yogurtwrong
AsklemmyThe Nazis are back.
Last night my sister and I had a 90 minute conversation on our phones with full-colour, hi-res video, me in the UK, her in NZ. It didn't cost either of us anything. We're in our 70s, such a thing was unimaginable back in the day.
It cost you internet and your privacy. 🤗
Not your privacy if you can find an encrypted video chat software. I'm trying keet.io it's been solid
Not if they were using stolen wifi and Signal \s
In Johnny Mnemonic the upload in the brain was 320GB and he had to erase his childhood memories. Today it would be just a microSD. The story is set in 2021.
and yet we are told that it's too hard/expensive to add a 16 gb Video Cache to a consumer graphic card.
Uhh very, very, very different type of memory. You could try using a microsd card if you're happy with 10 spf I guess, I prefer measuring in fps though
10 spf is too low for me, I'll sunburn
Even the 1tb ones cost too much now. What, are data centers using those too??
Transferred demand.
SDDs and HDDs are too expensive, so people are using SD cards instead.
I think it's more that the companies producing flash storage have shifted their focus to ssds and therefore lowered the supply of SD cards ?
why not both?
Well let's see. I was a nerdy kid in the 70s, so I should be qualified for this. I have to say though, my wildest dreams set a pretty high bar. I dreamed of cities in space and in the oceans. And on land, we'd build giant fusion-powered arcologies modelled after the space cities that recycled everything we used. We'd spent most of our time in these cities connected by tunnelled maglevs while the rest of the world returned to a more natural state and became a giant wildlife/archaeological park.
But I'm trying to think of what would have blown my mind to learn about back then that actually happened. I think from a technological perspective, I never saw the marriage between computers and telecommunications becoming all that it is today. I had a vague idea of something like a video cell phone, but the idea that you could grab a movie off it from some distant giant computer complex and throw it up on a big screen in your home would've made me giddy. And just the quality of the image and the fidelity and depth of sound that could come out of tiny speakers would've been shocking. Sound systems were really, really shitty in the 70s. And TVs. Well, let's just say there was a reason you went to the cinema.
The science nerd in me would also have been blown away by discoveries made since the 70s. Birds are dinosaurs? There were real life hobbits running around on some island in Indonesia? There are ocean moons in our solar system? And if I showed up to explain all this to my kid self, he would not have believed my age when I told him. Medicine is keeping us younger now.
There are ocean moons in our solar system?
Just learned it from your post. That is absolutely mind-blowing!
https://xkcd.com/691/
Ultrabright LEDs
They were d a r k back then.
me (1999): I just want 1GB of ram and 1TB of hard drive, I can't see a world where more than that would be necessary.
We were ripping DVD's to 200mb divx at the time and an OTA cartoon might only be 25mb because SD+compression.
SDR (Software Defined Radio)
Its insane how many things you can do/listen to with a simple cheap USB stick.
https://blinry.org/50-things-with-sdr/
waow this is cool
psychedelics (LSD, MDMA, mescaline, psilocybin, etc) as antidepressants or PTSD treatment. It was demonized so hard during the 70s because the govt hates hippies.
Two income households that still can't afford a single-family home.
Mind blowing but not nerdy.
Full body virtual reality is cheap and affordable ($1-2K vs $145K in 1994 and $Millions in the 70s)
Full body?
👉👌
Full body allows you to move your arms and legs in VR. Joints are approximated using IK, and the more trackers one wears, the closer it approaches to film grade motion capture quality.
I don't think the 4tb micro SD card actually exists. They top out at 2tb which might be the maximum for the protocol. Your photo actually says SDHC which is clearly a mockup since SDHC was 32GB maximum. 4TB would have to be SDUC which is the level after SDXC. Sandisk announced a 4TB card last year but I don't think it was ever shipped, maybe due to the AI-driven shortage.
Partial AI slop: https://electronics.alibaba.com/buyingguides/4tb-microsd-card-reality-check-(2026)
Social media in general.
Watching a lot of stuff from the era, it seemed to completely miss the mark on how social media as a concept would work.
