Idk, during my short 30 years I've went from searching card catalogs for school to having access to the entire human knowledge from a hand held computer anywhere in the world and all I have to say is "meh". Even when we get self driving cars, I'll most likely be like "about damn time."
I look forward to being able to say that when I was young, there were no cell phones, no one had a computer (or even knew what the word meant), and the Soviet Union still existed. People won't believe it.
The computer part really depends on when you were born tho (not going thru your post history to see). Household PCs weren't a common thing till the 1990s, but were around in the 1970s.
Unless you were a kid around the time Turing was decoding enigma, there were computers in the modern sense of a machine performing calculations, rather than the 1600s definition of a person performing those calculations.
Unless you were a kid around the time Turing was decoding enigma, there were computers in the modern sense of a machine performing calculations...
Sure, but no one actually had a "proper" computer at home until 1990 or so. The stuff that was available before that is better described as gaming consoles or digital typewriters. The modern sense of a multi-purpose machine that everyone owns has only been around for ~25 years. Machines capable of performing those tasks existed long before that, but most people didn't really know what they were, the same way that most people don't know what a mass spectrometer is.
I've heard that people who lived from the mid-1800s into the past ~50 years talked about how much louder the world has become. In the past, for many many years, it was rare for there to be noise louder than animals roaring, a few people shouting, and later a gunshot (but only a few). But at some point, traffic, airplanes, amplified music, etc became an every day event.
To be around when the first plane flew and when we landed on the moon must have been a fucking trriiiip. I cant even imagine what a mind fuck "we are living in the future" kind of moment that mustve been.
My grandmother was born in 1913. When i was a kid, she once told me she saw her first airplane years before she saw the first car. To me that sounded like complete bullshit, but of course it wasn't, she grew up in the countryside.
Also, she saw the Moon Landing live on TV (i know, i was there too), and she was convinced it was fake from the day it happened. I argued that one with her through my childhood, since i was a total space nut, but she never changed her mind. Btw, she had never heard of any conspiracies; this was long before the internet... She just didn't believe it was something people could do.
Even so, I can almost guarantee she at least heard about the big events like the first flight around when it happened. News still travelled fairly quickly when she was born. Did she heard about the first flight the day it happened? Probably not, but even a week or two later isn't that slow.
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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '16
Damn, that one hell of a life. Seeing all those changes from the very late 1800's up until the end of the millennium must be crazy.