Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

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I graduated high school in 2004. It constantly amazes me how far we've come.

Back in the 90s, CDs were the height of getting music. 1 disk would carry around 24 songs. That's it. The internet was accessible, but limited to around 56kbps on a desktop. Mobile data wasn't a thing. Texting wasn't a thing. Cell phones were barely a thing, but coverage was practically non-existent.

Most people got their media only from broadcast stations. You had radio, television, and the newspaper and that was pretty much it.

The fact that data is available pretty much everywhere is incredible. Even in the last 10 years, we've went from data being only available in the cities to being able to stream video in all but the most remote parts of the US.

On top of that, something not really appreciated by the general public is just how good codecs have gotten. It is INCREDIBLE what can be done with the same amount of bandwidth we had in the 90s. AV1 + Opus can very nearly stream SD content at 56kbps! 1Mbps wasn't enough for SD content with MPEG2 and MP3 audio. Now, 1Mbps is enough for 1080p HD content.

I'm 50.

We had cassettes and vinyl. I didn't have a Sony Walkman but my first personal cassette player was similar. It was too big to go in a pocket and was generally worn clipped to a belt or on a shoulder lanyard under your coat. By the time I went to Plymouth Poly (UK) in 1989 your cassette player was small enough to fit in the breast pocket of your sleeveless denim over jacket (over the leather jacket that is!)

My first home PC was a ZX80 with 1Kb of RAM - not all of the 1Kb was available. Later I had a C64 which nowadays has a USB interface - I re capped it, sorted out a few other details and got it going again. The first game I played on it in 2018 when it sparked up was "attack of the mutant camels" - a Jeff Minter classic.

We learned we could double our floppy disk storage capacity by using a hole punch to cut a notch out of the sleeve and flipping it over.

>We had cassettes and vinyl.

Which are both still being manufactured :)

I'm 35, I remember in 7th grade when the industrial tech teacher told us that "one day in the future, you'll have this little cube in your hand mimes an inch or so cube that holds hundreds of CDs worth of music and that is how you'll listen to them" Yeah, sure Mr. Pedigo... fortunately he lived long enough to see the iPod come into existence before leukemia took him way too early.

You can have an obscene amount of music on this tiny little sliver of a micro SD card but we still have artists putting their albums out on cassette and vinyl. It's so strange and wonderful at the same time.

Oh man, I remember laughing about that exact idea. Though, at the time it was going to be "holographic storage" which never seemed to pan out.

We never envisioned that NVMe would end up being the storage medium of choice for pretty much everyone.

I still remember my first 128MB usb drive. At the time I was like "Wow, this holds about 100 floppies worth of data, insane!"

My first thumb drive was 32mb, cost me 100ish USD IIRC. I was so proud of that thing, sadly I seem to have lost it in my most recent move but I keep hoping that little bit of nostalgia turns up in a box somewhere.

About the same cost of my first thumb drive.

It was one of these (though I believe the model before).

https://www.techpowerup.com/5494/usb-sticks-from-geil

Blazing fast 20MB/s write and 300MB/s read (lol)

I remember: how much it sucked none of the radio stations around me played the music I liked.

how I wanted to learn advanced math topics, foreign languages, etc, but there was no way for me to learn it.

How amazed I was when our school library got those encyclopedia disks and we can look up a lot of things

how I use to dial home with 2 rings to signal my mom to pick me up at school. Telephone company eventually gave us a huge bill.

when I wanted to experiment with linux and other various tech, but getting ahold of hardware to experiment with was too expensive for me.

Right there with you. My first linux machine was an old Pentium 2 Gateway box :D.

I also grew up in idaho mountains so you can imagine how bad radio stations were. Nothing but talk radio and one "hits" station.

Napster was a small lifeline into the rest of the world, though for the longest time we were 5 to 10 years behind the rest of the world when it came to things like pop music. It was bizarre!

I vividly recall getting a Diamond Rio PMP300 in the (late) 90s. 32MB of flash memory and hardware mp3 player. Took one AA battery.

My friend got one and would throw it against the wall—he had headphones with long a cable—to show how it didn't skip (unlike our portable CD players). Until the battery door broke. (He taped it on, but stopped throwing the player.

I eventually got the fat iPod, the first 20 GB. I loaded my whole library and could listen to whatever album I wanted on my walk home from school in the winter.

I'm not from the US, at what age do people typically graduate highschool?

18

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