In the 80s, my nerdy friends were already having LAN parties and some of them set up BBS's over spare land lines, which were sort of like an early social media just for your immediate friend group but not connected globally or anything.
Fast forward to the present day, and one of said friends invited me to a discord that was modelled after his old BBS. It's actually active and fun to catch up with everyone who's found their way back.
Blue LEDs. We had red and green since the '60s, but blue took until the '90s to figure out and the guy who did so got a Nobel prize for it because that finally meant we could use them for white lights and full-color displays.
It's also opened the door to some very interesting synthetic chemistry applications that use blue light, it's changed the field of photochemistry
so that's the guy I can blame for blinding LED vehicle headlights?
I remember when the only color laser pointer was red. Now you have all the colors of the rainbow.
And damn powerful. So powerful you get almost every time wayyy more than allowed/advertised.
1980's nerd here.
I fly camera drones, sometimes for money. I can buy a DJI mini 3 for under $400 US, and it is capable of taking perfectly steady video and pictures even in a pretty good wind. It will also stay in one spot in midair for close to half an hour before the battery runs down.
And a DJI mini 3 is a cheap beginner camera drone.
Could you imagine showing a modern game console to someone from the 70s?
Pornhub, OnlyFans
Apparently, the invention of the VCR in the 80s brought an end to 70s porn cinemas, and this was one tech development few people regretted, including those employed by those establishments.
That's just curb crawling from home, home office for prostitutes.
I think people generally tend to underestimate technology levels from 50 to 100 years ago. For the most part, the biggest innovation of the last hundred years has been miniaturization rather than any one particular technological advancement. And frankly, I think that’s the answer to the question; People from the 70s wouldn’t necessarily be in awe of one particular technology, but they’d certainly be in awe of how much we’ve been able to fit into a tiny ass amount of space.
Honestly, I think they’d be more disappointed than excited. We have not been to Mars, we don’t have flying cars, and we don’t have computers that can think for themselves despite what LLM providers would have you think. Our 2001 looked nothing like that which was imagined.
Our 2001 had that tragedy
Everyone having a portable supercomputer that fits in their pocket that also has a network connection that allows for instantaneous global communications.
But it's obsolete, so they throw it away and buy a new one the next year.
Don't forget that it also has a digital watch and calculator build in. Two things that where always added to 1970s premium tech products :)
This is it, when you look at sci-fi from that era you rarely see the analog of our current “phones”
Vr is pretty damn cool IMO, also emulation.
The fact almost any computer after 2010 ish can basically play every single game made for every console ever up to probably ps1/ps2, is insane.
I'd imagine someone living in the 70s during the insanely fast computer power progress would have no problem believing that a newer system could emulate older system's code... Wouldn't be surprised that it was already happening back then.
Yep, for example, emulation was being used at IBM in the late 60's (and a descendant of it is still in use today, called z/VM): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/CMS
I'm still amazed by the fact that PS2 was backwards compatible with PS1 cause it had a PS1 module inside. Also, PS2 super slim was way too sleek, even for today's standards
using the PS1 CPU as the I/O processor when in PS2 mode, no less.
Yeah ps2 is just great. Still play it all the time.
Mine broke unfortunately
IIRC Alan Turing was the one who came up with the concept of emulation, so that's nothing new.
Damn, really? Dude was a treasure. And we treated him like shit.
Imagine showing VR porn games to Benjamin Franklin.
He'd never get anything done.
Cameras in general. Good quality film cameras took some work and were heavy. Like bookbag heavy. You’d have to carry a little set of filters (thin lens caps that screwed onto the main lens) in addition to another lens or two to get a good range of options. Now, tap, done. Copies? NP. Black and white? Tap. No need to use up the roll of color film and then switch to black and white film.
And modern mid-range photo cameras come with crazy features. Autofocus that can detect human and even animal eyes and instantly focus on those. Lenses with whisper-quiet and crazy fast ultrasonic focusing motors. Image stabilization both in the lens and in the camera.
