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For me it's paying for stuff with a phone...
[William Woollard]
"And now we have a hand-held computer a quarter of the size of a typical paperback book... and if you simply wave it over a receiving device you can pay for items worth hundreds of pounds in just a few seconds. And it will unlock by taking a 3D scan of your face in fractions of a second"!
[/William Woollard]
...you'd have pointed at the screen and gone - 'yeah right! Now show me another robot!' 🙂
Not Tomorrow's World but I remember being utterly incredulous at the scene in Blade Runner where he keeps zooming in on a photo in a manner that now seems a lot like using photoshop but not really being troubled by the flying cars.
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That music on your cassette tape that you have to rewind to play the other side?
You'll be able to play that through the air, immediately. From satellites!
I'd have doubted Kindles. Not because of the tech but because I didn't think people would move away from paper books like that. Much the same for "online magazines", though I still think they're stupid whereas I've come to love the ebook.
I like that "living in the future" feel. Like, phones are starting to get properly clever with integration, commonality across apps etc, we're definitely getting out of the wild west phase of "100 apps on a phone and none of them really work right". And sometimes I just watch my 3d printer and think, "I have a mechanical spider that shits plastic and then I fit things that I downloaded into my car..."
I remember thinking that by the time we could make calls with our video watches like Dick Tracy we would have solved all the world's problems. Lols!
It is amazing how much some things have progressed in 50 years. But also how some things haven't moved on at all. I mean we're only just now starting to move away from the internal combustion engine in cars...
Tyres are pretty much the same as they were too.
No flying cars, no 'real' autonomous cars, planes fly slower than Concorde did in 1969. Very few high speed rail services... 🙁
Blade Runner.
Flying cars, synthetic humans, deep space colonies. Just remember you have to use a public phone booth to make, admittedly a video call, phone call.
That music on your cassette tape that you have to rewind to play the other side?
Really? Rather than wait for the auto stop, eject the cassette, flip it and hit play?
Full suspension bike with disc brakes and electronic shifting gears - designed to go up and down mountains.
Not Tomorrow’s World but I remember being utterly incredulous at the scene in Blade Runner where he keeps zooming in on a photo in a manner that now seems a lot like using photoshop but not really being troubled by the flying cars.
Are you one of my clients who supplies a shitly lit and out of focus phone image and wants it to be a hero shot in a catalogue and just keeps saying enhance it?
Not really a tangible object, but the internet.
- Without the internet our smartphones would be useless.
- Allows anyone to search for anything and become an armchair expert in minutes.
- Allows us to have virtual calls/meetings where we can share screens and videos, work collaboratively and all sorts
- Allows us stream media
- Death of hedge porn
Really? Rather than wait for the auto stop, eject the cassette, flip it and hit play?
Get with the programme grandad, you can get auto-reverse nowadays.
Paying for music, tv programmes and films but never owning it. Even though I do it now I think it’s stupid
Get with the programme grandad, you can get auto-reverse nowadays.
Oh you crazy kids, that'll never catch on.
Get with the programme grandad, you can get auto-reverse nowadays.
Get with the insults, we're called boomers nowadays 🙂
Social media?
Even in early 90's if you'd have said people spend vast amounts of time staring at their phone to see what friends and "celebraties"** are doing would have been laughed at.
Then told the same would be used to swap two monumental elections and ultimately segregate vast sections of the population would have been an Orwellian fantasy.
How about go back to the 70's and explain Instagram and influencers?
** Though I think the notion of celebrities has some what been diluted lately.
Paying for music, tv programmes and films but never owning it. Even though I do it now I think it’s stupid
Strictly speaking you've never owned it - even with physical media you were buying actually buying a license.
About to put our recycling out and I don't thing my past self would be enthralled by the notion that in the shiny suited future people of the next millennium would wash their rubbish before they threw it away 🙂
Early 70s me would be in hysterics at 2022 me considering the bulk tealights in the shops in case of powercuts.
Are you one of my clients who supplies a shitly lit and out of focus phone image and wants it to be a hero shot in a catalogue and just keeps saying enhance it?
Or a private investigator with a fuzzy bit of CCTV and I want you to pause it, zoom and enhance to identify the criminal... 😉
People not believing vaccines work.
