Vr is pretty damn cool IMO, also emulation.

The fact almost any computer after 2010 ish can basically play every single game made for every console ever up to probably ps1/ps2, is insane.

I’d imagine someone living in the 70s during the insanely fast computer power progress would have no problem believing that a newer system could emulate older system’s code… Wouldn’t be surprised that it was already happening back then.

Yep, for example, emulation was being used at IBM in the late 60’s (and a descendant of it is still in use today, called z/VM): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/CMS

Yeah, but there is also academically knowing something vs actually seeing it. I doubt those people’s minds would be blown away, but theyd probably find it rather sick to experience.

I’m still amazed by the fact that PS2 was backwards compatible with PS1 cause it had a PS1 module inside. Also, PS2 super slim was way too sleek, even for today’s standards

Yeah ps2 is just great. Still play it all the time.

Mine broke unfortunately

What broke, the laser ? Very easy fix

I think the tape that connects the laser. But it broken 12 years ago, I don’t have it anymore

using the PS1 CPU as the I/O processor when in PS2 mode, no less.

a lot of consoles did this actually! for example, the 3DS contains a DS, which in turn contains a GBA. the Wii U contains a Wii, which contains a GameCube.

What you said reminds me of this:
cheezburger.com/…/guys-impossible-garage-sale-fin…

IIRC Alan Turing was the one who came up with the concept of emulation, so that’s nothing new.

Damn, really? Dude was a treasure. And we treated him like shit.

Imagine showing VR porn games to Benjamin Franklin.

He’d never get anything done.

The fact any computer can mimic any other computer (given enough computing power) is a mathematical fact of life. Said like this, it does sound pretty surreal.

Yeah MicroSD should’ve been replaced eons ago.

With what?

According to cellphone companies, apparently non-removable storage

At least Johnny Mnemonic hasn’t happened yet… although Neuralink seems to be trying.

I’m sure Neuralink will only be used in the most responsible ways possible. Fitness trackers are a great example of… Okay I can’t do the sarcasm, the “wellness” industry is evil

MicroSD express.

Nintendo Switch 2 is the only device I know uses it. Steam deck/machine needs it desperately. It would give similar performance to internal storage for cell phones.

steam deck does not need it desperately. the games that it can run on it fit quite well on the 512gb and 1tb model, and you can have a regular microsd card for older games/indies. if you only went for the 256gb model, it’s likely you only bought the thing for indie games anyway

i have a 512gb microsdxc card on a 1tb model steam deck, i have a lot of bigger games on the ssd and like dozens of smaller games on the microsdxc with essentially 0 performance difference on those smaller games

nintendo switch 2 has a microsd express card reader because they cheaped out on the internal storage while having requirements for fast storage in many games, and want to offload the cost of storage to the customer

the steam machine would benefit from a microsd express reader i guess, but only one with backwards compatibility, as those cards are ridiculously expensive and i’m sure a lot of people would want to go for a microsdxc card instead, peoples’ needs and use cases are different. i’m not sure if backwards compatible ones even exist though, i’m pretty sure nintendo switch 2 for example only accepts microsd express cards.

Led mouse instead of trackball/mechanical mouse.

Or having a mouse at all. Even in the late 80’s, mice were a luxury item. And those horrible resistive touch screens in the auto parts store were a nightmare compared to today’s capacitive phone screens.

Light pens were cool, though.

Yeah I paid $60 for a mouse in 1984/1985. My friend borrowed it to try it out and a few weeks later his mom got rid of his computer along with my mouse. Nooooooo!

I recently bought a JBL Trio everything in one box music thing.

It has the ability in almost real time, there’s a bit of buffering, to unmix any music I stream to it from my phone. You can dial out vocals, the guitar, drums, etc.

Being able to separate the tracks in audio, let alone do it in basically real time, would have seemed like black magic in the 70s. Hell, it seems like black magic now.

