Yes, and there’s also the much more prosaic fact that it just felt as something that I’d done countless times in my life : waiting for someone, looking at cars and old buildings, feeling the cold January evening air.
Lots of things have changed, but somehow, life still feels pretty much the same.
This reminds me of two things: one was an episode of NPR’s Science Friday back in the mid-90s when they were talking about listening to the radio on a computer. That just sounded crazy at the time.
The other was an article I remember reading in Newsweek, back when Apple was about to come out with the AirPort. The article talked about how Steve Jobs did a demo where he had two computers connected wirelessly at opposite ends of a conference room, and he was watching a movie on one computer that was being streamed from the other. And Jobs was positively giddy while doing the demo, saying things like “How cool is this?”
Amazing how commonplace both of those things are now.
TLDR: pretty much everything.
My thesis (seriously, this is TLDR and I didn’t mean for it to be this long when I started writing. Consider yourself warned):
My son wants to buy a “project” car to hone his grease monkey skills. This has made me ponder just how far car tech has come just in the not-quite-30 years I’ve been driving.
My first car was a 1975 Type 2 VW bus. It had dual single barrel carburetors, minimal heat, and no air vents – not even outside air. Well, it had a vent, in the sense that it had a lever that would open a little flap and allow outside air to flow in. So the van had to be actually moving down the road for it to work. The window washer was powered by an air bladder that had to periodically be pressurized using an external air compressor. Nothing was powered: no power brakes, steering, windows, nothing. The seats and the steering were, of course, not adjustable. The gas gauge didn’t work, which was a PITA (and left me stranded at least once that I remember). To start it on a cold morning I had go out the van, climb in the cold cabin, pump the gas pedal a few times, crank it while usually pumping the gas some more, and when it finally fired up I had to wait 30 seconds or so for the idle to even out then I had to pump the gas again to cancel the choke. Then I had to wait 10 minutes for the engine to warm up so the defrost would hopefully work well enough to clear the windshield. And yes, I’m aware that I was supremely lucky in that mine had a functioning heater, of course for certain values of “functioning”. The only thing protecting me from being permanently crippled by a front collision was a couple of thin pieces of sheet metal.
My parents let me drive that thing by myself from southern Oregon to Kalispell Montana when I was 17. I doubt I’d be comfortable letting my kids do that today. As cool as that van was and as much as I would love to own one again it was rudimentary in the extreme and not the best choice for a reliable daily driver, even back in the mid-90’s when I was driving it.
Today I drive a 2023 Kia Soul. On a cold morning I can push a button on the key fob to start the engine from the warmth of my kitchen and get the cabin heat and defrost going before I ever leave the house. When I go out to get in the cab a few minutes later it will be already nice and toasty, the windows clear, and the seat warm. I can adjust the seat with the push of a single button, turn on some tunes that are beamed down using magic from a satellite simply by touching a screen on the dash, and when I back out of the driveway everything behind the car is projected onto a large screen on my dash – the same screen that I use to turn on the stereo, adjust the heat settings (which I can also do using traditional physical buttons, so I have two methods of doing that!) and make a phone call. Oh yeah. I can make a phone call using my car itself. On a cold winter night ca. 1997 my trusty VW van ran out of gas on a little rural backroad and I had to hike a mile or so to the nearest house, knock on the door hoping not to get shot by some good ol’ boy with a Remington, and then ask to use their phone to track down someone who could come get me and take me to a gas station. Today my Kia will tell me exactly how many miles I have left in my tank in addition to the traditional needle-against-a-scale gas gauge (although it’s digital, of course). I have not one but three trip odometers. It tells me how much air pressure is in each tire, and a myriad of other little tidbits of info.
My father drives a 2021 (I think, maybe it’s a ‘22) F-150 hybrid that makes my Kia look positively rudimentary. And of course, fully-electric vehicles makes his pickup look rudimentary.
Other car tech has come a long way in the last couple of decades, although much we don’t notice. Tires are so well made now that blowouts are almost non-existent and flats are rare. Noise reduction engineering has evolved to the point that for many vehicles an idling gas engine, your standard 4 or 6 cylinder, is nearly silent from inside the cab and only slightly louder when standing outside the car. Leaving your headlights on or the dome light on is rarely causes a dead battery any longer as lighting systems often have auto-off timers that turn off the lights after the ignition is turned off (the lack of such a tech was the bane of many drivers in the Good Old Days) or LED lights simply draw so little power that they’re incapable of killing a battery overnight.
I’m still thrilled by satellite navigation built into my car, and that it’s cheaply available for older cars that don’t have it integrated into them. I used to carry a DeLorme atlas in my car “just in case.” No longer. I’m planning a road trip to Alaska in the next year or three and have decried the availability of such a detailed atlas for BC and the Yukon even though I realize I don’t really need it.
Much of this tech is very recent. My son drives a 2003 F-150 and it has almost none of this technology. My other son drives a 2011 Mustang and it has very little of this tech. My wife’s 2014 GMC Terrain has a screen on the dash with digital stereo controls, including SiriusXM, and phone controls but it can only make phone calls – it can’t stream music from the phone and doesn’t have satellite navigation.
Cars are also exponentially safer today than they were even 20 years ago let alone 40 years ago.