Really? Rather than wait for the auto stop, eject the cassette, flip it and hit play?
Doh! You know it's been a long time since you played a cassette tape when you forget how to use them... 🤣
I remember seeing a compact disc player being demonstrated (1981?)on Tomorrow’s World which I watched every week (yes I am that old). It seemed remarkable then. I would have been astonished to know that 40 years later I can fit all of the music that I have ever bought (and quite a lot that I didn’t buy…ahem) on a small piece of plastic the size of my thumbnail.
Computer nerds inventing currencies named after dogs... Oh wait people still laughing at that.
teaching people to wash their hands in 2020
oceanskipper
Full Membe https://mobile.twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1566016654357565440/blockquote >
Omg they even got the fashion right!!
I was but a babe in the late 70’s, but massive TV’s that are a few mm thick would’ve seemed like utter make believe in the 80’s. A big TV took up most of the living room and *probably irradiated your testicles and gave the family pets super powers*
*Disclaimer - I’m not a scientist.
I can’t differentiate between Tomorrow’s World and the second series of Look Around You.
I remember on Going Live or one of its precursors, Philip Schofield demoing a little box of electronics where you could insert little microchips to play albums rather than faff about with cassettes. There might have been a competition coming next week where you could win one.
It was, of course, an April Fool. But they inadvertently predicted both the mp3 player and SD-style storage.
Are you one of my clients who supplies a shitly lit and out of focus phone image and wants it to be a hero shot in a catalogue and just keeps saying enhance it?
Yeah, been there, done that! And the client was Canon, too! They dished out digital cameras to their staff to take photos for the company magazine. I think they might have been Ixy Digital 320 with a 3.2 Mp sensor. We’d get JPEG files at the smallest size because of the small cards used, so possibly about 250Kb? And they wanted them used at about A5, sometimes larger.
The digital artefacts in certain colour channels showed no detail at all, it just looked like square paving slabs.
Quite a challenge in Photoshop; I learned a lot doing those pics.
I remember an episode on genetically modified crops, the emphasis being that they could be grown in areas of limited water supply and perhaps help feed people in remote or poor agricultural areas Fast forward to protestors pulling them out of test sites in Oxfordshire.
Not really a tangible object, but the internet.
I love old episodes of Tomorrow's World. The use of the Internet was something that cropped up a lot and was described very accurately.
Bet they didn't realize they were inadvertently predicting Alan Partridge 😀 😉
I was promised a hoverboard. Well where is it? Want one now
That I could point a telephone at the night sky, and it could tell me what stars I'm looking at.
I'll just leave this here. I think the link is self explanatory enough.
Oh and maybe this quote
nobody wants a suddenly out-of-control team of cyborg cockroaches roaming around
I was promised a hoverboard. Well where is it? Want one now
Hoverboards and jetpacks cropped up regularly.
Reading some sci-fi books is quite funny too cos they assume things like hoverboards and jetpacks but also haven't got beyond tape decks and analogue. 😅
Reading some sci-fi books is quite funny too cos they assume things like hoverboards and jetpacks but also haven’t got beyond tape decks and analogue. 😅
Nah, they just predicted retro didn't they.
A soup maker, I mean WTAF as if someone would actually invent that!
I remember a late 60s edition suggesting that we’d have yellow ,reflective, rear number plates on vehicles , sometime soon .
I remember a late 60s / early 70s edition suggesting that we’d have yellow ,reflective, rear number plates on vehicles , sometime soon .
Back in the 80s we had ICL come into our offices to show off their "one on a desk" concept. Everyone would have their own computer. Oh how we laughed.
"Logging" in to an internet forum and typing messages to people you've never met about imagining your reaction to a hypothetical situation on an episode before you were born of a TV programme that no longer exists.
That was difficult to type.
being able to go from an emerging disease to an RNA Vaccine in ~18 months.
VHS will be obsolete cos DVDs are little shiny disks containing a whole film and they will be obsolete cos you can think of a film, type it into your trimphone, and send it to play on your 50 inch flat telly that weighs about the same as your toaster. But yeah, we'll still have toasters.
