This ought to stir things up a bit. The subject is how technology has actually changed over the course of your lifetime. I'll start it off with a few things and let others here run with it.
Portable telephones.
Then: In 1970 my father had a mobile telephone installed in his car for work. It had a regular rotary phone dial and a monster 35 Watt or so transceiver that took up a chunk in the rear of his station wagon. Full sized phone booths existed in any convenient spot.
Now: Virtually every working adult in the western world has a cellphone in his pocket. Phonebooths have vanished. Payphones only exist mounted on the front of convienience stores.
Video
Then: When I was a sophmore in high school in 1967, a black and white Ampex reel to reel video recorder was 2 foot by 2 1/2 foot by 18 inches and weighed probably 50 lbs or so. It recorded fair quality black and white video on 1" tape. Most all television stations were broadcasting in color by then and used machines that ran 2" tape although some 4" tape machines still existed at that time. Sometime btween then and now Sony revolutionized the broadcast industry with their 1" reel to real broadcast video recorder, then the commercial sized Beta cart tape using 3/4" tape.
Now: I possess a automotive key fob spy camera I can hold unoticed in my hand that shoots up to two hours of full color 720p HQ video onto a micro SD card that I can plug into the USB port of most any computer and burn the video over onto a $0.20 DVD which my printer will most impressively label for me.
Data Storage
Then: I have a sixties photo of a large forklift loading a miraculous huge IBM 5 MB storage unit onto a cargo airplane for shipment to some big buck industrial customer. Unit was about 7 foot wide by 3 foot deep by 6 to 7 feet tall and weighed probably a ton and a half.
Now: You probably coodn't tell if the guy next to you in line at McDonalds had a Terabyte shirt pocket drive in his pocket containing over 200 full DVD quality movies on it. I might typically have 4 or 5 movies on a tiny 16GB flash stick in my pants pocket. My portable MP3 player is woefully out of date and only holds about 15 albums worth of music to choose from on 1GB full sized SD chips.
Energy storage
Then: A typical Fat AA Nicad battery had a storage capacity of a whopping 400 mAh.
Now: A typical normal AA Nickle metal hydride rechargable battery has a storage capacity of 2500 mAh. 1000 mAh AAA cells are not uncommon.
Computers
Then: When I was again a sophomore in high school in 1967 the school district moving squad rolled in the latest greatest small IBM console computer to total up the grades for the year and I got to look over the shoulders of some of the Ham Radio club / electronics shop elite while they fed brain jarring math problems into this beast that was six feet long and two and a half feet deep and nearly three feet high and had its own IBM selectric style typwriter keyboard and printer unit. Wow! In abot 1975 or so I signed up for ten hours a month worth of computer time on a local university's Univac 1108 computer. Entering and running BASIC programs through old modified teletype units that whent "shook" on every keystroke. There were a whopping 10 terminals in a narrow strip room adjacent to a glass wall facing the beast. I recall there were at least five dial up lines available on campus at that time.
Now: The CPU in your smart phone is faster than the original Cray 1 supercomputer. Wouldn't match it for data width or I/O throughput but on math functions it would clean its clock!
I'll let others carry on from here.
Doc
Portable telephones.
Then: In 1970 my father had a mobile telephone installed in his car for work. It had a regular rotary phone dial and a monster 35 Watt or so transceiver that took up a chunk in the rear of his station wagon. Full sized phone booths existed in any convenient spot.
Now: Virtually every working adult in the western world has a cellphone in his pocket. Phonebooths have vanished. Payphones only exist mounted on the front of convienience stores.
Video
Then: When I was a sophmore in high school in 1967, a black and white Ampex reel to reel video recorder was 2 foot by 2 1/2 foot by 18 inches and weighed probably 50 lbs or so. It recorded fair quality black and white video on 1" tape. Most all television stations were broadcasting in color by then and used machines that ran 2" tape although some 4" tape machines still existed at that time. Sometime btween then and now Sony revolutionized the broadcast industry with their 1" reel to real broadcast video recorder, then the commercial sized Beta cart tape using 3/4" tape.
Now: I possess a automotive key fob spy camera I can hold unoticed in my hand that shoots up to two hours of full color 720p HQ video onto a micro SD card that I can plug into the USB port of most any computer and burn the video over onto a $0.20 DVD which my printer will most impressively label for me.
Data Storage
Then: I have a sixties photo of a large forklift loading a miraculous huge IBM 5 MB storage unit onto a cargo airplane for shipment to some big buck industrial customer. Unit was about 7 foot wide by 3 foot deep by 6 to 7 feet tall and weighed probably a ton and a half.
Now: You probably coodn't tell if the guy next to you in line at McDonalds had a Terabyte shirt pocket drive in his pocket containing over 200 full DVD quality movies on it. I might typically have 4 or 5 movies on a tiny 16GB flash stick in my pants pocket. My portable MP3 player is woefully out of date and only holds about 15 albums worth of music to choose from on 1GB full sized SD chips.
