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For examples of other books that show how much technology rapidly changed the world, I can't recommend "The Victorian Internet" [0] highly enough. (It describes the impact of the telegraph).

I remember reading the book in the mid to late 2000s and it felt so "current" in describing events of the day e.g.

- local newspapers were basically crushed by "international news" that arrived immediately

- the rate of commerce rapidly accelerated as people could communicate instantly around the world

- financial markets were impacted by the "low latency trading" of the day thanks to financial news being sent via telegraph.

- there is even a section about lawyers debating if contracts and marriages could be signed over the telegraph (like this on in particular as this was a debate in the early ecommerce days)

I was then shocked to find that it has been published in the 1990s. Really is a reminder that "new" technologies are often just updated versions of old technologies.

0 - https://amzn.to/4frEGyC

(NOTE: the link above takes you to a later edition)

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If you have children, I am often surprised how they seem to think that the previous generation was stone age. Particular example is that my daughter was surprised I would give orders to my broker via fax, and that the latency was practically the same they get on the free tiers of their online 2020s bank (this is France). My trusty old ThinkPad, which still boots as if 30 years hadn't passed, still has all such digitalized sent/received faxes I did in the 90s..

Children in general have a very hard time grasping the idea that their parents' lives resembled their own at all. For another example, look how every generation of teenagers, without fail, thinks they are the first people in the world to invent having sex for fun. I myself didn't understand how my parents used to easily catch me in most of my attempts to get away with trouble, until I realized (as an adult) that they caught me so easily because they tried the same sorts of things as kids themselves. It's just human nature, I guess.

I heard an anecdote recently where the kids asked mom what it was like when they were a kid. Mom collected the mobile devices and turned off the internet.

What’s funny is that I hear today’s conservatives moral panicking about kids apparently not having sex or breaking the rules like they used to. The narrative goes that they are too busy just staring at screens and being placated.

Conservatives. I hear conservatives saying this. That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now.

I don’t know how true this fun recession is. The stats say there’s a kernel of truth to it but it’s being exaggerated, and if you talk to young people they say it’s as much about the high cost of anything as digital distraction. It’s become crazy expensive to do things in the real world.

Blaming this on cost doesn’t really make sense. Sex and minor delinquency are extremely cheap forms of entertainment (as long as you successfully avoid pregnancy).

Both of those generally involve you being in the same physical place as some other kids, which requires some combination of transportation and real estate, both of which cost more than they used to.

Meanwhile if they know you can't afford to do anything other than get into trouble somewhere then your parents aren't inclined to give you a ride, so instead you sit at home on your phone.

> That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now.

I suspect that's because what they [0] overtly asked for was not what they actually desired. The true desire was to be obeyed, for their teens to eagerly mold themselves onto stated parental-priorities, disassociating with peers their parents had a bad feeling about, etc.

In other words, control, rather than outcomes.

[0] Here, I'm treating "conservative parents" as a persistent group identity, even though individual membership changes over the decades. The ocean-wave exists even when it's not the same water molecules, etc.

> In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now.

Are you complaining about 'conservatives theses days'?

'Conservatives' is a label that you put on people whose views are currently seen as conservative.

If there is a wild part at all then it isn't that 'they' are saying it, but what we came to view as conservative.

In a couple of years you might find yourself in that whining bucket.

My late grandmother had a pithy turn of phrase when I would act like she "just didn't get it".

"Kiddo, every generation thinks they invented sex and fast music."

It's the opposite with my kids. I get the feeling they think their parents were wild party animals (we weren't -maybe only in comparison to today, hell my parents were closer to that). As for the music, for her birthday my daughter recently asked for the first Alice in Chains album - on CD! Yikes.

Ours are jealous of bygone music etc, but on the whole kids treat each other so much better now, I am jealous of that part for them. YMMV of course.

Because it was in many ways, the same as a generation before that and one before that.

40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then.