Personally, I’d go with 80s/90s nerds, as it would take a special kind of 70s nerd to understand digital storage enough to be wowed by a 4tb sd card.

Multi-gigabit network speeds being common in people’s homes. 400mbps+ wifi speeds being common too.

4KUHD tvs and on your phone. Small B&W crt tvs were extremely common.

Bluetooth headphones, cords were a pain.

The more I say, the more I think, basically everything.

I just did the math on network speed the other day. I remember our local dial up ISP upgrading to 56k from 28.8 and it blew me away, although I rarely connected above 33.6. I’m currently on 1200 mbps, nearly 23,000 times faster than 56kbps and about 37,000x faster than the 33.6 I actually received.

I can transfer in one second what took about 10 hours before. A movie I just watched would have taken over 95 days to download at 90s speeds.

Yet now, basic websites take longer to load! Lol

For a reminder of how quick it could be :

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com

That website makes me feel seen.

Love it! The main reason I use reader modes in browsers is so that they look like that website.

Best site ever made! Haven’t seen that one topped yet.

Not difficult to top, since it looks like nineties’ shitty typography, but with a sans-serif typeface. The way better example is Butterick’s Practical Typography.

My boy experienced lag for the first time about a year ago while playing fortnite. Another player was rubber banding about the place.

He looks at me and says “bro why is our internet so bad?”

I was legitimately amazed that he’d never seen that happen before, and equally surprised that I’d just sort of forgotten about it myself.

Lag…you don’t know lad till you tried playing Quake online from New Zealand (that place that is often left off maps)…in the late 90’s.

I scoff at your 200ms ping, try 4500ms (on a good day); that is right, you spot turn and shoot. Three and a half seconds later you die; because you shot at empty space and someone saw you.

My first attempt at online gaming was 90s. Tried playing counter strike using a 56k dialup. My dumb child ass was waiting for it to load. Every 2 minutes it would refresh and the screen would fill up with text of who killed me.

I regularly work with 800Gbps Ethernet at work

That image has gotta be fake, right?

SDHC only goes up to 32GB and I’m pretty sure the successor SDXC only goes up to 2TB

I’m not quite sure how a card can be both U1 and U3 too

SD express should be able to surpass 2TB, but I don’t know if 4TB micro SD express cards have been made yet

They can print whatever size they want on it if you’re buying from AliExpress 🤪

Back in early days of Aliexpress, I was looking at a bike frame by Trek. I messaged the shop and ask if they stock Specialized as well. Shop replied “Yes, of course we can put whatever decals you want on it”.

You are 100% correct, there is no such thing as a 4TB SD card. Largest you can get is 2TB. Western Digital has shown a 4TB MicroSDUC and even 8TB SDUC card at shows and events, but I don’t think it has found its way into production just yet. And with the extreme prices of flash these days, I doubt they will release it any time soon. The 4TB card would probably be $1500 - $2000 retail, who is going to buy that? And what is the use case?

The picture is some mockup someone made or maybe AI generated, but not of a real card.

It could be a real card from Temu. It’s actually a 1 GB card, but it says it’s 4TB.

You can actually store 4TB on most those cards (if you’re ok with automated data deletion to make room)

Yep. It’s a “write once, read never” storage medium.

WORM/WORN, small difference, I say ship it.

This guy’s got upper management written all over him.

/dev/null is the ultimate storage solution. You can write infinite bytes to it and it’ll never get full or wear out!

Very fast, too!

A friend bought a USB stick that had some amazing data size for the era for a cheap price, turned out it ran some sort of zip tool interface and compressed the data

No one claimed the compression algorithm was lossless! Everything fits inside a single bit if you squint

SDUC can get up to 128TB btw

Has an SD card with 4tb ever been produced? Idk and i doubt

Being able to look up and verify just about any fact in seconds via a magical device that fits in your pocket and only needs to be charged once a day, then never using it to do that.

I use it for fact checking all the time!