Oh, and your photo camera can record video, too, because why wouldn't it?
Can't wait for this revolution in wildlife photography.
Cyberpunk 2077. Video game with Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba basically as themselves, and just the whole scope of the game. And the graphics.
the first implant doctors you meet in the tutorial is a lookalike from the Keanu Reeves movie Johnny Memonic.
Which is based on one of the early short stories from William Gibson. Who Mike Pondsmith took a lot of inspiration from when writing the first Cyberpunk rulebook.
Both of those actors were children in the 70s; can't imagine they were particularly big among nerds at the time
True, but Keanu Reeves started being an icon in the 80s, at least, but I really meant the game had real people in it. Not just voice acting (e.g. V doesn’t necessarily look like Cherami Leigh), but the character looks like the well known actor. It’s a line I don’t think gaming crossed before, to that level.
I can't believe nobody said Star Trek. In the 70s you had reruns of the original series and the animated series short run. TMP didn't come around until the end of the decade. I wasn't there, but I imagine a 70s trekky would be damn grateful to have all the Trek we have today and they'd probably even love Academy (All the older not chronically online fans I know rave about it).
Edit: regardless of your personal opinion on nu trek, the answer fits the question. A trek fan from the 70s would be blown away by having 13 series and 14 movies available to watch on demand, plus books, games, etc.
Oofta, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has a 4.6 on IMDb.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8622160/
What would TNG's first season have if it was standalone and came out today
Like a 6-7 probably
I dunno man, but probably better than that 😂
Well, now you can't say all the older not chronically online fans you know rave about it, because I'm older, not chronically online and I think it sucks.
Edit: I've just found out that "not chronically online" means "too incompetent to do shit online" so my apologies for misunderstanding. I thought it just meant, you know, not being online a lot. Like me. I've posted to Lemmy about 10 times in the past 5 days. I have literally no other social media accounts on the Internet. I was on Facebook for like a week in 2014 before I noped out. BUT! I can make an account on Lemmy, so my opinions about Star Trek are clearly only informed by being a chronically online mouth-breather.
"not chronically online". Has a Lemmy account.
The people I'm talking about would struggle with Reddit, let alone Lemmy. To paraphrase Lt. Commander Nella Daren; 'You're more online than you think you are."
my dad thinks it sucks
Personally, I'd go with 80s/90s nerds, as it would take a special kind of 70s nerd to understand digital storage enough to be wowed by a 4tb sd card.
Multi-gigabit network speeds being common in people's homes. 400mbps+ wifi speeds being common too.
4KUHD tvs and on your phone. Small B&W crt tvs were extremely common.
Bluetooth headphones, cords were a pain.
The more I say, the more I think, basically everything.
I regularly work with 800Gbps Ethernet at work
I just did the math on network speed the other day. I remember our local dial up ISP upgrading to 56k from 28.8 and it blew me away, although I rarely connected above 33.6. I'm currently on 1200 mbps, nearly 23,000 times faster than 56kbps and about 37,000x faster than the 33.6 I actually received.
I can transfer in one second what took about 10 hours before. A movie I just watched would have taken over 95 days to download at 90s speeds.
Yet now, basic websites take longer to load! Lol
For a reminder of how quick it could be :
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
Best site ever made! Haven't seen that one topped yet.
Love it! The main reason I use reader modes in browsers is so that they look like that website.
That website makes me feel seen.
My boy experienced lag for the first time about a year ago while playing fortnite. Another player was rubber banding about the place.
He looks at me and says "bro why is our internet so bad?"
I was legitimately amazed that he'd never seen that happen before, and equally surprised that I'd just sort of forgotten about it myself.
I have the opposite: at work, I found a Sony Memory Stick to Floppy Disk adapter (with CD driver disk). Yes, you plug a Memory Stick into a dummy floppy disk, then insert it into a 3.5” drive to transfer files to/from your peripherals. If literally anyone pings me tomorrow I will post the most cursed 2002 shit I’ve ever seen.