But yeah, we’ll still have toasters.
...and they still won't work very well!! 🤣🤣🔥🔥🍞🍞
You will be able to buy something that looks like a bicycle but which lets you pretend you're going for a ride while it does all the hard work for you. 😀
Kettables. Really, I don't know how I survived without one. That and chipsmades.
I think the phone and internet thing generally just seems to have changed us all so significantly - without us really noticing. We focus on the trivia - the vacuous influencers etc - but actually we're hugely empowered by it all - we're all now sort of psychically connected to all our friends - even friends we don't actually know - and we take it all for granted. We can contact each other, find each other, find our way around, find out about everything about us (I've spent the morning idly travelling through time the the NLS Spyglass looking at the moment the house I'm buying was built, then back to before the railway arrived, then forward seeing the town grow around it, all the time, easily - just as an idle distraction while I wait for the solicitor to call.
When I was a student in the early 90s every weekend I used to drive with a friend from Birmingham to Leeds - drop him off at his girlfriends place, drive on the Hull, spend the weekend with my girlfriend, drive back to Leeds, pick him up somewhere then back to Brum. Looking back... I can't figure out how I coordinated picking him up again - both gf's houses had phones that were incoming only - but we were both out and about having fun all weekend anyway- yet somehow we knew when and were to meet so I could pick him up - and I can't remember how we communicated that - its must have required planning but I can remember all the fun stuff but nothing about how we made it happen
Bands n gigs - we used to have to scour the ads in the NME/Sounds/Melody Maker for our local venues and hope they'd listed the gig when someone good was playing. Then wait for the day and hope there were tickets left, queue early to be sure! Or even drive/bus/taxi to the venue in advance to buy a ticket and don't lose it for gawd's sake!
Now I get pop-ups on my phone, click it, pay, ticket in an app. It's a bit better ain't it!
(Thankfully, I don't go to gigs where the new fangled arrangement is re-mortgaging the house to be able to afford a ticket!!)
Wot maccruisekeen says.
My current trip would have been very different pre internet. I've used my phone for mapping with loads of info about routes. I've stayed with folk who I only know thru the internet. I've kept in contact with family and friends. I've checked the weather etc etc.
It has made the trip so much easier ( i bicycle toured pre internet) and the communication via the internet has removed much of the loneliness.
I was expecting TJ to be cynical about phones, pleasantly surprised.
Once aged about 15 I cycled 10 miles on a freezing morning to visit a "mate" and go to his house, but rather than give me directions he said he'd meet me at a spot and show me. He didn't show up, so I waited for an hour and then cycled home. Not much of a mate, obvs, but it wouldn't have happened now.
go to his house, but rather than give me directions he said he’d meet me at a spot and show me.
I used to work for a specialist art transport company and travel round the UK delivering and collecting from various artists, collectors and galleries. There was a guy up in a remote part rural Perthshire (I think he was a publisher I took a van load of original manuscripts there) who created a trail of clues along the glen to his house - a yellow bucket, a welly on a fence post and so on, all the way from his house to the A9 then sent me a lengthy fax with instructions on what to do as I encountered each item.
Weirdly back in those days - I could arrive in a town and usually have a good instinct about where its art gallery would be - industrial revolution era towns the art gallery, library and town hall would all be right next to each in the middle of town - places that got flattened in WW2 with a new road layout the art gallery would be in a bit of parkland next the ring road. It was too expensive to buy an A-Z in every town I went to so I'd just follow my hunch first and ask in a filling station if I got it wrong - I managed to guess right surprisingly often 🙂
Are you one of my clients who supplies a shitly lit and out of focus phone image and wants it to be a hero shot in a catalogue and just keeps saying enhance it?
I know this is derailing the thread but I was once supplied a picture of a wooden staircase with a stairgate at the bottom (the client was a carpenter). I used the picture that he supplied in his brochure and he went mental at me for not deleting the stairgate from the picture. He went ballistic when I told him how much it would cost for me to Photoshop it out. He went apoplectic when I suggested he went back to the house, remove the stairgate, and take the picture again.
@hot_fiat
Full Member
Kettables. Really, I don’t know how I survived without one. That and chipsmades.