“Hey Chatgpt…”

You jest, but I used ChatGPT the other day to check a fact and it was right on!

“Hey ChatGPT, do AIs often hallucinate and just make shit up?”

At least it’s honest… Until the context gets too long. Then it gets sick of chatting with us 🤷

Yes! I dunno if it’s still reasonably possible, but I remember downloading a text copy of Wikipedia and thinking how cool that was. And earlier than that, back in the CD-ROM era (90s), digital encyclopedias were actually an exciting use of the technology and I was given one as a Christmas gift.

You can still download Wikipedia, the entire English version (as of 2022) is only 95GB (including images!)

I wish slide-up keyboards were back.

Cloud services in general. Tech used to all be local, regardless of what it was. Everything cloud would blow the minds of people from the 70s. Though, we all know the tradeoffs these days

I might be misunderstanding, but dumb terminals are super old, dating back to the 60s (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_3300). The idea of having your own personal computer, rather than time sharing, was very exciting to people. Like the Apple computer kit in the 70s, and the IBM PC in the early 80s. People wanted their own computer rather than having to rely on and pay for those centralized services. So I’d say that cloud services are more like a return to the bad old days rather than some exciting prospect.

Terminals existed in libraries even in the early 80s, probably earlier than that, to replace the card catalog. And to my knowledge each library didn’t have a minicomputer or mainframe in it, as that would have been way too expensive. I think they were probably using either dial up or some kind of old connection to a mainframe in the city, but I’m just speculating.

We had cloud, but it was hardwired phonelines back to corporate

who the fuck can afford that shit if you don’t get scammed first 🤣

We went from dumb terminals to personal computers, now were back to dumb terminals

Except now the dumb terminal (and even an iPhone) has even more compute power than supercomputers from the late 90s

Having a portable device that can play any song you want still blows my mind. I had a Walkman as a kid and thought that was great but being able to listen to anything at the touch of a button is so next level

i might get shade for it, but LLMs.

I remember reading in the 80’s, can’t remember where (this 60’s Time-Life book series, maybe? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Science_Library), where they were discussing the latest advances in training neural nets, and the idea that with a big enough net they could simulate the human brain. Maybe those Time books are on archive.org, I’ll have to look for them sometime.

On Wikipedia it seems that research dates back to the 40’s, but work was definitely in progress in the 50’s: en.wikipedia.org/…/Neural_network_(machine_learni…

So for us old farts, LLMs (even though it’s different technology obviously) seem more like “finally” because since Eliza we’ve been hearing and dreaming about it for ages. Too bad that the reality of them is so dark! And every movie and show tried to warn us: 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Ultimate Computer (Star Trek TOS), TRON, Terminator 2… but we thought “nah, that’s just the movies”.

Nah, in the '70s they expected us to have stuff way better than LLMs by now.

Laptops are so damn thin and light now. A MacBook Air M5 is just an insane thing to me when I saw it at Costco

When I was a child my parents worried that microwave ovens would make their own food toxic, and told me TV would ruin my eyes. Now they sleep with a wireless super computer plugged in to a world wide-network, with a camera and lidar pointed at themselves around the clock.

What lidar device is pointing at them?

www.simplywise.com/…/which-iphones-have-lidar/

TIL, iPhones have lidar…

Lol I physically recoiled when I read that. I know that’s been a thing for a while, just still gets me. 4tb is a Lotta floppies.

Well maybe not crazier than their wildest imaginations since there’s Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.
but certainly matching it.

This however, I think anyone from the 1970s would fail to describe what they’re looking at first try…

4% of 5000 is 200. How much of them are earth-like, how much mars-like?

Cameras in general. Good quality film cameras took some work and were heavy. Like bookbag heavy. You’d have to carry a little set of filters (thin lens caps that screwed onto the main lens) in addition to another lens or two to get a good range of options. Now, tap, done. Copies? NP. Black and white? Tap. No need to use up the roll of color film and then switch to black and white film.