I wonder if there is a size limit? Could you just throw a 4TB drive on there and plug and play?
I’m not sure what standard of Memory Stick it supports up to, but definitely not in the TB range*… though now I’m wondering if I could get a Memory Stick and floppy drive expensed… Would love to see a multiple week file transfer estimate lol.
The oldest computer I think I have access to, though is an iMac G4, so if it won’t accept the driver disc and a modern floppy drive, we’d be out of luck.
*unless there’s some ridiculously unholy Memory Stick to SDXC adapter I’m blissfully unaware of…
I think the notion of a pocket-sized device that gives you instant access to virtually all the knowledge humanity has ever produced is hard to beat.
Quantum Leap (1989 TV series) had a similar, but less functional device.
Ziggy!!! We loved this show so much when we were kids.
That image has gotta be fake, right?
SDHC only goes up to 32GB and I'm pretty sure the successor SDXC only goes up to 2TB
I'm not quite sure how a card can be both U1 and U3 too
SD express should be able to surpass 2TB, but I don't know if 4TB micro SD express cards have been made yet
SDUC can get up to 128TB btw
Has an SD card with 4tb ever been produced? Idk and i doubt
They can print whatever size they want on it if you’re buying from AliExpress 🤪
Back in early days of Aliexpress, I was looking at a bike frame by Trek. I messaged the shop and ask if they stock Specialized as well. Shop replied “Yes, of course we can put whatever decals you want on it”.
You are 100% correct, there is no such thing as a 4TB SD card. Largest you can get is 2TB. Western Digital has shown a 4TB MicroSDUC and even 8TB SDUC card at shows and events, but I don't think it has found its way into production just yet. And with the extreme prices of flash these days, I doubt they will release it any time soon. The 4TB card would probably be $1500 - $2000 retail, who is going to buy that? And what is the use case?
The picture is some mockup someone made or maybe AI generated, but not of a real card.
It could be a real card from Temu. It's actually a 1 GB card, but it says it's 4TB.
You can actually store 4TB on most those cards (if you're ok with automated data deletion to make room)
Yep. It's a "write once, read never" storage medium.
/dev/null is the ultimate storage solution. You can write infinite bytes to it and it'll never get full or wear out!
WORM/WORN, small difference, I say ship it.
This guy's got upper management written all over him.
I'd say so, afaik they only go as small as a CF in 4TB.
i might get shade for it, but LLMs.
Nah, in the '70s they expected us to have stuff way better than LLMs by now.
I remember reading in the 80's, can't remember where (this 60's Time-Life book series, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Science_Library), where they were discussing the latest advances in training neural nets, and the idea that with a big enough net they could simulate the human brain. Maybe those Time books are on archive.org, I'll have to look for them sometime.
On Wikipedia it seems that research dates back to the 40's, but work was definitely in progress in the 50's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network_(machine_learning)
So for us old farts, LLMs (even though it's different technology obviously) seem more like "finally" because since Eliza we've been hearing and dreaming about it for ages. Too bad that the reality of them is so dark! And every movie and show tried to warn us: 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Ultimate Computer (Star Trek TOS), TRON, Terminator 2... but we thought "nah, that's just the movies".
Well maybe not crazier than their wildest imaginations since there's Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.
but certainly matching it.
This however, I think anyone from the 1970s would fail to describe what they're looking at first try..
I recently bought a JBL Trio everything in one box music thing.
It has the ability in almost real time, there's a bit of buffering, to unmix any music I stream to it from my phone. You can dial out vocals, the guitar, drums, etc.
Being able to separate the tracks in audio, let alone do it in basically real time, would have seemed like black magic in the 70s. Hell, it seems like black magic now.
Obviously first is cell phones giving pocket access to the internet. And, what those two together have done to us. Along with, yes we all have video phones in our pockets, which would NOT be a surprise, but we don't use it that way very much at all, preferring to text each other. That would be a big surprise.
Also, OnlyFans.
