2000, the Year Formerly Known as the Future
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Email was nice, back when it consisted of nothing but emails from people you knew. And the occasional spam that could be knocked out by simple keyword filters.
Usenet was nice. Even with that dial-up netzero account you had access to a HN-esque level of intelligent discourse on pretty much every subject imaginable. Now we only get that with tech.
But back then you had essentially a HackerNews for rock climbing, one for chess, one for rocket science (with real rocket scientests there who would answer your questions), and ones for discussing whether an imperial star destroyer would win in a fight with the USS Enterprise.
But then Spam happened and it killed both those things. The Usenet went away in the span of a single year, to be only fractionally replaced with a series of terrible PHPBB boards that nobody could find and you certainly weren't about to meet any real rocket scientests hanging out in.
Not sure I'd trade my iPad to get all that back, but it was still pretty nice.
As for e-mail, if you have a decent provider spam is a solved problem. It hasn't bothered me for years.
Nowadays, for better or for worse, any child with a mobile phone can - and does - spout off online, on Twitter, on messageboards, etc.
I like to discuss radio online, and I remember the good old days of alt.radio.uk and similar Usenet groups, full of interesting discussions with people actually involved in the industry.
Nowadays, the web-based messageboard equivalents are filled with kids plugging their bedroom internet streams, and obsessive ranting about radio stations that is frankly bordering on the insane. One of the popular UK radio-related boards is pretty unusable these days, because any real discussion is drowned out in noisy ranting and one-liner posts.
I just think it's an effect of everyone and his dog being able to send off comments without any thought needed.
Tue Sep 7147 09:58:54 EDT 1993Why do I feel the need to tell kids to get off my lawn?
These days, Activision makes millions selling the same dumbed down Call of Duty every year to teenagers...
I'd normally wake up, (computer was of course running 24/7) check ICQ for messages, check on my downloads and chats on MIRC, read my friends LiveJournal posts and head off for school. If I needed a big file I would burn it to cd the night before and could simply grab the cd, for something small can always post online on my file server (don't remember what I used but remember having a semi easy solution that ran locally on my home computer). Pretty much everything we do now I could do then, just the time lag was bigger, didn't really matter to me though, you just plan ahead a bit more. If I want to hang out with someone send them an ICQ, they'll get it when they're home, etc. In the meantime I'll log onto an MMO, maybe an old school MUD, Ultima Online, or Everquest. Or maybe I'll play some CounterStrike. On my broadband internet. Yes things have advanced in the last decade, but 2000 was far from the technical wasteland that this article paints.
October 2000: My digital camera was $500, not $5500. I used to carry it all over the place. Not everyone relies on pockets!
November 2000: I did a 4800 bps dialup call over an analog cell connection to get a map going in a pinch while parked in a rental car far from home. The hardest part was figuring out where I was so as to have a meaningful "start" address for mapquest. That involved getting lucky and finding a storefront with a number visible, then looking at a yellow pages site for all of the locations of that store in the town I was in to see which one matched. That gave me a street name and now I had a starting address.
(Newark, DE, you are on my list of miserable places to navigate at night.)
Normal people would never do the 4800 bps PPP craziness with images disabled, but a $500 camera from CompUSA (remember them?) isn't that special.
As we neared 2000, people would joke about the show's name and its future.
The Wikipedia page for the show (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Tomorrow_(TV_series)) suggests that it eventually suffered from budget cuts as well as competition from other sci/tech shows. But here we are more than a decade beyond 2000 and though I admittedly don't watch much TV other than food/travel/doco shows on SBS OnDemand, it saddens me that there seems to be nothing there to capture the expectant wonder for the generations to come.
So much of popular television is entranced by the bland present.
This year I preordered the MYO gesture interpreting device and backed a Kickstarter project for wireless and colour-changing light globes. Someone on Kickstarter invented an origami-like fold up kayak.
I hope the average kids of now see these things and dream of what's to come.
* Wifi, laptops, andcell phone are ubiquitous, smart phones are just beginning to emerge.
