I haven’t taught in the classroom in about 10 years now, but I used to tell my students that the “marker” for me was that, when I was born, lasers didn’t exist. And now, in that classroom in the early/mid 90s, I owned several of them…
I remember putting my little Radio Shack cassette recorder in front of the tv and recording Star Trek episodes so I could listen to them again later. Man, piracy was tough back then.
I did that with the title song of 007 - In her Majesties Service (or whatever it was called, that one were JB gets married and his wife gets murdered. With that one-time JB… Lazenby or something)
I did that with a couple of reruns of Get Smart… Granted, that was during the early 1990s, so it was a bit of an anachronistic solution, but at that time portable video in our household meant staring at the tiny little black-and-white viewfinder on the camcorder. You just couldn’t lug a TV and VCR around as easily as you can a digital video player, or even a portable DVD player.
My elementary school days were spent on the cusp of the digital revolution. When I was in kindergarten, we studied the layout of the QWERTY keyboard, but when it came time to actually practice typing (in first grade), we didn’t have anywhere near enough computers (only two or three, at best, in the entire school), so we learned on the IBM Selectric typewriter. Also, the school didn’t even have a photocopier; we had a “ditto machine.” And this was in the capital city of the darned state! Granted, it was North Dakota…
When we moved back to Vermont, things got marginally better. My school had many more computers, and one of them even had a CD-ROM drive. There was even a Laserdisc player, but no one knew how to use it. Truth be told, most of the videos we watched were 35mm film strips with accompanying audio cassette narration.
Most of the film strips involved Bill Clinton talking about the Information Superhighway, and how it would usher in a new era of peace and prosperity by allowing us to play chess with Korean kids from the comfort of our own living room.
In my elementary school days we learned how to type on manual typewriters.
I bet yours were electric, though.
I learned on a cast-iron manual one that looked like something from Batman. I built up some biceps pulling the return bar.
Oh…and I guess it hit me when I found out I was living in a SyFy movie now. Sci-Fi no longer even exists.
Wow, living in a Sci Fi movie sounds fun! On the other hand, living in a SyFy movie sounds pathetic and sad. I’m sorry for you :( Watch out for the graboids, ninja zombies, and Milla Jovovich!
I haven’t been, but apparently the Shanghai Special Economic zone is terrifyingly modern since all the buildings and infrastructure are less than 10 years old.
Necro for future-living!
Today, I left my cell phone at work when I came home, and I had to make a phone call. The Horror! So, even though I don’t have any skype accounts or anything, I figured there had to be a free service that did something similar. So I look, yup, Google voice is free, I sign up, pair a bluetooth headset with my computer and am making free phone calls! Hooray!
It wasn’t that interesting really, but that was what impressed me when I thought about it. The sheer mundanity of using the interwebs plus a ludicrously tiny plastic earpiece to call a traditional phone line. I just assumed I could do it, and for free, and lo and behold I could.
The cell-phone related thing that gives me the strongest “holy crap we’re living in the FUTURE” moment is using SoundHound on my iPhone. At a bar: “What song is this?” “One sec.” whip out phone boop “Aha!”
Having the technology to listen to a 10-second snippet of a song in a loud location, audio thumbprint it, query a giant database housed gods-know-where in the ether to find a match, and get the result back in mere moments… and do it all with a device that’s about the size of a deck of cards – it blows my mind every. fucking. time.
It then saves it for future reference, which is also awesome! Gotta love Shazam!
And Google Voice on a Droid phone is awesome. Backup storage of texts and voicemail and able to call without the phone even being in the same state as me is =awesome=.
No, they were cast-iron manuals. No electricity anywhere. My Dad had electric typewriters in his office – IBM Selectrics with the golf-ball. Those were nice.
(EDIT: The ones I learned on in school looked something like this. Didn’t have 5 settings for strength, though, that I recall – I think they only had three. But otherwise, that kind of keyboard, that kind of mechanism, constantly getting jammed.)
Much later, we got a Brother daisy-wheel typewriter at home, and eventually a serial interface for it so we could use it as a printer with our TI-99/4a home computer. It was slow and noisy as hell compared to the Selectrics, but it got the job done, and the computer interface was a neat feature the Selectrics didn’t have (that I know of). But that was much later. Then, even later than that, we were able to get an Apple //e with a proper dot-matrix printer. It could type gray text in two different fonts with AppleWorks! And then there was The Print Shop…
This reminds me of a book we had to read for school, back in my elementary daze. It involved a set of high tech humans who lived in cities and had some sort of large mechanical device on the back of their heads and bodies that fed them information. The main character of the book gets lost in the wilderness and has his removed and learns to live without it.
But it’s funny mostly because the device was a knowledge repository, and now I think to myself, hey he had google on his back. Like a really large cellphone or something.
What’s hilarious is that the modern cell phone does all that, but is smaller than what is in that SF story. :D
The iPad. That is all.
Supreme Commander 2.
I mean, you know, I grew up playing video games and all. I did my fair share of Atari VCS Combat against my sister with the bouncing bullets and like that.
I enjoyed the hell out of Sublogic Flight Simulator on my Apple ][+.
And thirty fucking years later, when I want to geek out, I load up some of THIS motherfucking shit.
Fuck YEAH it’s the future!
I would like to address this one because no one did. It sounds like a joke, but this used to be a real thing. On old TVs you’d get maybe 4 channels (maybe you got PBS, maybe you didn’t). There were no remote controls for these TVs because they had manual knobs that tuned them. Sometimes the knobs would break and you’d be able to move the knob anyway, but sometimes it’d break almost completely and you couldn’t get a grip on the channel changing rod that the knob twisted. So you’d get a pair of pliers and change the channel by clamping the pliers to the rod and turning it.
Damn, that shit is old school. We had a few TVs like that. I remember the first TV that came with a remote, I was like “Whoah!” because it had buttons, not knobs.
Hell yes.
Well, there’s a thread about an implanted retinal chip that enables the blind to see elsewhere in this forum. Aesthetically, that’s ahead of Geordi La Forges’ rather large visor.
It would be great to see 30 year comparisons between all genres. Pitfall and Uncharted. 2d sprite shoot-em-ups and Bad Company 2. Racing games and Dirt 2. 3D Monster Maze and Aliens vs Predator. Colossal Cave and New Vegas.