I've had to wear something very similar to the kettable.
While working at Starbucks I had to occasionally wear a backpack sized thermos flask and give out free samples of very, very black coffee in espresso sized cups near the strand. It was Villiers Street,one of the busiest streets in Europe at the time.
It took a very long time to give Londoners free back coffee as they marched from the tube to wherever they were off to in black suits.
I think the phone and internet thing generally just seems to have changed us all so significantly – without us really noticing.
You say you haven't noticed. Go out without your phone, leave it at home. Report back later. 😁
You're right, of course. We have become a connected world in an astonishingly short space of time. I had my first mobile phone in 1999. The first smartphones that were actually smart rather than a glorified PDA (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone etc) were about ten years later, which broadly correlates with 3G becoming widespread. Meanwhile, home Internet in the 90s was the domain of hobbyists and nerds; today it's so ubiquitous that people don't even ask any more, you're an outlier if you don't have Internet access.
And we have become reliant on it even more quickly. My phone can be a camera, a map, a music player, a reference book, a payment method, a torch, a public transport timetable (and tickets), a restaurant menu, a portable games console, a calendar, an alarm clock, a proof of identity, a book, a calculator... and oh yeah, and I can make phone calls on it too. Elsewhere on the forum just yesterday someone was talking about how they "need" their kids to have a smartphone so they can be contacted / GPS tracked. No you don't. You might want it and indeed I can wholly get behind this, I'd probably be saying the same thing if I had kids, but having the ability to do so at all is a remarkably recent change. A little over 20 years ago we didn't have any of this, today forgetting your phone is a personal disaster.
Imagine that on Tomorrow's World in the 70s.
CAR-T therapy. Gene editing humans. Monoclonal antibody magic bullet therapies (THE 1975 seminal paper if you are interested https://www.nature.com/articles/256495a0 led to the Nobel Prize). I still recall the lock and key explanation of how a drug works with a big key and a polystyrene receptor.
Whilst phones, computers and connectedness have been revolutionary, they have been relatively progressive linear evolution. Some of the biotechnology has been simply magic.
I had the privilege of meeting Judith Hann for some communications training at work. She and her husband run a training company for improving science communication. She was lovely and it was a hilight of my career. And I mean that sincerely.
And there is a flying car now 🙂 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-60072194
I probably would have thought eMTBs were amazing and would have wanted one really badly.
Not that fussed now I'm a grumpy middle-aged man though.
and the communication via the internet has removed much of the loneliness.
I think that psychic connection thing is as much about the indirect connection rather than direct communications - through social networks and the like, even the general informality of texts you sort of have a sense of the mood of the people around you
You say you haven’t noticed. Go out without your phone, leave it at home. Report back later. 😁
I'll signal my findings by setting fire to something shall I? 🙂
I think you notice when its not all there - I think we just didnt notice we were taking quite a massive step into the future when we took it.
I think I only noticed the transition on one occasion - being at a music festival sometime in the late 90s/early noughties with a group of friends that had come together from across the country - a few people had phones most didnt - those that did could hardly get a signal or were somewhere too noisy to hear their phone ring. As we'd cross paths from time to time between noodle vans and fairground rides you'd get phone owners asking non phone owners to tell another phone owner if you see them to call them. What? I'm your secretary now?
For that summer socialising changed from like minded people meeting in the same place on the same same evening each week to weird dispersed pub crawls where one phone owner amongst the members of the group you'd managed to find texting 'where are you?' and getting the reply from someone from another grouplette with 'we've just left the Duke'. And gone where? For a short while there seemed to be this fear of missing out amongst the phone owners and an evenings socialising just wouldn't stay put.
Bands n gigs – we used to have to scour the ads in the NME/Sounds/Melody Maker for our local venues and hope they’d listed the gig when someone good was playing. Then wait for the day and hope there were tickets left, queue early to be sure! Or even drive/bus/taxi to the venue in advance to buy a ticket and don’t lose it for gawd’s sake!
Now I get pop-ups on my phone, click it, pay, ticket in an app. It’s a bit better ain’t it!
I used to read about a gig in NME midweek, then pop down to London on the Saturday and buy tickets at the box office of the Astoria or whichever venue... maybe at a ticket sales place.