* laptops are reasonably powerful compared to desktops.
* Streaming media works fairly well.
* Broadband internet is fast enough to stream movies at a decent quality.
* LCD screens have pretty much replaced CRTs.
* TV is no longer just 480p.
* Social networks exist.
* google maps, and mapquest exist.
* wikipedia exists.
* gmail is in beta.
* MP3 players have hard drives instead of flash chips and can store a large number of songs.
Another great way to realize how ancient 2000 was compared to now is to watch the first few seasons of the west wing.
http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/06/30/france-in-the-year-...
"The New-Fangled barber" isn't quite there yet, but we do have electric razors and trimmers. Then again, the electric trimmer is fairly old at this point.
"An Arial battle" and "Torpedo planes" bombers, ground attack aircraft and fighters. I'm not surprised the first use ideas for aircraft are in war.
We have "Aviation police" of sorts, except they're a combination of air traffic controllers and the FAA. And the near-collisions in "Aero-Cab station" are eerily similar to what has already happened. We also have air-mail, but "Rural Postman" with his own flying machine hasn't quite happened yet.
We don't have "intensive breeding" machines per-se, but the poultry industry is pretty automated these days.
We have drones today except they don't have a guy with a looking glass. We have "electric floor cleaners" that don't involve a maid.
Am I the only one shocked that the maid uniform has essentially stayed exactly the same (maybe with shorter skirts). I mean, look at military uniforms. The helmets in particular have changed a great deal. Same with police uniforms.
The "well trained orchestra" is basically a synthesizer. "House rolling through the countryside" is real today and we call them Dollies (http://hmrsupplies.com)
"At school" knowledge download is not quite what we have, but Wikipedia and Google come close. After all, almost everyone these days carries a mobile device even if they have no other electronic device on them.
"Madame at her toilet" is kinda out there, but you could say those new multi-head showers are almost that.
"Battle cars" we've got 'em and they're tanks/armored cars.
"A Croquet Party" underwater is a tourist thing and even happens in backyard pools.
A "Whale bus" is basically an organic submarine that we haven't built yet, but the company Innerspace has built a dolphin sub. http://www.seabreacher.com/dolphin
All in all, that's quite close to what we would have had if idealized projections came forth and other disruptive technologies like automobiles didn't become as common first.
Still bitter about not having my flying car yet, damnit!
Makes me excited to think just how unbelievable 2100 will be from today's perspective. Or, with exponential growth of technology, say 2040. You really can't extrapolate, because it's the completely new things that will be really revolutionary. (Is that redundant?)
The sea was (still is?) the last frontier of exploration on our own planet, so I figure they must have thought we would have sorted out all its mysteries by now. They didn't know about deep sea smokers, tube worms or the Mariana Trench obviously, or that we'd still be flabbergasted by some of the things we find in the deep oceans today.
A part of me thinks that technolgy will soon begin retreating to the background where it belongs. As Clarke's third law states : Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic Which means future tech will be tech without looking, sounding, feeling like tech... if that makes sense.
I'm picturing an oak cabinet or chest of drawers that tell me how many socks I have remaining and that there are blue ones in the laundry. Or a kitchen that looks like it belongs in the 1930s, but has a smart fridge telling me it's time to turn over the trout in its marinade because I'll be putting it in the smoker Saturday.
I think we'll see more of a return to original materials like wood, stone and steel (or modern materials that perfectly mimic it in texture and feel) all the while being "smart" (or the 2040 equivalent of what that means). We're already seeing a lot of that in our surroundings where people are becoming more nomadic with fewer possessions or multi use tools and a drive toward less "connectivity" as in people and more connectivity in gadgets.
Bottom line is that no matter how "different" we imagine ourselves to be tomorrow, there's a thread of nostalgia connecting us to yesterday. That may be stronger than alloy we can invent.
The true life changers from the article for me: smartphones with always-on internet (these existed in 2000, but they were overpriced and sucked), laptops + wifi, and wikipedia. Also, amazon - I do almost all my shopping online now.