All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized

It sounds callous to dismiss any improvement to medicine as trivial, but frankly I grew up under the assumption that humanity would cure diabetes, cancer, blindness, deafness and perhaps death itself by the end of the millennium.

It's much more noteworthy to me how little medicine has changed than how much.

I guess I grew up in 'then', and that sort of 'assumption' is so depressing. But I get that some people only want to see medicine, and by extension science, as black-and-white.

"We haven't cured diabetes" (only made massive strides in control and management and came up with whole new classes of drugs that attack root causes). "We haven't cured cancer" (except the ones we have cured, the ones we came up with vaccines to prevent (HPV), and came up with all sorts of innovative and less unpleasant treatments extending lifespan with less side effects), "Haven't cured blindness or deafness" (except for the types we have cured).

And haven't cured death...well, I guess you got us there.

But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.

I agree with you that we’ve made progress. To me, the most impressive achievement has been nearly curing cystic fibrosis and our array of tools for dealing with HIV. And yet I think it’s important to be honest. The age-adjusted diabetes mortality rate per 100k has been pretty much flat for thirty years. Life expectancy growth has been meager and the US has fallen far behind Europe. Overall health/physical fitness/mental health seems to be on a steep decline. 90s and 2000s optimists had high hopes for the world. They would have good reason to be horrified at things today.

If we’re lagging behind Europe, that doesn’t seem to be an issue of progress, right? If they are ahead, then the tech must be here ready. And we’re a bit richer than them, so we could presumably afford to implement whatever policies they are doing. Living just seems to be a higher priority over there…

Meh, it’s just a reflection of there not actually being much medical progress and lifestyle becoming the dominant tie breaker as the few breakthroughs we do have spread through the world.

“We can’t fix most damage to any organ so follow a lifestyle that minimizes it” is not a meaningful medical advance IMO.

Thanks to modern weight-loss drugs (many of them repurposed diabetic meds) lifestyle might become less important.

That reaction to my comment seems like a pavlovian response - like a response to past interactions with social media culture warriors.

It's not a sound assumption that everyone must either be "impressed by the progress of medicine within my lifetime" or "anti-science".

>But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.

Good comment until here. This is a strawman.

There is a huge gap between the vision of what medical advances might have brought us with technological breakthroughs and what has actually materialized.

Cloning and stem cell research was supposed to let me grab a new organ whenever I needed it. Instead I’m still waiting for a poor person to get in a car wreck and be declared brain dead so they can scoop out whatever is useful.

Cancer is still killing half of my family members, just different kinds after a cancer breakthrough helped them with an earlier kind. Others are hit by strokes, heart failures, and the occasional horrific Alzheimer’s.

50 years I’ve heard doctors saying “it was just their time” as an excuse for some old person dying. The field barely has a grasp on human biology and we’re barely making inroads.

I was talking with a historian of medicine who surprised me with the observation that the age of cures was past, and that we lived in the age of management. Antibiotics gave us cures, and vaccines eradicated diseases, but those advances had their limits: there is no penicillin for viruses or cancer. Advances since the mid-twentieth century have been more about managing conditions, which is much more profitable. Cure syphilis, and the patient goes away happy; treat AIDS, and the patient will keep buying more treatments as long as he lives.

>treat AIDS, and the patient will keep buying more treatments as long as he lives.

This is oft-repeated but it doesn’t pass the smell test. All it takes is a single principled academic to blow the whistle if there was any active suppression of cures or even research on cures.

In order for that quip to hold water, literally everyone involved in medical research would have to be a corrupt monster maintaining a worldwide conspiracy to keep sick people coming back for more treatments.

There's no conspiracy to suppress cures, but research funding is more attainable the larger the eventual profit.

> Antibiotics gave us cures, and vaccines eradicated diseases, but those advances had their limits: there is no penicillin for viruses or cancer.

We are actually working on vaccines for viruses and for cancer.

Well, we were.

I occasionally notice that people younger than me seem more impressed by smartphones than me (and I assume, maybe incorrectly, my generation).

One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.