Touts didn't really bother with indie gigs back then.
Preferred that to having to be online the very second a gig is announced to get tickets.
Preferred that to having to be online the very second a gig is announced to get tickets.
Exactly, as I said - thankfully I don't do those types of gigs 😀
Cars.
Unlike phones which got better the more people had them and the more they could do and thus the more you could get done.
Cars got worse. When one middle class person had one it was great for them, and everyone else just lived in what we'd now aspirationally call "15 minute walkable neighborhoods". Now everyone has one and it's rubbish (and ironically the middle classes now work from home and complain that they need the car because they've moved to a nice old farmhouse in the Cotswold's and need to visit gran who has a nice old farmhouse in the Fens, without a hint or irony that the reason they both live so far from each other is because they told themselves that the car would make it practical).
Exactly, as I said – thankfully I don’t do those types of gigs 😀
I don't go to any, but I'd kind-of assumed it's like that for any gig these days.
😀
I remember thinking that by the time we could make calls with our video watches like Dick Tracy we would have solved all the world’s problems. Lols!
TBH can you remember when 3 came out, it was all about the video phone and it never really took off and the same happened with pen and touch on pda's was way crap, it took something like the iPhone to unite a load of things that were crap with great usability due to the software to actually deliver where we are now.
Blade Runner.
Flying cars, synthetic humans, deep space colonies. Just remember you have to use a public phone booth to make, admittedly a video call, phone call.
Reading some sci-fi books is quite funny too cos they assume things like hoverboards and jetpacks but also haven’t got beyond tape decks and analogue.
You're assuming that ALL tech moves at the same pace, or doesn't have other reasons for being stuck in a particular moment.
In 100 years time, I guess that people will be saying about us that we had sophisticated electronic technology but physical transport that had barely developed since mid 20th Century. Pretty much the reverse of Blade Runner, in fact. And a system of politics, warfare and aggression that would be recognisable to Julius Caesar. We are just monkeys with smart phones.
In 100 years time, I guess that people will be saying about us that we had sophisticated electronic technology but physical transport that had barely developed since mid 20th Century.
I think it was Arthur C Clarke who proposed that an advanced civilisation would either need perfect communication or perfect transport, but once you've got one you don't need the other. We're definitely further down the lines to getting comms sorted than we are transport.
We’re definitely further down the lines to getting comms sorted than we are transport.
Yeah, maybe the need for quick transport is offset by immediate communication and info. But you've just described Blade Runner. 😀
When I was a student in the early 90s every weekend I used to drive with a friend from Birmingham to Leeds – drop him off at his girlfriends place, drive on the Hull, spend the weekend with my girlfriend, drive back to Leeds, pick him up somewhere then back to Brum. Looking back… I can’t figure out how I coordinated picking him up again – both gf’s houses had phones that were incoming only – but we were both out and about having fun all weekend anyway- yet somehow we knew when and were to meet so I could pick him up – and I can’t remember how we communicated that – its must have required planning but I can remember all the fun stuff but nothing about how we made it happen
My first uni halls of residence (1997) had 6 flats, arranged over 3 storeys with a central stairwell, 5 students per flat. This was before mobiles were commonly available - no-one in our block had one. The only way for parents / friends to get in touch was to phone the single payphone in the central stairwell and ask whoever answered it to talk to [name] in flat [number]. The answerer would then need to go to the entry buzzer, buzz up to whatever flat it was and the recipient of the call would then have to run down to have a really not very private conversation that echoed up the whole stairwell.
Somehow, it all just worked.
In 100 years time, I guess that people will be saying about us that we had sophisticated electronic technology but physical transport that had barely developed since mid 20th Century.
I think it was Arthur C Clarke who proposed that an advanced civilisation would either need perfect communication or perfect transport, but once you’ve got one you don’t need the other. We’re definitely further down the lines to getting comms sorted than we are transport.
there was an item on the radio a few days ago pointing out that don't treat 'transport' and 'communication' as the same issue at government level - that they dont come under the same department. So that - prior to lockdown at least - it wouldn't have occurred to government minister that you could address issues of congestion or pollution by investing in Zoom.