10 ms·

Jesus christ. It's so hard to believe that's only from 2004. I feel like that era transpired 40 years ago. The period of time before smartphones feels like it

Jesus christ. It's so hard to believe that's only from 2004. I feel like that era transpired 40 years ago. The period of time before smartphones feels like it happened in the 1970's to me. The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
65827 10y ago
It's like things are accelerating isn't it? I remember trying to convince people they should sign up for email accounts in like 1992, I remember them looking at me like I was trying to sell them on a cult. Those people staring at me were such fucking dinosaurs they lost siblings to polio. Imagine that craziness. Now I feel like if I don't have a cyberbrain by 2022 it will be a huge letdown.
- Swizec 10y ago
  Crazier still. The young generation once more has siblings who die from polio and measles and such. For reasons. Maybe we're the dinosaurs.
  - acetoxy 10y ago
    What do you mean? According to WHO, measles caused 2.6 million deaths a year before 1980, but only 134 200 in 2015. Polio dropped from 350 000 cases in 1988 to 74 in 2015.
    - treehau5_ 10y ago
      I think he was making a passing joke at the anti-vax crowd
      - acetoxy 10y ago
        Yeah, if people stops vaccinating their kids, then the numbers would obviously go up instead of down. It's pretty scary that a lot of people don't realize this.
samplatt 10y ago
>The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief. The first movie I watched on my GearVR headset was called Strange Days, a 1995 film rather aptly about the introduction of Virtual Reality and how the government is involved in all sorts of dirty cover-ups. The movie was terribawesome, but it was amusing to see what 90's ideas of the future were getting right and wrong. Though, the time between 1995 and 2015 is almost a whole generation, so I don't know why I'm surprised that I'm seeing the dreams of the past realised quite literally before my eyes. Does this mean I'm old, now?
- ChrisClark 10y ago
  As a side note, I don't remember much of that movie beside the 'mental feedback loop' of experiencing live what you're recording. Terrifying.
  - tritosomal 10y ago
    It was cheesey. The focus of the conspiracy was the political assassination of a musician, except whenever movies try to fictionalize a wildly popular artist, it usually deflates the premise because you're forced into imagining why the artist is so popular. The music is contrived and laughably bad, so while you might really want to imagine the profound tragedy of losing the artist while being a fan of the music, your just left with blah. Hackers and Johnny Pnemonic (ostensibly from the same essential genre or style and period) are more fun to watch, simply because those movies don't frame the story arc as supposedly shocking and worrisome, even though they suck probably just as much. With Strange Days, your supposed to care about something for some odd reason.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >The music is contrived and laughably bad That never stopped chart-topping artists...
      - samplatt 10y ago
        Seriously. I actually thought the 'rapper' had some decent-power beat poetry going on, and measured up favourably against real-world artists (talk about backhanded compliments...)
notahacker 10y ago
I dunno, I thought part of Facebook's instant success was because, with the exception of wilfully-obtuse student columnists, most students instantly "got" it because they'd had some sort of internet profile and compulsively-updated statuses since their parents had finally succumbed to the avalanche of AOL CDs in 1997. Even the university, moving at such glacial pace it still ran a nineties Windows NT, was trying to get us to blog on their platform and chat with other students in the fresher's forum in 2004. And for all the joys of smartphone browsing on the go and novelty of proximity based search which doesn't involve typing postcodes, I just logged into a popular uh... people-meeting service that fundamentally hasn't changed design since earlier than 2004, and it was dated-looking then.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  The original Facebook didn't have a status to update; that didn't come until around late 2007 or early 2008. There was no chat until that time as well, just "poke." In 2004 it still managed to be "social" for its time though, especially with its focus on a campus. For a very long time Facebook was just mostly static pages with a list of friends and a "wall" your friends could write on, and maybe, IIRC, photo upload. That's it! It was literally that boring! Uploading a new profile pic deleted your old one, even. That being said, you could still use Facebook to contact people, if they included their phone number or AIM name, which was accessable to anyone in your college. I was contacted several times this way before Facebook chat/message/whatever else. I remember when the "mini feed" feature was released, and all it did was list your last 5 or so activities. That was controversial. The current Facebook shares very little resemblance to the original version, it's very, very fundamentally different from 2004 Facebook. ...yet the original version still got popular. That being said, the first time. I heard about Facebook was one of those college publications like this one. I wish I could read it today but it was just a student publication that was printed on regular paper and put around campus every once it a while. I remember reading it and being baffled as to why it would be popular. Shortly after that the person I was dating at the time asked me to sign up. That is the only reason I did!
  - aidos 10y ago
    Haha. Remember when they first introduced apps and they had access to everything? So people were tracking who was viewing your photos the most etc. It was the Wild West out there.
flashman 10y ago
> It's so hard to believe that's only from 2004. It's surprising Holt could still get away with writing "Cornell girls are hideous" as late as 2004!
- NautilusWave 10y ago
  That was as far as I got into the article....
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  It's true though.
- Vinnl 10y ago
  It's surprising he got away with the term "webmasters".
- lmm 10y ago
  I think 2004-me would see a future in which it was politically impossible to write that kind of thing as a horrible dystopia.
- coldtea 10y ago
  One could as well write it today. Assuming it's a free country and they do find them hideous or doing it for joking purposes (as the author does).
- zapu 10y ago
  I assumed there is some sort of rivalry between Stanford and Cornell - I'm not in US so I wouldn't know. But you would not see this kind of statement in a paper nowadays, that's for sure.
  - wiredfool 10y ago
    Cornell had of a rivalry with Harvard (who can't play hockey). Stanford really wasn't a concern, they're on the other coast. Though, this was from afew years after my time.
thesagan 10y ago
Now that you put it that way, man... things have changed. I can't help thinking about further back, too. Just imagine how it felt to live around the turn of last century! Planes, [newer] trains, and automobiles! Electricity, plumbing, underground subway transportation. Hygienic medicine. Vaccines. Telegraphs reaching out overseas and powering thousands of morning daily papers; becoming a commodity instead of luxury. Radical industry/political reforms, striking poverty, unimaginable wealth, obscene pollution. Women's suffrage. Radio, traveling circuses and vaudeville, mass consumerism, magazines, torpedos, and a world war. Oh my! Looking through my great-grandfather's scrapbook (he lived outside Detroit) is absolutely mind-blowing. The stuff he (and especially his father) saw are hard to put into a continuous world. His letters describing the "number of autoes" he passed on the way to visit relatives bleeds giddiness and awe.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  The really weird thing is how actual technology in movies from the 80's and 90's looks so much worse to people in 2017 than technology in moves from the 50's and 60's looked to people in the late 90's.
  - laurieg 10y ago
    Orville Wright (of the Wright brothers) went from developing early airplanes to seeing the development of international travel and the jet engine. He lived until 1948 and his last flight was in a Lockheed Constellation[1] In computer science we are similarly privileged. We've gone from basic ideas of transistors and turing machines to having a global network of interconnected supercomputers in our pockets. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Constellation
    - bluecmd 10y ago
      Quite interesting that super-sonic flight was achieved 1946. I don't know if Orville was informed, but imagine that - from barely flying to supersonic in 40 years.
akerro 10y ago
13 years ago they had funnier conspiracy theories. Now it's all related to NSA and confirmed :/
barking 10y ago
Were things that primitive? "A car phone is a mobile phone device specifically designed for and fitted into an automobile. This service originated with the Bell System, and was first used in St. Louis on June 17, 1946." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_phone
czep 10y ago
> The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief. I don't disagree, it does feel very surreal to reflect on life in the 1990s. But put in context, a lot can happen in 15 years. I mean, imagine living through the era 1930 to 1945. From the days of flappers and the Charleston to Nazism and atomic bombs.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