To me, the smartphone impressed me for a couple years, but it's just one of many miracles of miniaturization I've lived through - and less qualitatively different than, for example, personal computers or the GUI or the internet going public.

My father noticed a similar phenomenon with Rock n Roll. People younger than him saw it as a musical sea-change, but to him it just sounded like the boogie woogie music the radio already had been playing for a decade.

I'm 40 and very impressed by smartphones.

Back in my day, we had a separate (wired) telephone, a camera, a notepad, paper maps, a walkman, and a million other things. Now I just have a phone and it can do all that and lots more.

That's a valid observation, but we both lived through the advent of the modern PC, and the PC eliminated far more tools than that.

It's a convenience to carry around one smart phone instead of a dumb phone, a digital camera, and an iPod... but today that fills me with no more wonder than the advent of any of those three devices on their own.

Smart phones are a pinnacle product that combines materials science, supply chain management, electronic engineering, product design, graphic design, operating system design, application development, computer science, quantum electro-optics, digital signal processing, communication theory, satellite communication, and marketing - all in a small handheld device.

Not only are they absolutely miraculous, but they're commodity products that make the miracle seem routine and mundane.

When I watched the 2007 Apple keynote where Jobs announced the iPhone, it completely blew me away.

These days the smartphone doesn't fill me with awe anymore the same way many earlier and even subsequent inventions still do.

It's possibly because I could carry on quite easily without a smartphone. The greater loss would be for me to live without a mobile phone (of any variety), a computer, or a portable music player.

> When I watched the 2007 Apple keynote where Jobs announced the iPhone, it completely blew me away.

Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?

I mean smart phones are a great achievement, but they were an incremental improvement, nothing to be blown away by?

Not at all. The iPod of the day had a click wheel as an input device. The iPhone introduced us to capacitive touch, multitouch, gesture recognition, full web browsing. Huge leap compared to not only the iPod but the PocketPCs of the day.

Listen to the audience reaction when he shows how you scroll a list view: https://youtu.be/VQKMoT-6XSg?si=OmbgSG7nmEpdAETl&t=970

> Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?

It's the other way around. The iPod touch (introduced September 2007) was basically an iPhone (announced January 2007) without the phone part.

> I mean smart phones are a great achievement, but they were an incremental improvement, nothing to be blown away by?

Feature phones ("dumbphones"), even ones with cameras or music player functionality, were and are extremely limited compared to smartphones like the Palm Treo, which was basically a pocket-sized, wireless internet-connected computer with a much larger, color screen, OS and GUI, installable apps, and a tiny (but usable) keyboard.

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

Phones using DoCoMo's i-mode (which took off in Japan starting in 1999) were sort of a bridge between feature phones and smartphones. i-mode will finally shut down in 2026.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode

Smartphones also generally looked very different pre-iPhone and post-iPhone.

> "What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties," DeSalvo said. "It's just one of those things that are obvious when you see it."

https://www.engadget.com/2013-12-19-when-google-engineers-fi...

> It's the other way around. The iPod touch (introduced September 2007) was basically an iPhone (announced January 2007) without the phone part.

Oh, thanks, I got my history the wrong way round!

> Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?

No, the iPods that were like iPhones (iPod Touch) were after the iPhone, not predecessors. The main iPod at the time of the iPhone introduction ("iPod Classic") had a small, non-touch screen in the top area of the face (except, most of the face taken up by the physical "click wheel" control, and a hard disk for storage, and other immediately pre-iPhone iPod's were basically scaled down versions of the same design (with Flash memory on, IIRC, the Nano and Shuffle, and no screen on the Shuffle.)

Compared to my PC, the smartphones of my friends impressed me because I could they had so many sensors to partake in the world compared to my 'autistic' / 'shut-in' PC which basically only had a keyboard and a pointing device, and couldn't tell which way I was holding it nor a barometre etc.

> One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.

Probably over-analyzing this, but I can see why this might happen:

1. There's an ulterior motive of getting them to treat it safely, as it's one of the more-expensive and breakable things they might be carrying around, and they become obstreperous if it is unavailable.

