werehatrack @yakkoTDI
Something like this:
That we would make it to the next millennium.
@2many2no
@katbyter Bend over, put your head between your knees,
and kiss your ass goodbye…
@2many2no @katbyter
wifi and bluetooth enabled pleasure devices that disappear inside our bodies to be remotely controlled from across the world.
@irishbyblood and the “Refurb” ones will end up for sale here…
When I was a kid, we were promised flying cars before the end of the century. Lots of things were thinkable that haven’t happened. Now, if you want to discuss things that could only have been done for a CIA black budget level of money, yes, this drone qualifies.
@werehatrack
Every time this comes up in discussion I remind people to look at the broke down cars on the interstate after the first really hot day here in Florida. Cars that broke down due to poor maintenance. Then I ask, “Do you really want those people flying over your house?”
@werehatrack @yakkoTDI Not to mention those cars with (ahem) questionable trunk contents…
@macromeh @yakkoTDI Honestly, I know a few people in the aerospace field who could explain (in truly excruciating detail) why we will NOT have “flying cars” as a practical public-commute option at all, ever, period. (It would require the development and perfection of technologies currently accepted as being impossible within the realm of physics as we understand it, at the very least.) If someone disagrees with those folks, I’m going to ignore their opinion - because that’s all they’ve got.
@werehatrack
Yes, I own this shirt.
Being able to order something on a whim and have it shipped to your house within 48 hours or less and in the same vein, not requiring a trip to the store for everything only to find out that the store doesn’t have the part/thing you need.
@zinimusprime I remember when I ordered a Colecovision Game console from the Spiegel catalog (circa 1983), and watching for the UPS truck to drive down my street for SEVEN weeks, before it actually turned into my driveway with the glorious, glorious Coleco
@crow OMG…my friend had a Colecovision system when I was a kid and I wanted one soooooo bad so I could play Zaxxon at my own house because he never wanted to play. Lol. Sadly, I never got one
@cory206sea @crow Coleco had so many QC issues that they had to abandon their plans to mass-market the Adam upgrade, and they’d invested so much in that product path that it basically killed them.
@zinimusprime Two day delivery was very nice, next day delivery was impressive, same day delivery was amazing.
I almost take them all for granted already.
I thought muscle cars were dead in the 80’s, and they were. Sub-200 HP Mustangs and Camaros???
The stuff today has more power, better mileage, and drastically better handling.
Not to mention the insta-torque of electric motors.
@blaineg More than a few of the current low-end econoboxen can wipe the pavement with a lot of those '60s “muscle cars” in a straight line, and vanish from their sight on a road course. Those old heaps of iron were crude, slow, wallowing, unreliable piles of manure by comparison to the most mediocre offerings of today, and we get gas mileage per ton that they could not have achieved at all.
@werehatrack Some years ago a sports car magazine ran a Honda Odyssey against a classic British sports car. You can guess who won.
One particular advantage they noted was modern tires vs. the vintage stuff.
My uncle had a '69 Camaro Indy 500 pace car replica. I loved that thing, but was too young to drive at the time.
I was surprised to find out a few years ago that the convertible had such poor structural integrity that vibration damping “cocktail shakers” were installed at all four corners to compensate. Each is a large can with a weight suspended by springs in an oil bath.
Adding weight isn’t exactly a performance modification.
Chevy claims the modern Camaro convertible chassis has nearly identical strength compared to the hardtop because they reinforced the convertible’s chassis.
I was in high school in 1993 when this AT&T commercial came out and couldn’t wait for Video Pay Phones.
But we could email and chat on AOL!
And I was already online gaming with my friends, playing Street Fighter II on Sega Genesis using the XBAND video game modem! By the time I graduated in 94, I had the Sega Channel with “on demand” game downloads.
We had a car phone, in bag.
My dad had this hand held game thing, that got over the air updates using a radio, you could play trivia games, read the news, and play Jeopardy live when the show was on TV. (I think it was Jeopardy, maybe it was Wheel of Fortune.) I think we were beta testers or something.
We were already living in the future!
The only thing I needed to wait for was mobile internet. In the early 00’s I would stream my mp3s using ShoutCast/IceCast and my friends and I could listen at work with WinAmp. I had a web interface to remote control the songs and playlist. And I could search for and download new songs using Gnutella remotely too, the songs got automatically added to the playlist at home and streamed out to everyone. I was like a DJ, taking requests over AIM, pushing out the tunes. I really wanted to listen in my car on my way into work too, but the ipod was a good stop-gap measure. Now I just listen to YouTube music or Sirius XM, all by myself.
@xenophod So you’re saying it’s better to have old technology and friends, rather than new internet services and no friends?
I got a monaural reel to reel in 1961 and thought it was great. I patched in an AM radio and recorded hits off WABC in New York. I could not imagine the digital audio gear I carry in a pocket.