I was born in the 80s, but somehow my life didn't feel like much change happened, because the one constant of my life was to learn new things every few years.
The farmer in this piece saw the beginnings of the industrial revolution. That had huge implications but it took a lot of time for those implications to reach the corners of the earth. These days, ideas and technology spread and compound much more rapidly.
Re: Last 20 years, I used to travel in the early noughties before mobile phones were everywhere and none of them had cameras. Wikipedia had barely begun, Google Maps didn't exist, many countries were without ATMs or card connectivity, I even carried TCs once. You you had to pay internet cafes for sporadic internet access. Now I can pay cashless in most places, there's crypto, mobile signals everywhere and global roaming data is a thing. I once got lost in rural India in ~2011, pulled out a laptop with mobile data, a satellite map and a 3D digital elevation model. That's ... superhuman by 1960 standards. And then there's machine translation/video conferencing/libgen/cloud services.
> Electrification
Batteries leading to mobile electronics. Fundamentally changed the nature of the industrial revolution from capital equipment to consumer products. Not to mention that all the domestic technology like clothes and dish washers, robotic vacuums, and modern AC were born in the post war period.
> long distance communication
Digital telecom (transistors, protocols, the internet, etc.). Telegraph and early radio versus the internet - IMO that's like comparing chemical rockets to a warp drive.
> automobiles
Ubiquitous air travel. What was once a months long trip for the middle class is now a day long trip for anyone who can save a thousand bucks. It's impossible to convey just how world changing that is.
> refridgeration
Biotech and genetic engineering leading to the green revolution increased our carrying capacity to over 7 billion. Globalization that allows us to have seasonal produce at any time of year.
As https://www.radiolaguy.com/info/About%20battery%20radios.htm points out, "Few homes in the early 1920s where wired for AC operated appliances." so most radios "were battery operated and required more than one type of battery."
Here's a portable radio from 1924 - https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/zenith_super_portable.html .
The first commercial domestic clothes washer was 1937 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washing_machine#Automatic_mach... , so not post-war.
Robotic vacuums were 1990s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_vacuum_cleaner#History .
> IMO that's like comparing chemical rockets to a warp drive
Warp drives don't exist.
I think you underestimate the impact of chemical rockets. And telegraphs.
The telegraph made it possible for information to travel around the world within a day. "It's impossible to convey just how world changing" it was.
> .. Globalization ...
Globalization dates from at least the East India Company.
Modern agriculture also requires a non-sustainable use of fossil fuels, destroys ecosystems to raise meat animals more cheaply, and generates huge monocultures tempting the next great blight. "Genetic engineering" also includes making farmers economically dependent on the patented seeds from a small number of seed companies.
Speaking of which, post-war air conditioning, combined with cheap power from fossil fuels, meant that millions could move to places like Phoenix or Los Vegas and live in houses with styles meant for, for example, Cape Cod, rather than local vernacular architecture like thick adobe walls. Gigatons of CO2 emissions, to maintain a certain style, and because tearing down forests for stick building is cheaper in the short term.
At some point, it's just going to come down to a difference of opinion over which transformation(s) were more qualitative and which were more quantitative. Suffice it to say that I regard all of your counterpoints are quantitive changes, and all of my original points as qualitative.
I acknowledge that there are different opinions about this.
The same can be said for every one of your examples. Automobiles: horsepower, but more! Like, literally. Last time I saw a car ad, they used the word horsepower. A century later.
> At some point, it's just going to come down to a difference of opinion over which transformation(s) were more qualitative and which were more quantitative. Suffice it to say that I regard all of your counterpoints are quantitive changes, and all of my original points as qualitative.
What makes automobiles qualitative and airplanes quantitative? That sounds very hand wavy.
Over time various forms of "mass" transits steadily increased the ease (and thus possibility) of taking longer journeys, but always on a schedule decided by the transport operator.
The development of the automobile (and the infrastructure that it requires) eventually changed this to make it feasible for an automobile owner to undertake almost arbitrary journeys without reference to a transport operator's schedule, and without requiring relatively unusual levels of "explorer-ness" as would have been the case of foot and horse travel.
So there was an inflexion point somewhere at which independent long distance travel switched from being something done only by a tiny percentage of people to something that was quite accessible.
That (for me) is the qualitative change.
Air travel is the quantitative change layered on top of that, which makes the possible distances and destinations of such travel more expansive.
Vertical filing system, c. 1900 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filing_cabinet#Vertical_file
"information science" as a field c. 1895 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet
punched cards + tabulation machines c. 1890 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine
Any of these 50 year periods brought pretty significant change depending upon where you lived and how much that change was either positive, negative, or didn't affect you as much.
There's also a whole backdrop of significant changes in medicine throughout the different periods which are pretty major if you were one of the people who would have died absent antibiotics or a polio vaccine or whatever.
Now drop them in 1985 instead. No video on demand or highspeed connections or cell phones. CONNECT 1200.
Certainly 1985 was even more all this; a lot of people didn't even have VCRs for time-shifting at that point or home PCs. Prior to joining a company that had an internal email system in 1986, I didn't even have email except in a very fragmentary way through organizations like CIS.
Even into the 2010s, ubiquitous GPS and things like restaurant search, especially internationally, weren't the seamless experience they (often) are today.
Maybe this is a just a trivial wording mistake, but the "replaced" here is completely inaccurate. "Changed" would be fine.
Now when I need to go somewhere, I open up Google Maps and tell it where I want to go and what form of transport I'm using to get there and I have a route. My documents are on my phone and now my forms of payment are as well. If I'm meeting up with someone and they're running late, they usually let me know through a messaging app. All of this really changed the pace of going places and doing things, _especially_ travel. This all feels mundane to us, but try dropping a kid who grew up in the internet age to navigate without their Maps app, and the vast majority of them (especially the ones that aren't outdoorsy) would probably have a tough time.
Other than other media distribution and telecommunication industries, and some of retail, it hasn't replaced much. It has impacted lots, but impacting and replacing are very different.
Still no flying cards, robots to do our work, AI, fusion, etc.
Not that there is anything wrong with subjective impressions like this.
On the other hand, the boring automobile I drive every day is practically a spaceship compared to the death traps of the 1970s. And of course probably 90% of advances in computing have occurred since the early 1970s.