I am using Windows XP and I think all the people in the 1950’s who didn’t predict that ordinary people would have computers vastly more powerful than ENIAC in their pockets were right.
For my next computer, I want a GENIAC. ( More. )
ETA: Okay, how many people here remember GENIAC? My older brother had one.
In my grandmother’s lifetime, we (well, they) got:
[ul][li] A new home in America with a house with indoor plumbing and a non-dirt floor and a front yard and back yard with lawns and flowerbeds, in a city with paved streets and sewers and supermarkets so you didn’t have to catch and butcher your own goose for dinner.[/li][li] Electricity.[/li][li] Radio and TV and air conditioning.[/li][li] Airplanes.[/li][li] Sputnik and men on the moon.[/li][li] Not one but TWO World Wars for excitement.[/li][/ul]
In our generation, we got:
[ul][li] Viet Nam war.[/li][li] Facebook.[/li][li] Twitter.[/li][/ul]
I saw lots of ads for that thing, but never got one.
The failure in imagination was not missing that people would own computers. It was that your coffee maker would have a computer. And your washing machine. And that your car would be stuffed with computers. I suspect not one of us has a clue about how many computers are in our houses.
There are vastly more microcontrollers than there are people in the world.
With all the maniacs on the highways imagine them with flying cars.
The major thing that seems to be missing from most futurists minds was the pedestrian field of economics – the very basic price consciousness of consumers. They will only buy something if it’s worth the price. And most of those things they imagined were not worth it.
Take flying cars, for example. To be both a car & a plane (and probably mediocre at both). it would be very, very expensive. Both to buy, and to operate & maintain. Then there would be the insurance. Just basic collision insurance would be more, for such an expensive vehicle. And Liability insurance would be much more expensive, when a mechanical breakdown or even running out of fuel might have you crashing down on top of people, buildings, priceless art museums, etc. Plus the social worries about crazy teenage showoffs, drunk flyers, etc.
And in the end, what does it get you? Faster travel times, but how long before their would be traffic bottlenecks in the air, too. And the travel is dropping, too – with email & voice mail & treleconferencing, the need for everyone to be in the office from 9-to-5 is greatly reduced, so you can plan your travel for times when the roads aren’t jammed. And with tele-commuting, you can eliminate the travel entirely. With all that, consumers won’t pay the price for flying cars. So companies don’t make them.
Or robots. The tin-man humanoid robot could be built, but very expensively – what could it do for me that would be worth the cost? There are lots of ‘robots’ around, but they’re moastly single-function, and built into a device. You can get a robot that when you say “phone Joe” it looks up his number, dials it, and connects him – that robot is built into most cell phones. You can get a robot that reads out loud turn-by-turn directions to my destination in my car – a GPS system. You can get fancy cars with a robot built into them that remembers my preferred adjustments for my car seat, mirrors, interior temperature & even my favorite music source. And nearly all new cars come with a robot that will automatically unlock the door & turn on the lights for me. Those kinds of robots have proliferated, because people found them worth paying for. But not the tin-man robots.
So futurists, evaluate your predictions based on whether those tightwad consumers will spend their money on it!
I had a Digicomp
And a Doctor Nim
From watching how it worked, I learned how to "solve: Nim-type games.
Even farther back there was Mentor. I always wanted one of those. The big brass-colored head always reminded me of the Supreme Intelligence in Invaders from Mars
The idea of robots comes from an era when servants were commonplace. More profound changes occurred between 1880 and 1930 than did between 1945 and now. The light bulb, automobile, aeroplane, telegraph, telephone, phonograph, motion picture, radio, and television had all been invented by 1930, though some of these inventions still were primitive. None existed in commercial form before 1880 except the telegraph. Radar and atomic weapons came a few years later. Almost everything else is merely a refinement. The major exception to this is the transistor, which was not foreseen. Almost none of our current devices would have been possible without it. No cell phones or laptops would be possible with vacuum tubes!
Leather is still used for shoes (DuPont’s Corfam was a flop because it didn’t breathe). Polyester was invented in the 1940s, I believe. The idea that we are so far ahead of the 1940s is untrue. Other than television, internet, and electrical refrigerators, most of us would feel quite at home in a 1939 home.
Leather may still be used for shoes, but most of mine use synthetic materials. Go to PayLess and you won’t find leather. It’s worth seeking out, for lots of reasons – better breathability, you can repair and resole it, but it’s by no means the only option. Samuel C. Florman, in his book Blaming Technology lists a number of materials and technological innovations that showed promise (Corfam, fluidics) but were ultimately sidelined.
