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I grew up with a ravenous appetite for science fiction too. In particular, I was fascinated by handheld computers. Tricorders, PADDs, Al's Handlink, SELMA, the

I grew up with a ravenous appetite for science fiction too. In particular, I was fascinated by handheld computers. Tricorders, PADDs, Al's Handlink, SELMA, they all drove my imagination nuts. From my early Handspring visor to today's iPhone 4, real life handhelds have been exciting because they slake my childhood thirst for a piece of the future. I'm a little sad, though. The first iPhone pretty much put all scifi handhelds to shame, and the iPhone 4 with FaceTime beats even the video communicator from Earth: Final Conflict. After playing with Epic Citadel and seeing the ridiculous graphical power in that tiny package, there's nothing left to thrill in me in the land of pocket computers. The depths of those childhood fantasies have been plumbed. Ah well. We still have ocular implants with augmented reality HUD overlays and telescopic vision to look forward to!

_delirium 16y ago
Hmm, I can see that on the technological front, but culturally to me it hasn't surpassed the imagined future. I might've read too much cyberpunk, but when I was a kid I really thought this kind of tech was going to totally change things... we were going to live in cyberspace now. Somehow, using smartphones to look up yelp reviews, traffic directions, and email doesn't seem like what I was hoping for. In some weird way, BBSs were more exciting and futuristic to me, creating an ASCII-based virtual world out of beeps on a telephone line between my computer and some random sysop's computer, and with a cultural ethos that this was a new world we could define. Maybe I'm jaded, but now the internet just feels like an extension of irl.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  Yeah, perhaps the thing you took from what I'm guessing was a much more literary exploration of Scifi than my own was a sense of a new sort of place, driven by technology. A new way of conceiving of community. And in many ways, though it was clunky by modern standards, BBS satisfies the conception of "cyberspace" much better than what we have today. I was a little past BBS when I was a kid, using Hotline instead, but it did feel like I was going somewhere when I connected to servers with decent communities. Everything was real-time, you could exchange data, there was just placeness to it. So now we've got stuff like Second Life, which satisfies Stephenson-esque Metaverse fantasies, but it hasn't fundamentally changed anything. Everyone still meets up for drinks and fried chicken, goes to work in their cars. The internet ended up lacing around our lives instead of redefining them. I could see you being, perhaps, underwhelmed with that in mind.
- derefr 16y ago
  And it all woulda, coulda, shoulda happened already, if only everyone had taken to the net to the same degree that the futurist authors of those books did. The one thing they never could have predicted was that was that a lot of the people who spent all day online would be doing so because they were unpopular, thus driving a correlation between cyber-community and anti-social tendencies that has stigmatized that possible future to this day. The one thing that made me hopeful again was the ads Blizzard ran with famous, popular, pretty, celebrity-type people saying they play WoW—but we'd need a lot more of that before grandma is jacking in.
- philwelch 16y ago
  Having grown older, I've become more and more convinced that spending a lot of time in cyberspace is a fundamentally bad idea. Using technology to enhance my life in the real world? Fantastic. Using technology to escape into a virtual world? Doesn't sound healthy.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    I guess I don't do it much anymore (posting on forums like this notwithstanding), but I'm not sure I've changed my mind overall. There's a certain kind of community that BBSs, along with medium-sized Usenet groups / webforums / mailing lists / etc. gave, that is somewhat different from IRL kinds of communities, and also different from both very small online communities (people you already know) and very large online communities (places like reddit, Slashdot, and HN). Not to promote a replacement of rl with cyberspace, but I think it's an interesting experiment where something is lost by it not persisting.

_delirium 16y ago

Hmm, I can see that on the technological front, but culturally to me it hasn't surpassed the imagined future. I might've read too much cyberpunk, but when I was a kid I really thought this kind of tech was going to totally change things... we were going to live in cyberspace now. Somehow, using smartphones to look up yelp reviews, traffic directions, and email doesn't seem like what I was hoping for. In some weird way, BBSs were more exciting and futuristic to me, creating an ASCII-based virtual world out of beeps on a telephone line between my computer and some random sysop's computer, and with a cultural ethos that this was a new world we could define. Maybe I'm jaded, but now the internet just feels like an extension of irl.

danilocampos 16y ago
Yeah, perhaps the thing you took from what I'm guessing was a much more literary exploration of Scifi than my own was a sense of a new sort of place, driven by technology. A new way of conceiving of community. And in many ways, though it was clunky by modern standards, BBS satisfies the conception of "cyberspace" much better than what we have today. I was a little past BBS when I was a kid, using Hotline instead, but it did feel like I was going somewhere when I connected to servers with decent communities. Everything was real-time, you could exchange data, there was just placeness to it. So now we've got stuff like Second Life, which satisfies Stephenson-esque Metaverse fantasies, but it hasn't fundamentally changed anything. Everyone still meets up for drinks and fried chicken, goes to work in their cars. The internet ended up lacing around our lives instead of redefining them. I could see you being, perhaps, underwhelmed with that in mind.
derefr 16y ago
And it all woulda, coulda, shoulda happened already, if only everyone had taken to the net to the same degree that the futurist authors of those books did. The one thing they never could have predicted was that was that a lot of the people who spent all day online would be doing so because they were unpopular, thus driving a correlation between cyber-community and anti-social tendencies that has stigmatized that possible future to this day. The one thing that made me hopeful again was the ads Blizzard ran with famous, popular, pretty, celebrity-type people saying they play WoW—but we'd need a lot more of that before grandma is jacking in.
philwelch 16y ago
Having grown older, I've become more and more convinced that spending a lot of time in cyberspace is a fundamentally bad idea. Using technology to enhance my life in the real world? Fantastic. Using technology to escape into a virtual world? Doesn't sound healthy.
- _delirium 16y ago
  I guess I don't do it much anymore (posting on forums like this notwithstanding), but I'm not sure I've changed my mind overall. There's a certain kind of community that BBSs, along with medium-sized Usenet groups / webforums / mailing lists / etc. gave, that is somewhat different from IRL kinds of communities, and also different from both very small online communities (people you already know) and very large online communities (places like reddit, Slashdot, and HN). Not to promote a replacement of rl with cyberspace, but I think it's an interesting experiment where something is lost by it not persisting.