65827 10y ago

It's like things are accelerating isn't it? I remember trying to convince people they should sign up for email accounts in like 1992, I remember them looking at me like I was trying to sell them on a cult. Those people staring at me were such fucking dinosaurs they lost siblings to polio. Imagine that craziness. Now I feel like if I don't have a cyberbrain by 2022 it will be a huge letdown.

Swizec 10y ago
Crazier still. The young generation once more has siblings who die from polio and measles and such. For reasons. Maybe we're the dinosaurs.
- acetoxy 10y ago
  What do you mean? According to WHO, measles caused 2.6 million deaths a year before 1980, but only 134 200 in 2015. Polio dropped from 350 000 cases in 1988 to 74 in 2015.
  - treehau5_ 10y ago
    I think he was making a passing joke at the anti-vax crowd
    - acetoxy 10y ago
      Yeah, if people stops vaccinating their kids, then the numbers would obviously go up instead of down. It's pretty scary that a lot of people don't realize this.

samplatt 10y ago

>The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief. The first movie I watched on my GearVR headset was called Strange Days, a 1995 film rather aptly about the introduction of Virtual Reality and how the government is involved in all sorts of dirty cover-ups. The movie was terribawesome, but it was amusing to see what 90's ideas of the future were getting right and wrong. Though, the time between 1995 and 2015 is almost a whole generation, so I don't know why I'm surprised that I'm seeing the dreams of the past realised quite literally before my eyes. Does this mean I'm old, now?

ChrisClark 10y ago
As a side note, I don't remember much of that movie beside the 'mental feedback loop' of experiencing live what you're recording. Terrifying.
- tritosomal 10y ago
  It was cheesey. The focus of the conspiracy was the political assassination of a musician, except whenever movies try to fictionalize a wildly popular artist, it usually deflates the premise because you're forced into imagining why the artist is so popular. The music is contrived and laughably bad, so while you might really want to imagine the profound tragedy of losing the artist while being a fan of the music, your just left with blah. Hackers and Johnny Pnemonic (ostensibly from the same essential genre or style and period) are more fun to watch, simply because those movies don't frame the story arc as supposedly shocking and worrisome, even though they suck probably just as much. With Strange Days, your supposed to care about something for some odd reason.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >The music is contrived and laughably bad That never stopped chart-topping artists...
    - samplatt 10y ago
      Seriously. I actually thought the 'rapper' had some decent-power beat poetry going on, and measured up favourably against real-world artists (talk about backhanded compliments...)