Energy storage
Then: A typical Fat AA Nicad battery had a storage capacity of a whopping 400 mAh.
Now: A typical normal AA Nickle metal hydride rechargable battery has a storage capacity of 2500 mAh. 1000 mAh AAA cells are not uncommon.
Computers
Then: When I was again a sophomore in high school in 1967 the school district moving squad rolled in the latest greatest small IBM console computer to total up the grades for the year and I got to look over the shoulders of some of the Ham Radio club / electronics shop elite while they fed brain jarring math problems into this beast that was six feet long and two and a half feet deep and nearly three feet high and had its own IBM selectric style typwriter keyboard and printer unit. Wow! In abot 1975 or so I signed up for ten hours a month worth of computer time on a local university's Univac 1108 computer. Entering and running BASIC programs through old modified teletype units that whent "shook" on every keystroke. There were a whopping 10 terminals in a narrow strip room adjacent to a glass wall facing the beast. I recall there were at least five dial up lines available on campus at that time.
Now: The CPU in your smart phone is faster than the original Cray 1 supercomputer. Wouldn't match it for data width or I/O throughput but on math functions it would clean its clock!
I'll let others carry on from here.
Doc
Telephones
Then: for most of my childhood (in the 1960's) we did not have a house phone. We had to walk down the road to the bus station to use a phone booth for outgoing calls. No incoming calls!
Now: I have a mobile but I don't always bother to carry it around with me.
Computers
Then: In the late 1970's we could run an entire power station using just one PDP-11 16-bit minicomputer. It had 64k core memory, and 5Mb of disc storage (14 inch platters?). Clock speed was probably a few MHz, using TTL logic on huge PCBs.
Later: Floppy discs, Winchester discs (what everyone now calls hard discs), MOS memory, CMOS logic. We needed a network of 10-20 computers, each with 4MB memory, to run a power station. Then along came the IBM PC with DOS - about the worst computer design I have ever seen! I was horrified at the thought of letting non-IT people use such an unfriendly system.
Energy storage
Then: No NiCads or alkaline cells. Just zinc-carbon, and lead-acid.
TV
Then: two VHF channels, 405-lines, black and white, all valves. 625-lines on UHF and PAL colour appeared when I was still in school.
Then: for most of my childhood (in the 1960's) we did not have a house phone. We had to walk down the road to the bus station to use a phone booth for outgoing calls. No incoming calls!
Now: I have a mobile but I don't always bother to carry it around with me.
Computers
Then: In the late 1970's we could run an entire power station using just one PDP-11 16-bit minicomputer. It had 64k core memory, and 5Mb of disc storage (14 inch platters?). Clock speed was probably a few MHz, using TTL logic on huge PCBs.
Later: Floppy discs, Winchester discs (what everyone now calls hard discs), MOS memory, CMOS logic. We needed a network of 10-20 computers, each with 4MB memory, to run a power station. Then along came the IBM PC with DOS - about the worst computer design I have ever seen! I was horrified at the thought of letting non-IT people use such an unfriendly system.
Energy storage
Then: No NiCads or alkaline cells. Just zinc-carbon, and lead-acid.
TV
Then: two VHF channels, 405-lines, black and white, all valves. 625-lines on UHF and PAL colour appeared when I was still in school.
Post WWII Germany I recall telephones with hand-cranks and manually operated switchboards.
Once or twice a year Philips would set-up a big screen in the town sqaure and project movies and news. Oh, how I remember the Philips Logo stickman. 100s of People would stand and watch for hours
The first actual TV I saw was early 50s when Germany won the socker match against Hungary(?)
Bycicles had carbite powerd headlamps and the conversion of the 150VDC mains to 220VAC had begun.
Oh yeah, the good old days! Don't miss them a bit! E
Once or twice a year Philips would set-up a big screen in the town sqaure and project movies and news. Oh, how I remember the Philips Logo stickman. 100s of People would stand and watch for hours
The first actual TV I saw was early 50s when Germany won the socker match against Hungary(?)
Bycicles had carbite powerd headlamps and the conversion of the 150VDC mains to 220VAC had begun.
Oh yeah, the good old days! Don't miss them a bit! E
We had 8 watt per channel tube amps and played music on turntables. Oh wait - that was the audio show last week.
I was young when we had dial up internet. And Windows 98. It would take several hours to download a seriously compressed piece of music. And the connecting noises! Oh, I miss those. I might actually record those, just for nostalgia.
Now I play the latest games on a budget laptop, over wireless internet. I can stream music (and video) faster than I can watch it.
I have a small handheld device that has 32Gb of storage for my music, that can host a face-to-face video call with sound. The battery will last for a week. It has wireless internet access that enables me to share photos and videos with friends that can view them at their own leisure, from anywhere in the world.
The future will be an interesting place.
Chris
Now I play the latest games on a budget laptop, over wireless internet. I can stream music (and video) faster than I can watch it.
