An interesting and amusing item from Jules Crittenden, based on a 1981 news broadcast that discussed an early newspaper-by-modem service. (Modems? Remember those? With an acoustical coupler, yet!) Best line: “Well, it takes about 2 hours to receive the entire text of the newspaper over the phone, and with an hourly usage charge of $5, the new telepaper won’t be much competition for the 20-cent street edition.”
Crunchy Frog says:
Slightly OT: I rewatched Lethal Weapon last week, and it holds up pretty well, except for the scene where Danny Glover pulls out the cell phone in a suitcase – cracks me up every time I see it.
Our children have no idea what life was like without current technology.
January 27, 2010, 12:43 pmDaniel Chapman says:
“512 bytes is more memory than anyone will ever need” – Bill Gates
January 27, 2010, 1:00 pmDJR says:
I can barely remember it. Last weekend I had occasion to consider this as I arranged to meet a friend over blackberry Friday night and Saturday morning, confirmed by blackberry (with a 1/2 hour time change) while shopping, and finally found the person (at the museum where we agreed to meet) by calling her cell phone. On the way, I realized I wasn’t sure exactly which block the museum was on, so I googled it from my blackberry while waiting at a stoplight. These transactions took up approximately 2 minutes total.
The meeting could never have happened this way 20 years ago. We would have to have set up a specific place and time to meet by landline telephone (meaning one or both of us would have had to have been at home or work when we set the meeting), there could be no last minute confirmation or time change unless I found a pay phone and happened to catch the person while at home, and I would have to have looked up the address in the phone book or else park first and find the museum second, likely making myself even more than 1/2 hour late.
January 27, 2010, 1:02 pmMartinned says:
I’ve been rewatching old NYPD Blue episodes recently. So much fun with pagers! A few seasons in, some characters would have cell phones, but they would usually be the douchy businessman who would end up being the one that did it.
January 27, 2010, 1:08 pmBZ says:
And in the old days, even if you were on a national defense network (hence without hourly charges), the system was soooooooo slow. Because your server might have been, say, at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, where you were sharing with the guys designing propellers.
But things could have been worse. When I started, at special classes at the LA Museum of Science and Industry, we punched our IBM cards out with pencils (the original hanging chads), sent them off to the only available nearby mainframe (in my case, Orange County Community College), and waited a week to see if our program ran. And if you dropped your “deck,” you were in real trouble.
Getting timesharing with an acoustic coupler was an amazing advance. And the clacking printers were pretty good in their days. tick, tick, tick, THONK.
January 27, 2010, 1:10 pmDave N. says:
The easiest way to date a movie is through the cellphones and the computers. We already live in an era where our cellphones are smaller than Captain Kirk’s communicator and my Bluetooth headset is 1/4 the size of the thing sticking out of Lt. Uhura’s ear.
January 27, 2010, 2:08 pmDuffy Pratt says:
Here is a very funny 1994 version of the pilot to 24:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMLH_QyPTYM
January 27, 2010, 2:11 pmGrant Colvin says:
Yeah. In 1971 as a student at the University of Dallas I spent a sophomore semester at the University’s campus in Rome, Italy. The only “devices” I took with me were a 35mm camera and a copy of Frommer’s Europe on $10 [sic, ten] a Day” and a compact 35mm camera (Petri Color 35, a classic). Communication with home consisted of either an airmail letter (cheap) or an international long-distance telephone call (extremely expensive). I shot probably 12 to 15 rolls of film, which I developed after my return.
In 2004 my son participated in the same program. He took a WiFi-equipped laptop, a quad-band GSM pocketable cellphone with international service, and a compact digital camera. He could take photos (thousands) with the camera, load them onto the laptop, then use the laptop in the Cappuccino bar on campus to talk to us back home via Skype (free!) and send us copies of photos in real time. On numerous occasions he called me from his cellphone with questions or observations or to ask if I could look on the computer and get him directions from some street corner where he was standing to where he wanted to be.
For memory the camera used 1 gigabyte flash memory cards that cost, at the time, I think about $20 each. By comparison, in the mid-1980s I managed a departmental computer center at a bank, equipped with a Hewlett Packard Series 68 timesharing computer (HP’s biggest at the time), with slightly more than a total of 1 gigabyte of disk memory spread over four disk drives, each about the size of an under-the-counter dish washer. Those four drives were acquired for a total cost of $125,000, or about $200,000 in current dollars.
I keep in my office a fully functional, connected, standard black rotary telephone from the 1950s. My young patients (I’m an LCSW psychotherapist) are invariable fascinated by it. I usually offer them an opportunity to make a call using it (e.g., to someone at their home), but without demonstrating how to dial. Invariably, they pick up the receiver, hold it to their head, and proceed to poke their finger into each of the holes where the numbers are visible. When I demonstrate how to “dial,” they think it is just about the strangest thing they have ever seen.
January 27, 2010, 2:17 pmCrunchy Frog says:
BZ: You got to punch out your cards? My very first computer programming class was in fifth grade in 1976, in FORTRAN. We had to bubble in our code in #2 pencil, assemble the cards together, give them to the teacher, and wait three days for the output to come back from the mainframe downtown. It would be then that I would find out that instead of bubbling in the hollerith code for a semicolon, that I put in a colon instead.
God help the poor shlubs whos code resulted in an infinite loop. The ass-chewings were frequent and unmerciful. (Yes, in ’76 the teachers could and did do this, even in LAUSD, and we were better off for it.)
January 27, 2010, 3:06 pmA. Criminal says:
1981 news broadcast
Lots of oldish inventions and interesting prognostication here: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484
Q: “I read in a newspaper that in l981 you said ’640K of memory should be enough for anybody.’ What did you mean when you said this?”
[Gates] “I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time. … There’s never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again.”
January 27, 2010, 5:03 pmJeff the Baptist says:
I’m ashamed to say that I said something similar about online music distribution being impractical. At the time downloading a complete CD over dialup took days. Then MP3 compression reduced file sizes by an order of magnitude. Then residential broadband became widespread. Oops.
January 27, 2010, 5:09 pmtemoc94 says:
Perhaps the classic example of a disruptive technology.
January 27, 2010, 7:04 pmSoronel Haetir says:
For the context of how to split a 1mb address space it was a reasonable choice. Of course it then outlasted that situation by far too long.
January 27, 2010, 9:17 pmMike G in Corvallis says:
Last night I heard a TV newscaster say (approximately):
“The YouTube video went viral as bloggers spread the URL.”
I mentioned to my wife that if I could somehow transmit this back in time twenty years, nobody would know what the heck the newsreader was talking about.
January 28, 2010, 2:16 amDesiderius says:
I remember touring the Manchester Guardian in 1990 and on hearing that 2/3 of their costs involving printing and delivering the paper, I asked if there were any plans to distribute their it electronically (via Telex, as I recall).
The response: laughter.
Oh well. Some Progressives.
January 28, 2010, 2:08 pmPaulene Mogan says:
It’s the coolest website, continue to keep it up!
March 14, 2010, 2:29 pm