I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime...

I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (Full Version)

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jlf1961 -> I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/10/2013 12:19:59 PM)
Seriously, I never really thought about it, but technology has come a long ways. The first color TV my family bought was 4 feet wide, 3 high and 2 deep. It took four men to bring it in to the house and it was considered a piece of furniture. I remember the first moon landing, hell I remember some of the Gemini missions. I remember when the 747 was considered state of the art in air travel. But what really brings it home was this image. [image]local://upfiles/622970/07E5467410EF4B75B51D99F39B8B958B.jpg[/image]

jlf1961 -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/10/2013 12:21:08 PM)
try this again [image]local://upfiles/622970/0F99E890E66443989BDA68478D824FE5.jpg[/image]

MercTech -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/10/2013 12:36:51 PM)
Tell me about it. As an undergrad I got some work study money for helping do a 1 meg upgrade to the college mainframe. We had to solder in 128k sockets into a custom made circuit board. These days my phone has more memory and computing power than that IBM 360 ever dreamed of having. But, it was my grandfather that really saw the changes. He was a teenage doing a grocery run in a calf drawn cart when he saw his first automobile... had calves and cart charge off the road into the swamps along a creek. He lived to see men walk on the moon and his grandson operate nuclear submarines.

needlesandpins -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/10/2013 12:40:33 PM)
the other day I thought my mp3 player was broken. it's a tiny Philips square 4gb that is handy for the car. so there I was looking at potential new ones and thinking how big they are compared to my little thing. then I had to remind myself that our first music player at home when I was a kid was a vintage chest record player that took up a huge part of the living room! it really does make you realise just how much we take for granted sometimes. my son was taking about the central heating that will soon be in use. something that he takes for granted. he doesn't remember what it's like to have ice in leaf shapes on the insides of the windows and no running hot water. needles

DesFIP -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/10/2013 1:26:29 PM)
My great grandfather drove a horse and wagon collecting rags and bones in the alleys of Baltimore. His daughter went from that to seeing the moon landing, something that would have been unimaginable in her youth. Talk about culture shock.

Exidor -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/10/2013 1:42:22 PM)
Winston Churchill was a grown man when the Wright Brothers made their first flight in 1905, and lived to see the Russians drop the first probe onto Venus. He was a child when Edison invented the record player, and lived to see the Beatles on television, which, along with radio, was developed within his memory. He was a child when the first silent movies were shown. He was retired when 3D motion pictures came out in the 1950s. Yeah, he lived well into his nineties, but it was a whole lifetime with the button jammed into Fast Forward.

LafayetteLady -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/10/2013 2:28:00 PM)
The computer technology has of course advanced dramatically. I find it amusing that thing like MP3 players and cell phones started out large, then went tiny ad are now getting large again. Since I was a child, telephones have gone from dials, busy signals and ridiculous long distance costs to digital, call waiting, pay one price. Cable television didn't exist and of course we basically had 3 networks only; CBS, NBC and ABC. MTV, FX & CNN were maybe someone's pipe dream. No one wore seat belts or heard of car seats. Microwaves weren't in every home and they were HUGE. DVDs' didn't exist and I was a teen when VHS and Beta came out. Of course you could go see the latest movie AND buy popcorn fo abou 3 bucks, much less for matinees or specials.

kalikshama -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/10/2013 2:54:08 PM)
The first computer I used was a Z-100. Two 5" floppy drives; no hard drive. [image]http://retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/z100hp.jpg[/image] 10 years later I was using a 1 MB hard drive. The one I have today is 1 TB.

getoutnow -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/10/2013 2:59:57 PM)
If anyone wants to know what the next real change wave is coming. Google singularity or ray kurzweil. Man will merge with machine. We'll all be connected one way or another. There will be people electing to have arms and legs cut off because the bionic counterparts for sale are much better, stronger than what we are born with. Don't believe me? There are already artificial limbs that a person can get tactile feedback from. It's early stages but in 5 years we'll get hands that can truly feel. We already have contact lenses which give HUD (head up displays) to special forces in combat, they are already developing eyes to be implanted into the blind. Soon there will be another type of class, those with enhancements and those without.

Rule -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/10/2013 5:05:52 PM)
Will they be able to regrow our teeth? Will they be able to cure herpes? What about corns?