I have a small handheld device that has 32Gb of storage for my music, that can host a face-to-face video call with sound. The battery will last for a week. It has wireless internet access that enables me to share photos and videos with friends that can view them at their own leisure, from anywhere in the world.
The future will be an interesting place.
Chris
The research I did for my Ph.D., earned in 1988, flying to all over the world to go to libraries, reading hundreds of thousands of pages to find little nuggets of information took 3 years.
today with search engines, I've estimated it would take five weeks to gather the same volume of information...
today with search engines, I've estimated it would take five weeks to gather the same volume of information...
It occurs to me, though, that in many ways we have reached the logical conclusion of a lot of this stuff. When a thumbnail-sized full HD camcorder costs $10, the limiting factor is no longer the price or size, but the fact that you only need one (if at all), and don't even have the time to use it, anyway. The same for being able to carry 10000 hours of video around in a sugar cube-sized player with microscopic 1080p LCD that runs for a year between recharges: it would hardly change my life at all. Once we got to CD & DVD, colour TV, digital camera, Pentium PC all available for a couple of hundred GBP or USD, the limiting factor became the time we had available to use them. The biggest technological change in my life compared to 20, 30, 40 years ago is the internet (and I could use a very modest early 90s PC quite easily for that). I'm not holding my breath for anything else really revolutionary to come along before civilisation finally destroys itself!
Well they do say that combined shampoo and conditioner is nanotechnology. It's a start, I suppose.
The first computer I ever programmed was a DECsystem-10 which we could access via a telephone line. The modem was about half the volume of a microwave oven. It connected to the phone via an acoustic coupler and ran at an astonishing 300baud. The user interface was an ASR-33 Teletype.
The first micro I programmed (via binary switches) I believe had a clock speed around 1MHz although its instruction rate was slower. In those days RAM sizes were measured in bits (1k being typical) and byte-wide was practically unheard of. You needed two nibble wide chips side by side. The next generation hardware allowed storage via cassette tape, running at 300baud. However the software to load/store to cassette wasn't built in, you had to type it in manually using a hex keyboard. Display was on an 8 digit LED as used in the hand-held calculators of that era.
Speaking of calculators, my first was a 'Sinclair Cambridge' which my father bought for me as a Christmas present. It cost the princely sum of UKP32.95. A year or so later I built a 'Sinclair Scientific' from a kit at half that price. This calculator was the first I'd seen which could deliver transcendental functions. But they were not very accurate - my four-figure sin/cos/log tables were better. In addition the internal calculations to reach these answers were not too speedy - the display would blank for a few seconds and this time wasn't fixed. Different input values gave different blanking times. I spent ages exploring these variations and eventually found some numbers that left the display blank indefinitely. 😀
The first micro I programmed (via binary switches) I believe had a clock speed around 1MHz although its instruction rate was slower. In those days RAM sizes were measured in bits (1k being typical) and byte-wide was practically unheard of. You needed two nibble wide chips side by side. The next generation hardware allowed storage via cassette tape, running at 300baud. However the software to load/store to cassette wasn't built in, you had to type it in manually using a hex keyboard. Display was on an 8 digit LED as used in the hand-held calculators of that era.
Speaking of calculators, my first was a 'Sinclair Cambridge' which my father bought for me as a Christmas present. It cost the princely sum of UKP32.95. A year or so later I built a 'Sinclair Scientific' from a kit at half that price. This calculator was the first I'd seen which could deliver transcendental functions. But they were not very accurate - my four-figure sin/cos/log tables were better. In addition the internal calculations to reach these answers were not too speedy - the display would blank for a few seconds and this time wasn't fixed. Different input values gave different blanking times. I spent ages exploring these variations and eventually found some numbers that left the display blank indefinitely. 😀
Annnnnnnnnd it took foreeeeeeeeever to print out the naked ladies on the old ASR 33's - the 9 pin dot matrix printers were a real advancement!!! 😀😀😀
Member
Joined 2009
This quote from Lenard Audio really gets me:
"Academics of history (who do not understand technology) often believe that social change is a result of political influence. From the 1930s onwards, electronic technology that enabled amplified sound to exist transformed political and social history. Without amplified sound there could not have been a 3rd Reich."
Lenard Audio - Education - Guitar Valve Amps.
"Academics of history (who do not understand technology) often believe that social change is a result of political influence. From the 1930s onwards, electronic technology that enabled amplified sound to exist transformed political and social history. Without amplified sound there could not have been a 3rd Reich."
Lenard Audio - Education - Guitar Valve Amps.
Member
Joined 2009
Yeah but they relied on Centronics parallel interfaces which were several orders of magnitude faster than 300baud. Can you imagine how slow a dot matrix printer would be, fed over a 300baud serial line?😱😱😱
I am more interested in the stuff we don't yet have, like in "the future, it's a thing we still have to make happen".
vac
vac
Pardon me for mentioning the elephant in the room, but I remember a time before subjective reviews existed, and when anybody who suggested that listening 'tests' should supplant measurement would have been laughed into shame.
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