2. It's probably the most immediate and tangible candidate. They probably aren't going to be around MRI scanners or cryo-cooled qubits or whatever.

They're also designed to be mistaken for sorcery. If you used a PC in the 90s then you have some idea how it works because the inner workings used to be more exposed, error messages had actual contents that could imply something about how you might, yourself, address the problem, etc. Even the bubble-headed marketing people had to learn how to use AS/400 to do their jobs. You can see how a modern phone is the same device only now LCDs place the CRTs and it uses a radio instead of physical wires for internet access etc. You may not be able to easily disassemble the phone but you know roughly what's in it.

Whereas if you've never used a PC, a phone is a black box. You tap the screen and it mysteriously does things. You're discouraged from trying to figure out how or make any changes to it yourself.

And if it's magic you better be careful because who knows what'll happen.

> And if it's magic you better be careful because who knows what'll happen.

In terms of risk-taking (rather than knowledge) IMO the opposite has happened: Older generations had to worry about voiding the warranty because you held down the two buttons at the same time that the manual clearly told you never to do on page 37.

In contrast, younger folks have grown up with cheaper devices with much-improved idiot-proofing. That makes the strategy of "try shit until it seems to work" a lot more viable.

Meanwhile, older folks look on, seeing confident action and misinterpreting it as competent understanding, woefully concluding that "Unlike myself, kids these days just know computers."

> In terms of risk-taking (rather than knowledge) IMO the opposite has happened: Older generations had to worry about voiding the warranty because you held down the two buttons at the same time that the manual clearly told you never to do on page 37.

That was never really a thing though. To begin with, warranties are generally pretty worthless because they cover exactly the things that don't usually happen. Power switch doesn't work one day out of the box? Covered, but unlikely to happen and probably not hard to fix yourself anyway. Dropped it and broke it? Not covered. Device is three years old and the battery is flat? Warranty is already expired.

If you haven't needed a warranty in the first month you probably won't need it at all.

> In contrast, younger folks have grown up with cheaper devices with much-improved idiot-proofing. That makes the strategy of "try shit until it seems to work" a lot more viable.

Except that the idiot-proofing is that if something is broken, you get a message that says "an error occurred" and there's no way to fix it because the brokenness is in an app you can't modify or is running on a server you don't control.

Meanwhile mashing buttons at random is more dangerous than ever because your whole life is in that device and it will readily transfer real money or send private files to people you don't want to have them or give attackers access to your accounts on various services.

At what age did you notice that? My daughter is 5 and more often than not assumes that life before her was exactly the same as she experiences. Once in a while though she’ll ask if we had iPads made of wood or something like that which is amusing.

Usually when they become teenagers. Smug little know-it-alls!

Maybe you should get a wooden iPad case - they look amazing. ;-)

I was born in the early 70s, and growing up in America's Mountain West had the reverse experience until personal computers and the internet arrived in the early 90s.

From the perspective of my childhood, technology (cars, planes, phones & faxes, rockets, computers, refrigerators and other household appliances, rock music, radio, movies, television, science fiction & fantasy, the machinery of war, factories, farming, medicine, etc) were all elements of society that had advanced in technological progress, but had "always been there". I, of course, knew that there was a world before all that - my great-grandfather, who lived into his 90s and whom I got to know well, had driven a stagecoach as a teenager - but all of those had entered something like their modern form during or in the immediate aftermath of WWII, and to me it seemed like there had been progress, but not systemic change, in all the time since. It helped that all the adults around me largely saw WWII as the defining event of modern history. There was "before the War" and there was "now" (which came after the war).

Partly that was result of being born at the right time - the space program was in full swing, computers were a staple of fiction and large business but no more, the counterculture had come and gone, etc. The world really seemed like a timeless place to me as a child, and then about the time I reached adulthood, the Cold War ended, and the Internet Era arrived, and the world changed (and continued to change).

