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The world has changed rather drastically since 1990, both politically and technologically. If you told someone from ~1980 that not only would the Soviet Union n

by WJW 5y ago

treeman79 5y ago
As a kid in the 80s video phones were promised as coming soon. I was hugely disappointed for a long time.
- simonh 5y ago
  I got my first iPad in 2011 and went to see my grandmother up in Durham, North East England, who was in her 90s. My wife is Chinese and was in China with my daughters at the time, and we did a Skype call. At first she literally could not believe what she was seeing. It took me several times to explain that this was actually them, right now in China, and they could talk back to her and it wasn't just a recording or some sort of trick.
- corpMaverick 5y ago
  Agree. Video phones are very obvious idea that took a long time to become a reality. I was a kid in the 70s and I remember this 1951 movie made by comedian Tin-tan where he cleverly (for Spanish) names the video phones as "temirofono". Could be translated as "Iseeyouphone".
- euroderf 5y ago
  I'll see your video phone and raise you a Kubrick. As a high schooler in the late 70s I was sure I'd be able to go to orbit for my 40th birthday (late 90s). No such luck. Even though I had a plastic model of the "2001" Pan-Am clipper as a talisman.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Well, suborbital spaceflight is becoming accessible (for a once in a lifetime flight if you save up $250k) on Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin and soon (10 years?) orbital will have similar costs, perhaps, and then interplanetary flights in 20 years. We’ll see. But it not longer seems impossible.
abecedarius 5y ago
I was 10 years old in 1980. I wouldn't have had much of an opinion just then, but in 1981 I learned BASIC on an Apple II at a summer camp and started reading Byte, starting with a theme issue on AI (just missing the theme issue on Smalltalk). I started reading sci-fi too. From my standpoint of a few years later, I expected the world of 2020 to have seen roughly this much technical progress in bits, and also comparable progress in atoms (that is, more than we have seen). At the time it looked like we were in a bit of a technical-progress hiccup in the 1970s, but recovering, when actually the Great Stagnation thesis seems to better match reality. I'm sure there were plenty of people a little bit older who would've already found those predictions familiar and unsurprising, except to some degree the Soviet part (perhaps rightly -- the Soviet Union was certainly in decline, but that it fell in just the next decade may have been unusually good luck).
dash2 5y ago
You're right, but still don't underestimate just how CRAZY change was before this. In 1800 nobody had ever travelled faster than by horse or sail. By the 1850s, they are laying telegraph cables across the Atlantic. Young Winston Churchill witnessed one of the last cavalry charges. Old Churchill saw the first atom bomb.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  May 10, 1869 saw the completion of the transcontinental railroad across North America. July 20, 1969 saw the first human on the moon. 100 years, two months, and 10 days.
  - WJW 5y ago
    We are still on track to be on Mars on or before 2069 though, and might have a permanent moon base by then. Even since the moon launch humanity has built several more-or-less permanent bases in space, increased its space-industrial base by hundreds of times and set up an interplanetary comms network. Sure I'd like it to go even faster but I don't think it's going all that slowly. For someone reading a history book in the year 3500 these past 5 decades are all very close together. It's not like steam trains exploded out of the gates 2 years after the the first steam engine was used to drain coal mines in England, that also took several decades to spread to the general public.
Animats 5y ago
The world has changed rather drastically since 1990, both politically and technologically. If you told someone from ~1980 that not only would the Soviet Union not be a meaningful player in 40 years but also that everyone would be carrying a supercomputer in their pocket that could tell them the latest news in an instant and would let them send video messages to their friends and family (not to mention give instant, accurate directions anywhere on the planet), they would think you were crazy. I expected all those things in 1981. The Soviet Union was running down, because nobody really believed in communism any more, and it wasn't working well. It did break up peacefully, which was unexpected by everybody from the CIA to the KGB. I expected that many people would be carrying around something that did all those things. But not that they'd get so small and have so much bandwidth. I'd seen Xerox PARC, the Dynabook, and the pictures of the cardboard mockup of the laptop-sized version in the 1970s. That was just waiting for Moore's Law to make them possible. Didn't see Japan fading out and China rising, though. Nor that radio technology and fiber optics would get so good and so cheap.