Having a portable device that can play any song you want still blows my mind. I had a Walkman as a kid and thought that was great but being able to listen to anything at the touch of a button is so next level
When I was a child my parents worried that microwave ovens would make their own food toxic, and told me TV would ruin my eyes. Now they sleep with a wireless super computer plugged in to a world wide-network, with a camera and lidar pointed at themselves around the clock.
What lidar device is pointing at them?
https://www.simplywise.com/blog/which-iphones-have-lidar/
TIL, iPhones have lidar...
Being able to look up and verify just about any fact in seconds via a magical device that fits in your pocket and only needs to be charged once a day, then never using it to do that.
I use it for fact checking all the time!
“Hey Chatgpt…”
You jest, but I used ChatGPT the other day to check a fact and it was right on!
"Hey ChatGPT, do AIs often hallucinate and just make shit up?"
At least it's honest... Until the context gets too long. Then it gets sick of chatting with us 🤷
Yes! I dunno if it's still reasonably possible, but I remember downloading a text copy of Wikipedia and thinking how cool that was. And earlier than that, back in the CD-ROM era (90s), digital encyclopedias were actually an exciting use of the technology and I was given one as a Christmas gift.
You can still download Wikipedia, the entire English version (as of 2022) is only 95GB (including images!)
Synthstrom Deluge. Sampler, sequencer, synthesizer, all in one and open source. Portable too, takes a 18650.
This video isn't solely a Deluge, but you get the sorta idea of what sort of power house this thing is in the hands of a music nerd.
Vaccines and advancements in medicine. Ozempic and its ability to bring down and counts. Etc etc.
Led mouse instead of trackball/mechanical mouse.
Or having a mouse at all. Even in the late 80's, mice were a luxury item. And those horrible resistive touch screens in the auto parts store were a nightmare compared to today's capacitive phone screens.
Light pens were cool, though.
We went from dumb terminals to personal computers, now were back to dumb terminals
Except now the dumb terminal (and even an iPhone) has even more compute power than supercomputers from the late 90s
I dont know, have you seen "space:1999"? I think some things would be a surprise, but i also think they would be like "what the hell? No flying cars? No end to cancer? Even more wars? People just watching short videos all god damn day and not actually being productive at all?"
A modern car would be pretty impressive to someone from the 70s, even without the ability to fly.
Is modern media, we have games and movies and shows with AI villains like Cain and GLaDOS. We used machines to create those villains. And even within the context of a generation, we are creating those villains.
Technology isn’t impressive, it just seems that way compared to how disappointing humans are.
The internet in general but also cellular and wifi wireless networks. Its like wizardry and black magic.
Polychromatic VDU.
who the fuck can afford that shit if you don't get scammed first 🤣
Laptops are so damn thin and light now. A MacBook Air M5 is just an insane thing to me when I saw it at Costco
Yeah MicroSD should've been replaced eons ago.
With what?
MicroSD express.
Nintendo Switch 2 is the only device I know uses it. Steam deck/machine needs it desperately. It would give similar performance to internal storage for cell phones.
According to cellphone companies, apparently non-removable storage
At least Johnny Mnemonic hasn't happened yet... although Neuralink seems to be trying.
Lol I physically recoiled when I read that. I know that's been a thing for a while, just still gets me. 4tb is a Lotta floppies.
Cloud services in general. Tech used to all be local, regardless of what it was. Everything cloud would blow the minds of people from the 70s. Though, we all know the tradeoffs these days
I might be misunderstanding, but dumb terminals are super old, dating back to the 60s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_3300). The idea of having your own personal computer, rather than time sharing, was very exciting to people. Like the Apple computer kit in the 70s, and the IBM PC in the early 80s. People wanted their own computer rather than having to rely on and pay for those centralized services. So I'd say that cloud services are more like a return to the bad old days rather than some exciting prospect.
Terminals existed in libraries even in the early 80s, probably earlier than that, to replace the card catalog. And to my knowledge each library didn't have a minicomputer or mainframe in it, as that would have been way too expensive. I think they were probably using either dial up or some kind of old connection to a mainframe in the city, but I'm just speculating.