Yahoo mail always sucked. I pretty much never used a single Yahoo product (I didn't care about Yahoo! Finance at the time, which is the only one I'd use today other than flickr)
Yes, at the time desktops with big CRTs were still superior (I think I was using a Linux box running slackware and also had access to HP-UX and AIX and Solaris machines) to laptops. Desktops still are superior for a lot of things.
On the other hand, Apple didn't exactly reflect "mainstream" nearly as much in 2000 as it does in 2013.
Today, a homeless guy can have a functional machine of his own, or use something at a library, and children/mainstream/etc. users can use approximately the same machines tech experts do.
It's basically range compression between what high-end people have and what the mainstream has.
Boy did things change during high school.
The external keyboard for the palm V was pretty nice, though, assuming you had a flat surface. The serial port made a pretty solid connection and held the phone up at a reasonable angle; something I haven't been able to reproduce with a modern smartphone and external bluetooth keyboard. (To be clear, the bluetooth keyboards work fine; I just haven't figured out how to hold the phone at a reasonable angle while typing with both hands.)
So yeah, really? I wasn't all that less mobile then than I am now. I mean, I had a thinkpad running linux then, just like now; sure, it was slower, but it ran linux just fine. Configuring wireless, sure, was a pain in the ass then, and it's easy now, but eh.
It got a little easier with the Kyocera 6035 Palm phone, but I suppose that wasn't until a year later.
(I didn't have to look that date up)
(I've spent very little time actually using 10" touchscreens, but got something like 90% accuracy on the first sentence I ever typed on one, with it having the same size keys as a normal qwerty keyboard.)
These days, if the diner even allowed them to hang out and drink coffee for hours on end, they'd be nose deep in mobile FB or whatever zombification they prefer - rather than have "deep" and interesting in-person conversations.
I had a meeting a few days ago but it took them a while to unlock the door. Ten years ago we'd all have engaged in some small talk but on this occasion everyone immediately dove into their screens.
Back then, people would look for interesting profiles on Yahoo's proto-social-networking site at profiles.yahoo.com and then send that person a message on Yahoo Messenger... this was before the bot infestation. I developed several friendships that started as random IM messages.
Oh, and the Raspberry Pi. Thirty-five bucks for an easily-hackable UNIX system. Ten bucks more for a wifi dongle and you can have damn near anything you can imagine connected to the net.
This is mostly the new normal now but I still look back at how different things were growing up and I'm amazed and delighted. It's... whatever the opposite of "future shock" is. Stuff has changed a lot and I'm loving it.
Dale Gribble was inspiring everyone to freak out in Arlen, Texas. The seniors were getting coddled because they're the first millennium class.
The Rio PMP300 is f-ing amazing since it made it much easier than my Sony MiniDisc recorder/player having to use sound breaks to copy MP3 tracks.
There was no WiFi but then again it's not like anyone had laptops to use that anyways. I had to use the powerline as my network. But I do remember writing HTML for the high school web team and thought I was amazing.
I remember not being able to send a whole album through email but then if you knew anything you would have been splitting zip/rar files or how to fake upload ratios to leech off FTPs anyways.
Yahoo was all you needed. Yahoo directory was good, Inktomi kind of sucked so everyone used AltaVista, Yahoo Mail was good, Yahoo Maps was good, Yahoo Games was good, Yahoo News was good. There were no ads but if there were there was probably some auto-clicker to let you make a paycheck out of it.
I remember having a 5 digit ICQ number, remember AOL Profile was my Facebook, AIM status messages was my Twitter, Netscape Navigator could be bought in a store like CompUSA.
I remember spending all your time on a computer, or especially the Internet Information Superhighway if anyway knew what even means meant you weren't like them. But now it's a given.
A few years ago I reflected, thinking how far out in the future I was living just by the good fortune of having grown up in Silicon Valley. I've been online for 18 years now, babies then are now legal adults, and it's been three lifetimes of watching the internet being the internet.
And compared to other industries like Hollywood which endured more than 85 years, we've barely begun.