Car tech is only touches the surface. Streaming music and video still boggles my mind. I still have some VHS tapes buried in a box in the garage somewhere. I remember – and it doesn’t seem that long ago – when I had to drive across town to the nearest video store, rent a physical copy of the movie I wanted to watch (assuming they had it on the shelf), take it home and watch it, then remember to take it back to the store the next day. I remember buying my first DVD ca. 2003 (it was a stupid Julia Roberts movie called Mona Lisa Smile) and being absolutely amazed at the image quality. Now when I want to watch a movie I can pull up a menu on my phone and watch anything I can care to from pretty much anywhere I want. A year or two ago I went camping with my sons and we were pretty far out in the backcountry. This was true camping, in sleeping bags on the ground in the middle of nowhere. However, I had cell service and had brought an Anker powerbank for my phone so one of the nights I laid burrowed in my sleeping bag watching The Simpsons on Disney+. In the middle of the bush on a screen that I carried in my pocket all day.
My television can do all this too. No longer do I need a separate machine to play a physical disk or cassette in order to watch something. I can access an app on my TV which accesses whatever movie I want to watch and will play it instantly with a click of my remote control.
I’m enough of a luddite that I have not set up Alexa or Google Home, but the idea that I can turn on my various lights or change their colors with a simple voice command is pretty amazing to me.
The dizzying array of stuff we can do on our phones. I can make a Dick Tracy-style video call to almost anyone, for free. I can message friends in other countries using free apps. Phone calls themselves are free. When I was a kid we couldn’t make long-distance calls (my parents wouldn’t pay for them, anyway) and had to take a special calling card with us when we went on out of state strips. No longer. My phone is my morning wake-up alarm, my medication reminder, my calendar, my television (usually), my Walkman, my notepad, my calculator (remember when those little Casio calculator watches were all the rage after our grade school teachers warned us that we’d never have a calculator with us when we wanted/needed one so we’d better learn our arithmetic? Ha!), my camera, and of course my telephone. I can stream tens of thousands of both domestic and international radio stations from anywhere in the world when the urge strikes me, for free (Radio Garden. Seriously. Check it out.). I can pay my bills using my phone. I still have a couple of bills that need actual paper checks to be mailed, and when I do so I feel like I’ve gone back in time. I’m so used to opening a screen on my phone, “clicking” a button or two, and letting all that magic modern technology do the rest. If I choose to do so I can set it up so that my bank does all the pony work for me but I prefer to be in control of this, which I recognize is old-fashioned in of itself.
When shopping or getting gas I can tap my debit card on a POS screen to make a payment. I understand many people use their phone to do the same thing which I have never done, so the fact that I use what is, for me, cutting edge modern tech actually makes me somewhat old-fashioned. I remember using the old knuckle-buster CC machines at my first job, which was 1999. That was old tech by then. The last one of those I saw in actual use was 2016, at the Oregon Zoo.
My home HVAC system makes hot and cold air using the same unit depending on the needs of the house. I can set my thermostat to keep the interior temp within a certain window and the system does the rest. When I was a kid we had no AC and had an old Fisher woodstove for heat. We had to buck trees and chop up the rounds into cordwood each spring in anticipation for the coming fall. My grandmother had a whole-house AC unit installed sometime in the early 90’s and we all thought it was a marvel of the modern age. Now, when I feel hot or cold I push a button on the wall and the big boxy thing in the garage does the rest. Once that’s done I don’t worry about it for weeks at a time. And my average monthly power bill, in 2024, was lower than my parent’s average monthly power bill was in the mid-90’s even though they used wood heat. I also realize that my thermostat, what with its manual buttons and such, is yesterday’s tech. Smart thermostats can be controlled with a phone.
I can buy almost anything I want, from groceries to esoteric bits of hardware for a specialty project, from a website on my phone. Long gone are the days of tracking down a specialty retailer and making calls (on a phone that was attached to a box on the wall connected by a cord, natch) to find out if they can order it for you, and figuring out how to pay them, then driving halfway across the state to get said esoteric piece of whatever. I had to do that when I needed a door handle for my VW. What. A. Pain. In. The. Ass. Finding that part was. Today I could find one in probably 3 minutes on eBay, order it, and wait for it to show up at my house. All from my phone while sitting on my couch. I can pay for any of the above by clicking a button on my phone screen.
I was amazed when I could go to Office Depot, buy a piece of software on a single CD disk and install it on my computer. Now I’m amazed that I can buy the same software from a website and download it in minutes without ever leaving my house.
Medical technology. OMG. I’m amazed at how far it’s progressed just in the last couple of decades. Shelf-stable long-lasting insulin. Drugs like Ozempic for weight loss. CGM machines and CBG machines that require the tinniest, smallest blood sample to give a reading. New classes of chemotherapy drugs that are light-years more effective than ones a generation ago. Robotic assisted surgery. Electronic records: if I go to a mobile vaccine clinic hosted my employer and get a flu shot my PCP will have a record of it that afternoon. I can reorder my meds from an app on my phone. Mail-order meds (which the luddite in me does not trust but that I recognize are very popular and likely a godsend for home-bound or just extremely busy people).
So. I’m pretty amazed by how far tech has come just in my lifetime. There are a few things that bother me: I hate the subscription-based model we’ve moved to for things like software and certain car features. I wish cars still had ashtrays and manual transmissions. But in general, the day-to-day annoyances of life have been made marginally easier by modern technology. In the case of medical technology, modern advancements have been literal life-savers.
And I’m younger than many of the posters on this board so what’s old for me is likely not particularly old for many of you.