notahacker 10y ago

I dunno, I thought part of Facebook's instant success was because, with the exception of wilfully-obtuse student columnists, most students instantly "got" it because they'd had some sort of internet profile and compulsively-updated statuses since their parents had finally succumbed to the avalanche of AOL CDs in 1997. Even the university, moving at such glacial pace it still ran a nineties Windows NT, was trying to get us to blog on their platform and chat with other students in the fresher's forum in 2004. And for all the joys of smartphone browsing on the go and novelty of proximity based search which doesn't involve typing postcodes, I just logged into a popular uh... people-meeting service that fundamentally hasn't changed design since earlier than 2004, and it was dated-looking then.

nommm-nommm 10y ago
The original Facebook didn't have a status to update; that didn't come until around late 2007 or early 2008. There was no chat until that time as well, just "poke." In 2004 it still managed to be "social" for its time though, especially with its focus on a campus. For a very long time Facebook was just mostly static pages with a list of friends and a "wall" your friends could write on, and maybe, IIRC, photo upload. That's it! It was literally that boring! Uploading a new profile pic deleted your old one, even. That being said, you could still use Facebook to contact people, if they included their phone number or AIM name, which was accessable to anyone in your college. I was contacted several times this way before Facebook chat/message/whatever else. I remember when the "mini feed" feature was released, and all it did was list your last 5 or so activities. That was controversial. The current Facebook shares very little resemblance to the original version, it's very, very fundamentally different from 2004 Facebook. ...yet the original version still got popular. That being said, the first time. I heard about Facebook was one of those college publications like this one. I wish I could read it today but it was just a student publication that was printed on regular paper and put around campus every once it a while. I remember reading it and being baffled as to why it would be popular. Shortly after that the person I was dating at the time asked me to sign up. That is the only reason I did!
- aidos 10y ago
  Haha. Remember when they first introduced apps and they had access to everything? So people were tracking who was viewing your photos the most etc. It was the Wild West out there.

flashman 10y ago

> It's so hard to believe that's only from 2004. It's surprising Holt could still get away with writing "Cornell girls are hideous" as late as 2004!

NautilusWave 10y ago
That was as far as I got into the article....
maverick_iceman 10y ago
It's true though.
Vinnl 10y ago
It's surprising he got away with the term "webmasters".
lmm 10y ago
I think 2004-me would see a future in which it was politically impossible to write that kind of thing as a horrible dystopia.
coldtea 10y ago
One could as well write it today. Assuming it's a free country and they do find them hideous or doing it for joking purposes (as the author does).
zapu 10y ago
I assumed there is some sort of rivalry between Stanford and Cornell - I'm not in US so I wouldn't know. But you would not see this kind of statement in a paper nowadays, that's for sure.
- wiredfool 10y ago
  Cornell had of a rivalry with Harvard (who can't play hockey). Stanford really wasn't a concern, they're on the other coast. Though, this was from afew years after my time.

thesagan 10y ago

Now that you put it that way, man... things have changed. I can't help thinking about further back, too. Just imagine how it felt to live around the turn of last century! Planes, [newer] trains, and automobiles! Electricity, plumbing, underground subway transportation. Hygienic medicine. Vaccines. Telegraphs reaching out overseas and powering thousands of morning daily papers; becoming a commodity instead of luxury. Radical industry/political reforms, striking poverty, unimaginable wealth, obscene pollution. Women's suffrage. Radio, traveling circuses and vaudeville, mass consumerism, magazines, torpedos, and a world war. Oh my! Looking through my great-grandfather's scrapbook (he lived outside Detroit) is absolutely mind-blowing. The stuff he (and especially his father) saw are hard to put into a continuous world. His letters describing the "number of autoes" he passed on the way to visit relatives bleeds giddiness and awe.

ChuckMcM 10y ago
The really weird thing is how actual technology in movies from the 80's and 90's looks so much worse to people in 2017 than technology in moves from the 50's and 60's looked to people in the late 90's.
- laurieg 10y ago
  Orville Wright (of the Wright brothers) went from developing early airplanes to seeing the development of international travel and the jet engine. He lived until 1948 and his last flight was in a Lockheed Constellation[1] In computer science we are similarly privileged. We've gone from basic ideas of transistors and turing machines to having a global network of interconnected supercomputers in our pockets. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Constellation
  - bluecmd 10y ago
    Quite interesting that super-sonic flight was achieved 1946. I don't know if Orville was informed, but imagine that - from barely flying to supersonic in 40 years.

akerro 10y ago

13 years ago they had funnier conspiracy theories. Now it's all related to NSA and confirmed :/

barking 10y ago

Were things that primitive? "A car phone is a mobile phone device specifically designed for and fitted into an automobile. This service originated with the Bell System, and was first used in St. Louis on June 17, 1946." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_phone

czep 10y ago

> The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief. I don't disagree, it does feel very surreal to reflect on life in the 1990s. But put in context, a lot can happen in 15 years. I mean, imagine living through the era 1930 to 1945. From the days of flappers and the Charleston to Nazism and atomic bombs.