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Comment by thesagan | Hacker News Reader

Now that you put it that way, man... things have changed.

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.

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The really weird thing is how actual technology in movies from the 80's and 90's looks so much worse to people in 2017 than technology in moves from the 50's and 60's looked to people in the late 90's.

Orville Wright (of the Wright brothers) went from developing early airplanes to seeing the development of international travel and the jet engine. He lived until 1948 and his last flight was in a Lockheed Constellation[1]

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Constellation

I don't disagree, I'm just saying that there is a certain design ugliness that seems to be unique to turn of the century technology.

>I'm just saying that there is a certain design ugliness that seems to be unique to turn of the century technology.

And I'm saying that this is highly subjective and/or controversial.

There are tons of beautiful 80s and 90s electronics devices.

Totally agree, it is hugely subjective.

Quite interesting that super-sonic flight was achieved 1946. I don't know if Orville was informed, but imagine that - from barely flying to supersonic in 40 years.

There is an often-quoted truthoid that says that any technology takes 50 years from inception to maturity.

Seems to work for big scientific theories as well, more or less. Although an alternative explanation is that after 50 or so most of the original group of people driving the development will be gone, and as a result you end up with several loosely connected but separate developments. Which isn't really a sign of maturity, but merely a lack of coherence.

23 more years and we were on the moon!

> The really weird thing is how actual technology in movies from the 80's and 90's looks so much worse to people in 2017 than technology in moves from the 50's and 60's looked to people in the late 90's.

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.

I think I've been cured of this bias by seeing a lot of videos of analog modular synthesizers, which share the patch-cable programming techniques of analog computers. Analog systems can do some interesting things, and they have a nice physicality to them. The noise, instability, feedback, and imperfections in analog synthesis have an aesthetic appeal that has only matured with time. In ease of programming, though, simple imperative code feels like a huge release - you can actually follow the execution flow top to bottom, and the syntax makes it trivial to define many mathematical ideas.

For more on analog synthesizers and systems, the documentary "I Dream of Wires" is highly recommended, and available on Netflix streaming.

Does it? If that's the perception, it seems unwarranted to me.

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.

I was in a flight yesterday and thought about that. Our generation is crazy, but then I've always taken flying for granted, I've flew airplanes all my life. I can't imagine how it must have been for people before me to discover these huge things that could transport you km away.

I wonder if community was more central to life back then. With the world being so large I'd speculate/imagine that "place" and the people in that place were more unique. Maybe more intimate at times.

I see what you mean, communication must have been so hard back then.

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