I feel like that era transpired 40 years ago. The period of time before smartphones feels like it happened in the 1970's to me.
The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief.
I can't help thinking about further back, too. Just imagine how it felt to live around the turn of last century! Planes, [newer] trains, and automobiles! Electricity, plumbing, underground subway transportation. Hygienic medicine. Vaccines. Telegraphs reaching out overseas and powering thousands of morning daily papers; becoming a commodity instead of luxury. Radical industry/political reforms, striking poverty, unimaginable wealth, obscene pollution. Women's suffrage. Radio, traveling circuses and vaudeville, mass consumerism, magazines, torpedos, and a world war. Oh my!
Looking through my great-grandfather's scrapbook (he lived outside Detroit) is absolutely mind-blowing. The stuff he (and especially his father) saw are hard to put into a continuous world. His letters describing the "number of autoes" he passed on the way to visit relatives bleeds giddiness and awe.
In computer science we are similarly privileged. We've gone from basic ideas of transistors and turing machines to having a global network of interconnected supercomputers in our pockets.
And I'm saying that this is highly subjective and/or controversial.
There are tons of beautiful 80s and 90s electronics devices.
On the other hand though, I still feel like the analog computers they used back in the day are technologies from the future, not from the past.
Edit: I guess the point is that most of the tech products available at home in the 90's were completely absent in the 60's. There were ancient-looking telephones, TVs and radios but no old ancient-looking walkmans, cell phones, PCs, gameboys, VCRs, modems or web sites.
And for all the joys of smartphone browsing on the go and novelty of proximity based search which doesn't involve typing postcodes, I just logged into a popular uh... people-meeting service that fundamentally hasn't changed design since earlier than 2004, and it was dated-looking then.
For a very long time Facebook was just mostly static pages with a list of friends and a "wall" your friends could write on, and maybe, IIRC, photo upload. That's it! It was literally that boring!
Uploading a new profile pic deleted your old one, even. That being said, you could still use Facebook to contact people, if they included their phone number or AIM name, which was accessable to anyone in your college. I was contacted several times this way before Facebook chat/message/whatever else.
I remember when the "mini feed" feature was released, and all it did was list your last 5 or so activities. That was controversial.
The current Facebook shares very little resemblance to the original version, it's very, very fundamentally different from 2004 Facebook.
...yet the original version still got popular.
That being said, the first time. I heard about Facebook was one of those college publications like this one. I wish I could read it today but it was just a student publication that was printed on regular paper and put around campus every once it a while. I remember reading it and being baffled as to why it would be popular. Shortly after that the person I was dating at the time asked me to sign up. That is the only reason I did!
It wasn't that late. At early as 2005, there was a form with the prompt "John Doe is:" and you had to squeeze whatever thoughts you needed your friends to know into that format.
First of all, mini-feed launched in Sep, 2006, according to a TechCrunch post from that time. That was the real time Facebook started to be anything near what it is today, and certainly well before status updates.
I first noticed people using status updates in March 2008, how do I know month and year, you ask? because there was serious shit going on on my life at the time. And I remember reading "X is blah blah blah" for the first time while I was going through my shit. It was new enough to notice. I'll conceed that the "status feature" may have existed a year before I really noticed it, so we are still at early 2007 two years earlier than 2005.
I also do recall the criticism of "you're copying Twitter" as a sibling posted.
I remember using the brand new Facebook chat about April or May 2008, FWIW.
edit: 2006, not 2016.
It's especially weird when I see people roll their eyes or laugh at someone say my grandmother's age referring to it as "the facebook", because to them its quaint and elderly, and I'm tempted to break out the "get off my lawn, that's what it has always been called" speech... Internet history is weird.
there was one screen where you could check on who's online, then you'd write on their wall
The wall was mostly equivalent to scrawling something in a public bathroom, hence the name.
Still remember ATT Mobile in early 2001 had a "find me" service you could use to find your friends. It was like a messenger app you logged into and then it would show you where your friends were located on a google maps interface. Then you could text or chat with him.