by WJW 5y ago

treeman79 5y ago

As a kid in the 80s video phones were promised as coming soon. I was hugely disappointed for a long time.

simonh 5y ago
I got my first iPad in 2011 and went to see my grandmother up in Durham, North East England, who was in her 90s. My wife is Chinese and was in China with my daughters at the time, and we did a Skype call. At first she literally could not believe what she was seeing. It took me several times to explain that this was actually them, right now in China, and they could talk back to her and it wasn't just a recording or some sort of trick.
corpMaverick 5y ago
Agree. Video phones are very obvious idea that took a long time to become a reality. I was a kid in the 70s and I remember this 1951 movie made by comedian Tin-tan where he cleverly (for Spanish) names the video phones as "temirofono". Could be translated as "Iseeyouphone".
euroderf 5y ago
I'll see your video phone and raise you a Kubrick. As a high schooler in the late 70s I was sure I'd be able to go to orbit for my 40th birthday (late 90s). No such luck. Even though I had a plastic model of the "2001" Pan-Am clipper as a talisman.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Well, suborbital spaceflight is becoming accessible (for a once in a lifetime flight if you save up $250k) on Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin and soon (10 years?) orbital will have similar costs, perhaps, and then interplanetary flights in 20 years. We’ll see. But it not longer seems impossible.

abecedarius 5y ago

I was 10 years old in 1980. I wouldn't have had much of an opinion just then, but in 1981 I learned BASIC on an Apple II at a summer camp and started reading Byte, starting with a theme issue on AI (just missing the theme issue on Smalltalk). I started reading sci-fi too. From my standpoint of a few years later, I expected the world of 2020 to have seen roughly this much technical progress in bits, and also comparable progress in atoms (that is, more than we have seen). At the time it looked like we were in a bit of a technical-progress hiccup in the 1970s, but recovering, when actually the Great Stagnation thesis seems to better match reality. I'm sure there were plenty of people a little bit older who would've already found those predictions familiar and unsurprising, except to some degree the Soviet part (perhaps rightly -- the Soviet Union was certainly in decline, but that it fell in just the next decade may have been unusually good luck).

dash2 5y ago

You're right, but still don't underestimate just how CRAZY change was before this. In 1800 nobody had ever travelled faster than by horse or sail. By the 1850s, they are laying telegraph cables across the Atlantic. Young Winston Churchill witnessed one of the last cavalry charges. Old Churchill saw the first atom bomb.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
May 10, 1869 saw the completion of the transcontinental railroad across North America. July 20, 1969 saw the first human on the moon. 100 years, two months, and 10 days.
- WJW 5y ago
  We are still on track to be on Mars on or before 2069 though, and might have a permanent moon base by then. Even since the moon launch humanity has built several more-or-less permanent bases in space, increased its space-industrial base by hundreds of times and set up an interplanetary comms network. Sure I'd like it to go even faster but I don't think it's going all that slowly. For someone reading a history book in the year 3500 these past 5 decades are all very close together. It's not like steam trains exploded out of the gates 2 years after the the first steam engine was used to drain coal mines in England, that also took several decades to spread to the general public.

Animats 5y ago

The world has changed rather drastically since 1990, both politically and technologically. If you told someone from ~1980 that not only would the Soviet Union not be a meaningful player in 40 years but also that everyone would be carrying a supercomputer in their pocket that could tell them the latest news in an instant and would let them send video messages to their friends and family (not to mention give instant, accurate directions anywhere on the planet), they would think you were crazy. I expected all those things in 1981. The Soviet Union was running down, because nobody really believed in communism any more, and it wasn't working well. It did break up peacefully, which was unexpected by everybody from the CIA to the KGB. I expected that many people would be carrying around something that did all those things. But not that they'd get so small and have so much bandwidth. I'd seen Xerox PARC, the Dynabook, and the pictures of the cardboard mockup of the laptop-sized version in the 1970s. That was just waiting for Moore's Law to make them possible. Didn't see Japan fading out and China rising, though. Nor that radio technology and fiber optics would get so good and so cheap.