Zonie63 -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/10/2013 6:09:14 PM)
I remember the Moon landing. Our neighbors came over to watch it because we had a color set. Somewhere around the same time, we got an electric typewriter. That was kind of a big deal, too, as a lot of people were still using manual typewriters. And when I got an IBM Selectric with a built in correcting ribbon, I thought it was just the greatest thing. Having to correct typos was a bit of a hassle, but it's only a quaint memory now. Making a long distance telephone call was kind of a process, too. But at least we were lucky enough to not have a party line, like my uncle and a few other people we knew. And there was only one phone company. Turning the ringer off was not an option, and you couldn't even unplug the phone from the wall. No caller ID, no answering machines, no screening of calls. Quite a lot of advancements. On the other hand, some things haven't advanced all that much. Plumbing, for example. A toilet is still a toilet, and toilet paper is still the same. You'd think we'd have advanced to using the three seashells by now, but some things still remain basically the same. [;)] Strangely enough, back in those days, we actually thought we'd be further along by the 21st century than we actually are now. Since the Moon landings went so well, they were predicting that we'd already be on Mars before the year 2000. That never panned out. And what about those hovercars we were supposed to have by now?

slavekate80 -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/10/2013 8:00:40 PM)
My first video game console was the Atari 2600. Officially, it was my dad's, but I played with it more than he did, especially in the summer. You can play much more advanced games on a cell phone now. Wow, on the 1979 vs 2013 image. That's about my lifespan so far - well, I was born in 1980, but I existed for part of 1979. That's another major technological advance, actually. Some medical developments since then are amazing. I looked up some info, morbidly curious about what my chances of survival would have been if I was born in 13 weeks early near the end of '79. Different answers, ranging from "about zero" to "not good." A baby born 13 weeks early today, with immediate access to intensive care, will live 80-90% of the time with only about a 10% chance of serious disability.

Zonie63 -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/10/2013 9:11:17 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: kalikshama The first computer I used was a Z-100. Two 5" floppy drives; no hard drive. I remember using something like this: [image]http://oldcomputers.net/pics/trs80-i.jpg[/image] The tape recorder was the disk drive. You had to put a cassette tape in to load the program you wanted to use. And to think that, once upon a time, this stuff was considered the latest thing. I remember when "Pong" was really popular because there was nothing really like it before.

jlf1961 -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/10/2013 9:29:44 PM)
This was my first computer A TI99/4A [image]local://upfiles/622970/CA80C016548740B1B7434E81B8E95E68.jpg[/image]

DonGiovani -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/11/2013 1:34:22 AM)
Undergrad FORTRAN programming class. Had to manually write out the programs lines, then wait hours in a hot, cramped computer lab for a terminal to type out those lines into punch cards. Take said (hundreds of) cards to monitor in a cardboard tray so they could be run through the schools computer. After another hour or so, if you were lucky, you got back a punch paper print out with your program dot-matrixed printed out on it. If you weren't, you got your cards back to sort through them and find the reason it wouldn't fly. If you were really unlucky, you or another student froze up the system in an endless loop that took another hour or two to sort out. Good times.

ivone57 -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/11/2013 1:37:37 AM)
i remember the secretaries in school having typewritters and that was super cool.... or when cell phones first came out how big and bulky they were.... technology has change immensly since i was a lil girl... watching rocky and bullwinkle on the black and white television, hearing about the rich people in town getting a television that had color, have a drill at school where we got under our desks etc... i am dating myself huh

Hillwilliam -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/11/2013 5:32:57 AM)
I remember the first time I accessed the internet. I was an undergrad doing a literature search for a project I was working on out at the marine lab on tuna fisheries in '82. It cost me $10/hour. the good news is that there were very few forum trolls and online findommes back in those days. [8D]

Zonie63 -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/11/2013 6:03:43 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: jlf1961 This was my first computer A TI99/4A Interesting thing about computers is how we generally perceived them back in those days and how they might operate. Imagine if computers turned out to be something like this. On a Star Trek forum I used to post in, someone observed that no one ever uses a term like "memory banks" anymore. Their vision of computers in the future was something that involved verbal interaction, which is possible nowadays, but I can see where a lot of people may not want others to hear what they're doing on the computer.

Moonhead -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/11/2013 7:23:37 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Rule Will they be able to regrow our teeth? Will they be able to cure herpes? What about corns? When the evil foreskinless bankersa stop banning stem cell research, they will.

PeonForHer -> RE: I never really considered how far technology has come in my lifetime... (9/11/2013 7:41:33 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Rule Will they be able to regrow our teeth? Will they be able to cure herpes? What about corns? You could sing that as part of a new verse in 'Que Sera, Sera', Rule. Just saying. It's probably time I got some fresh air.

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