Comment by dave78 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dave78 | Hacker News Reader

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It really was magical.

I'll not forget the first time I sent an email. My cousin had just gone to college and his parents were visiting my parents and I. I somehow got his email address at college, and figured out how to send him an email through a BBS I was using at the time. He was apparently in a computer lab then, because he wrote back within minutes. I called everyone in the house over to see the computer screen. The feeling we all had at seeing a nearly-instant response to a message was just magical, especially since it was "free" (a phone call to him would have incurred long distance charges). I imagine it would be difficult for anyone under the age of about 42-45 to imagine just how mind-blowing this kind of thing was at the time.

I also remember a similar amount of wonderment a few years later seeing a "live" picture over the internet for the first time as you describe - I believe the first one I found was the Netscape Fishcam. Seeing a live picture on a computer from some other part of the country (or world) was just mind boggling.

It all seems routine and even mundane now. I wish I could recapture the sense of excitement the internet had back then.

I guess every generation experiences this type of nostalgia for the novelties of youth, but I still feel heavily privileged for having been able to live through the nineties and early 00's and experience the incredible technological explosion that occurred with microcomputers and the internet.

I started playing videogames on 8bit consoles and within a little more than a decade we had mainstream internet and games like Half Life 2. Every new generation of consoles and computers blew the previous one completely out of the water. We're also the last generation who knew what life was without having an always-online computer on ourselves at all times. Calling your friends on landlines to ask them if they wanted to hang out!

Meanwhile my current desktop computer that I use for work is about 8 years old and the benefits I'd get for upgrading would be relatively minimal. Tech is still progressing massively of course, but it feels like in many areas we've hit diminishing returns.

I suppose earlier generations had telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, airplane travel, rockets, etc. but yes, the rate of change of technology was incredible, to us anyway, in the 80s and 90s. I guess it remains to be seen if AI eventually evokes the same feelings. If not then it almost feels like we're in a bit of a drought since the smartphone revolution 15 years ago.

This time around, the tech spread faster and more evenly. With the telephone, there were places with no telephone and other places which would have had it for almost a century.

Now, cell phones are almost everywhere.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) at the United Nations tracks a precise statistic, and includes this updated as part of its annual report—with the most recent report just published this week (I believe yesterday, from the date of the press release).

More than three quarters of the population worldwide own a cell phone [1], as "78 per cent of the population aged 10 and over in 2023 own a mobile phone." Split by income level, 94% of high-income individuals, 84% of upper-middle-income individuals, and 70% of lower-middle-income individuals own a cell phone.

However, this is lowered to 47% for low-income individuals, which motivates many non-profits and governmental programs to provide free and/or donated cell phones to people in vulnerable groups.

[1] https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2023/10/10/ff23...

And if they don’t own a cell phone, chances are they have access to one somehow, like how many people didn’t own a dedicated landline but still could gain access, paid or by borrowing.

> I imagine it would be difficult for anyone under the age of about 42-45 to imagine just how mind-blowing this kind of thing was at the time.

Based on your username, I think we were born in the same year :-)

Sounds that way!

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