They used the example of a guy who wins some concert tickets and wants to invite his friends that are nearby. It showed him logged in and then bringing up the messaging interface and showing three friends all within a few block radius. He sends out a group text about the tickets and they agree to meet at the bar in 15 minutes. I really thought it was a clever use of GPS and felt this was really the future of "smart" phones.
I tried to sell that shit to everybody I knew and everybody instantly freaked about their phone transmitting where they were and how it would violate their privacy, etc, etc.
I guess times have changed huh?
Maybe we're the dinosaurs.
According to WHO, measles caused 2.6 million deaths a year before 1980, but only 134 200 in 2015. Polio dropped from 350 000 cases in 1988 to 74 in 2015.
It's surprising Holt could still get away with writing "Cornell girls are hideous" as late as 2004!
Stanford really wasn't a concern, they're on the other coast. Though, this was from afew years after my time.
The first movie I watched on my GearVR headset was called Strange Days, a 1995 film rather aptly about the introduction of Virtual Reality and how the government is involved in all sorts of dirty cover-ups. The movie was terribawesome, but it was amusing to see what 90's ideas of the future were getting right and wrong.
Though, the time between 1995 and 2015 is almost a whole generation, so I don't know why I'm surprised that I'm seeing the dreams of the past realised quite literally before my eyes. Does this mean I'm old, now?
Written by James Cameron and directed by his then-wife Kathryn Bigelow. It's such a great movie. And has a great track by Peter Gabriel at the end as well!
The interesting thing about it, in relation to this thread, is that they consciously tried not to extrapolate too far technologically (apart from the whole record all your experiences thing); in fact, pretty much the only noticeable advance is speech to text translation on voicemail.
Some legit stupid outfits as well. Very 90s-cool...
Compared to today's superhero movies?
The music is contrived and laughably bad, so while you might really want to imagine the profound tragedy of losing the artist while being a fan of the music, your just left with blah.
Hackers and Johnny Pnemonic (ostensibly from the same essential genre or style and period) are more fun to watch, simply because those movies don't frame the story arc as supposedly shocking and worrisome, even though they suck probably just as much.
With Strange Days, your supposed to care about something for some odd reason.
That never stopped chart-topping artists...
I actually thought the 'rapper' had some decent-power beat poetry going on, and measured up favourably against real-world artists (talk about backhanded compliments...)
If the producers were not willing to cast a known artist, and granting creative freedom to compose real music, which would then be included on the official motion picture sound track, it's assuredly contrived, although it might be appealing.
Further driving this fact home is that, the actor cast in the role did not further his career as a musician, and no one claims credit for composing authentic music. This is a telling clue that it was composed expressly as a believable, high-quality prop. The people who made it were paid specifically to craft the music to fill the space required for the plot of the movie.
Now, take authentic music from other movies, which has been composed by a career musician, which then gets used as part of a sound track years later. It comes through, as obviously good, because it's selected for its high quality, as a known quantity.
Similarly, observe career musicians that have played roles in movies. Even if their acting sucks, usually their musical contributions still shine.
When examined in this way, the cheesey nature of the prop music is evident. This sort of perception is tough to balance, when asking people to suspend disbelief for the duration of the movie. It's hard to pull someone into the world of a movie, and then ask them to be impressed by someone who is not famous, and show them a world that is moved by his music when the music isn't truly moving.
Beyond that, we weren't even permitted to become emotionally invested in the character. Even though the circumstances of his demise are villified, there's no depth to his martyrdom because we don't bond with the character. We bond with the underground experience brokering brain-hacker main character. This is where the movie falls short, with respect to the weak cover-up conspiracy theory.
"A car phone is a mobile phone device specifically designed for and fitted into an automobile. This service originated with the Bell System, and was first used in St. Louis on June 17, 1946."
I don't disagree, it does feel very surreal to reflect on life in the 1990s. But put in context, a lot can happen in 15 years. I mean, imagine living through the era 1930 to 1945. From the days of flappers and the Charleston to Nazism and atomic bombs.