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Comment by losteverything | Hacker News Reader

I need perspective

At peak, how many landline phones (residential) were there? Peak: printed newspaper readership worldwide? Peak: tv viewership (like july 20, '69)

How many people have electricity? Water?

How many active smartphones in use today?

How many machines run any MS OS?

How many worldwide automobiles?

At first it seems like Gomer "Gol-ly" but not really.

View on HN

World Cup 2014 probably beats July 20, 1969 as far as pure viewership numbers go

Edit: 600 million watched the moon landing [1], 3.2 billion watched the World Cup [2]

[1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/5852237/Apollo... [2]: http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/news/y=2015/m=12/news=2014-fifa...

Amazing to me that 3.2 billion people could be watching the same thing at once while I have no awareness at all that it's happening.

Let me rephrase it: amazingly there is (at least) 3.2 billion people having no awareness of you ;)

After your links id ask another way: how many FB ers are on at the same time?

1.16 billion landline phones in 2013 per Wikipedia (CIA world factbook reported 1.26b in 2003; either is likely a roughly good peak global number, a solid mix between high globalization development (eg China & India had started to get large enough economically to install plenty of landlines) and pre high-level cellphone dominance in the developing world):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landline

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