It’s also true that many of us would feel at home in a 1940s home. In fact, I often look at old photographs from much earlier, and am startled at how modern they look. I could live in such a world for a time, until I bumped up against something that was radically different because of a lack of technology or a social convention. And the list of such things gets longer as you go further back. Even in 1939 it went beyond internet, TV, and a non-icebox.
All of these people saying “Besides computers and the Internet, nothing has changed” are like asking Mary Todd Lincoln “But other than that, how did you like the play?”. The Internet is huge– All by itself, it’s bigger than cars and airplanes and electric refrigerators and light bulbs.
Not really. It’s just a fancy telegraph. Electricity, light bulbs, automobiles, and all the other 19th-century inventions are far more profound.
The internal combustion engine is probably the most significant 19th century invention. It made automobiles and life as we know it today possible.
What we used to have horses and servants for, we now have mechanical and electrical devices.
Interesting that you should say that. Tom Standage’s 1998 book on the telegraph was entitled The Victorian Internet. A lot of similarities can be drawn there.
But I think you’re wrong. It’s not “just a 20th century telegraph”. It carries infinitely more information, is infinitely more accessible (people used to have to go to telegraph stations, interface with an operator, and pay by the word), and has already wrought phenomenal change. If you don’t think so, go to your local book store, if you have one.
The world changed more from 1880 to 1930 than in any other 50-year span in human history. ‘The future’ was 1950. Been there, done that. I’m not saying the internet isn’t an important development, but it’s not nearly as important as the telegraph, radio, television, or telephone. I remember when Kennedy was assassinated. It was on the news immediately.
There have only been a half dozen truly transforming technologies in the industrial age. The steam engine; the train; the telegraph; the electric power grid; the automobile; the Internet. Not even the computer makes the list. Computers technically existed my entire life but they were just fancy machines until the Internet connected them. Transformational technologies change how people think.
The telegraph eliminated time and space. It was teleportation for words and thoughts a century before the word teleportation was coined. The world looks entirely different in juxtaposition than it does at a distance. Yet, the telegraph wasn’t personal in the way that the later transforming technologies were. Only a handful of the wealthiest homes had one. The telephone was personal in a much more powerful way and changed individual lives far more. It’s in the same category as newspapers, radio/television, air travel, medical advances, and computers. Huge societal changes but not quite fundamental shifts.
The Internet is both. More personal than anything previous, more life-changing for societies. It’s far more important than the telegraph because it’s far deeper.
Admittedly, this is a game where assumptions and definitions are slippery. The internal combustion engine was a crucial advance. The electric generator was a crucial advance. The vacuum tube, transistor, and microchips were crucial advances. You could argue that they are fundamental to all the transformative technologies I mentioned and therefore are more important. I like my list better because it helps me focus on the changes to lives, not the changes to inventions, but if going in a different direction produces other types of insights by all means go there.
Just a long way of saying that I agree with Cal about the Internet being a thing of its own and far more important in every way except the smashing of time and space. Hard to say that anything could be more important than that.
My point is that that 1880 to 1930 saw more technological changes than any 50 year period before or since. A person from 1930 who was thrust into the world of 1880 would be very unhappy (where is my car, my phone, my radio, my movies, my electric light?). If we were thrust into the world of 1930, however, we would be just fine. Newsreel of the time:
http://www.britishpathe.com/video/the-lindbergh-kidnapping-reel-1/query/ryan
Speak for yourself.
Check this out:
You keep repeating this “the world changed more from 1880 to 1930” as if it means something about the relevance of the internet. It seems abundantly evident to me that the internet is every bit as important as the telegraph, if not more so. It’s already changed things phenomenally in the two decades that it’s been a relevancy for most people*, and I have a hard time imagining how different things will be in thirty more years, to use your 50 year timespan.
*Yes, I know the internet was around earlier, and DARPANET and other precursors a lot longer. But 20 years is when non-specialists in the general public really first saw it, and internet addresses started appearing on things.
I am talking about the 50 years 1880-1930, not about any individual invention. The world changed more from 1880 to 1930 than it has since 1930.
Probably true, since I’d make the same argument.
So what? A) Some of the important technologies were already invented by 1880. B) Everyday life wasn’t a great place for the vast majority. Technologies are only important if they improve lives. I wouldn’t want to live in 1930. C) This is utterly irrelevant to the Internet and to our Future, which is certainly changing around us. Most people already can’t remember how they got through a day pre-Internet. Those young enough to know nothing but the Internet Age will consider the 30s a black-and-white hellhole and the 50s to be a crippled, broken era remembered for nothing except perhaps the polio vaccine.
The Internet is important independently of anything that happened in the past.
But that’s not the original poster’s question, innit? LOL My point is that we have already done ‘the future’. It was 1950.
Would you prefer to live in 1880 or 1930? Nuff said.