PBS did a special on how TV news came to dominance with coverage of the JFK assassination called "JFK: Breaking the News".

https://www.pbs.org/video/jfk-breaking-the-news-d7borr/

Similarly, CNN essentially became the mainstay with live coverage of the start of Desert Storm in '91.

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

The Penny Post, introduced in England in 1840, may have been an even greater catalyst of social change. Within urban areas, communication latency was surprisingly low. Londoners got five deliveries per day.

https://amzn[.]to/4frEGyC is a referral link, and referral links are not canonical links, which the guidelines implore us to use.

The above url resolves to the following (which I have rendered safe/non-clickable by slightly mangling the url with “[.]” in place of “.”):

https://www.amazon[.]com/dp/B07JW5WQSR?bestFormat=true&k=the...

Here is a non-referral link to the same product page:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JW5WQSR

The book has its own Wikipedia page, which would have been a non-commercial option, which would lessen any potential conflict of interest:

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

That book - first published in 1998 - was one of my favorites for a while. An overt theme was the the astounding parallels between early-internet culture and the social practices of telegraph operators. At night (particularly) they'd stay "online", shooting the breeze with each other, forming long distance friendships - even romances! - and semi-anonymously socializing in ways that felt immediately and intimately familiar to those of us were on the internet around that time. I think that 'net is nearly as dead as the telegraph, so I wonder how the book lands for readers who didn't experience that milieu.

The Golden Age of Telegraph Literature - The 19th-century genre showcased technology anxieties - telegraph literature from the 19th century was surprisingly modern https://slate.com/technology/2014/11/telegraph-literature-fr...

You might also like "When Old Technologies Were New", which describes about how electricity and communication in the home changed society.

For instance, it tells the possibly apocryphal story of how the telephone allowed male suitors to call reach young women directly and thereby bypass both protective parents and long-time traditional romantic competitors. Getting a phone call was so exceptional that people had not yet built up any social defenses for it.

https://a.co/d/fnBimUx

Doesn't make a lot of sense, since the same families that would have had a servant or parent answer the door would answer the telephone the same way. It's not like young misses were carrying phones in their skirt pockets. A more widely-accepted explanation for dating is economic: young women forced into apartment living and jobs in the city as their families lost the farm and couldn't keep their adult children anymore.

- Bailey, Beth L. (1988). From Front Porch to Back Seat. Johns Hopkins University Press. - Henry, O. (1906). "The Unfinished Story". The Four Million. McClure, Phillips & Co.

Also people forget that up to the 1830s, going from Paris to Marseille was a 2 week journey (unless you were a royal courier switching horses every 40 km, who could do it in a few days), and that sending a message across the Atlantic and getting a reply a 2 month affair. In the late 1860, going from Paris to Marseille was done in about 15 hours by train; it only got gradually faster since then (nowadays, 3h30, by train or by plane).

Two other good books are

The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

It’s about how if you think about distance as spacetime, that trains moved cities closer together by making the distance between them shorter. They shrink the world.

The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham

About how Soviet era projects thought they could throw pure labor at massive scale engineering problems to overcome any problem, to their detriment.

I read that book. It is indeed a wonderful history, especially for people who think digital communications are something new :-)

An interesting thing about communication systems depicted in "The Victorian Internet" is that it was an internet. Messages could be routed between postal services, telegraph, bicycle messengers, pneumatic tube systems, etc.

I would also recommend "The Information" by James Gleick. It covers all of known history so of course the scope is much broader, but there are familiar themes that accompany communication breakthroughs e.g. a train with a fleeing bank robber moves faster than the speed of our communication so we are all going to die.

In my region 'local' (half province level) newspapers are the most read by a huge margin.

I'd also recommend this book. It's sitting on my shelf - I had to hunt down a copy as I remembered reading it when I was a kid. Couldn't find a digital/kindle copy but I feel like reading the paper version works with the topic of the book, too.

Super well written and very cool to read about not just the technology side of telegraphy but the culture as well, and how it still roughly mirrors culture found when the book was written all the way up till now.

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