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Comment by broth | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to ponder the feats in technological advancement that were made in short periods of time in the 20th century. For example, in 1948 when the transistor was first revealed by Bell Labs to 1969 when mankind landed on the moon. Around 20 years. That's pretty amazing.

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I think that’s the case with most new technology. The first steps are very fast but then innovation goes much slower. You can see that for example in computing. PCs made a lot of fast progress until sometime in the 90s and then things stagnated. The same probably for cell phones. The last five years or more saw only incremental improvement. Nothing revolutionary.

> PCs made a lot of fast progress until sometime in the 90s and then things stagnated.

Transistor densities increased 2 orders of magnitude (~100x) between 1995 and 2005. Integer operations were a little less, maybe 1.5 oom, over the same period. When you say that PCs stagnated over that period, in what context did you mean?

They didn’t become much more useful. I mean that in the same sense that a car from 1950 and a car from today are not that much different. Yes the modern car is much better but the big jump was to be able to move from one point to another quickly which was achieved with cars from 1950 or earlier. Same for cell phones. Having a 3G connection and GPS was a huge step but since then I don’t see much revolutionary change.

I get your point, but Amazon, Google, Netflix, zillions of web forums, Facebook, AirBnB, Craigslist, Google Maps, NextDoor, DoorDash, Google Photos, all the messaging apps, and many other services all post-date 1995. In terms of how I live vs. how my parents lived, basically all the major changes are because of the Internet, and most happened in the last 15 years.

Well, apart from Amazon to some extent (we'll find out in twenty years), none of the others have fundamentally altered our lifestyles. Eg: Google -- searching the interwebs is a crazy fantastic capability... But most people aren't really using to live their lives any differently from twenty years ago.

I think YouTube (and possibly Facebook) might be among the only other web services having significant qualitative impact on people's lives. Maybe Uber/Lyft for an American audience used to owning cars.

I don't know, dude. The computer in my pocket changed my life pretty significantly. Don't forget that right now we are teaching cars how to drive themselves. Soon internet will soon be shot at us from satellites in orbit which were put there by rockets which had computers powerful enough guide them to land.

Agreed, though I think there were 2 jumps with cell phones, the original mass produced ones circa the late 1990s, and then smart phones circa 2007-2008.

Also this: https://www.tnhh.net/posts/google-maps-insane-backward-compa...

A 1995 laptop would have been incredible sci-fi future-tech in 1975. A 2015 laptop, on the other hand, is bascially just a thinner, faster, lighter version of the 1995 one. It doesn't even do much more - surf the internet, write documents, play games. If you're patient and determined, a late 90s machine could even service you today.

There's definitely a sense in which the 90s marks the beginning of the era of the recognizably "modern" computer. The oldest computer you can run Linux on will be from the 90s. GUIs settled in the 90s - you can make a modern machine look like Windows 95 with nothing more than a desktop theme.

Maybe "matured" is a better word than "stagnated".

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