And modern mid-range photo cameras come with crazy features. Autofocus that can detect human and even animal eyes and instantly focus on those. Lenses with whisper-quiet and crazy fast ultrasonic focusing motors. Image stabilization both in the lens and in the camera.

Oh, and your photo camera can record video, too, because why wouldn’t it?

Remember vid cams way back? On the shoulder with VHS tapes.

Can’t wait for this revolution in wildlife photography.

Synthstrom Deluge. Sampler, sequencer, synthesizer, all in one and open source. Portable too, takes a 18650.

This video isn’t solely a Deluge, but you get the sorta idea of what sort of power house this thing is in the hands of a music nerd.

The internet in general but also cellular and wifi wireless networks. Its like wizardry and black magic.

Obviously first is cell phones giving pocket access to the internet. And, what those two together have done to us. Along with, yes we all have video phones in our pockets, which would NOT be a surprise, but we don’t use it that way very much at all, preferring to text each other. That would be a big surprise.

Also, OnlyFans.

Cyberpunk 2077. Video game with Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba basically as themselves, and just the whole scope of the game. And the graphics.

Both of those actors were children in the 70s; can’t imagine they were particularly big among nerds at the time

True, but Keanu Reeves started being an icon in the 80s, at least, but I really meant the game had real people in it. Not just voice acting (e.g. V doesn’t necessarily look like Cherami Leigh), but the character looks like the well known actor. It’s a line I don’t think gaming crossed before, to that level.

Look at David Cage Games. Very different genre, and not always good or fun (Cage is a bit too full of himself), but e.g. Beyond: Two Souls had Elliot Page and Willem Dafoe years before Cyberpunk 2077.

I’ll have to look into that. I have a PS3, but I almost never play it… which is a shame, because I liked it, and PS3/360 was my favourite generation of console. Those games are still good, it’s just, on the Xbox side, I can play them on my Series X and they play better. Beyond: Two Souls looks like it was PlayStation exclusive (and Windows, but I’m a Mac user, so no dice there), so maybe I can pick up the PS3 version somewhere. Assuming the thing still works. It hasn’t been turned on in probably 2-3 years. But PlayStations are beasts, at least the old ones (never had a PS4 or PS5).

Didn’t mean to imply that Cyberpunk 2077 was the first video game to mocap real actors. Just the first one I recall, and that on top of its other technical accomplishments. Also, Elliot Page has always been cool (I’ve only seen him in a few things, like Hard Candy) and he’s a pretty good actor… but Keanu Reeves is kinda a whole other level. Plus, he’s playing a villain (sort of). So it was still kinda shocking and novel.

Always enjoyed the PS3 for its stupid system architecture. Just recently gave mine away to a friend. I assume it should be pretty doable, getting a used copy. I tend to see ps3 discs floating around on ebay for under 10€.

Always enjoyed the PS3 for its stupid system architecture. Just recently gave mine away to a friend. I assume it should be pretty doable, getting a used copy. I tend to see ps3 discs floating around on ebay for under 10€.

the first implant doctors you meet in the tutorial is a lookalike from the Keanu Reeves movie Johnny Memonic.

Which is based on one of the early short stories from William Gibson. Who Mike Pondsmith took a lot of inspiration from when writing the first Cyberpunk rulebook.

Everyone having a portable supercomputer that fits in their pocket that also has a network connection that allows for instantaneous global communications.

Don’t forget that it also has a digital watch and calculator build in. Two things that where always added to 1970s premium tech products :)

This is it, when you look at sci-fi from that era you rarely see the analog of our current “phones”

But it’s obsolete, so they throw it away and buy a new one the next year.

Do you buy bottom of the line Android phones?

iPhone usage pattern.

iPhones were getting 6-7 years of software support when top of the line Androids got up to 3 and bottom end was getting 1 at most. It took YEARS for Android to catch up on this.

Its not about the device forcing it, its about the type of user. They are saying a standard iphone user does that.

I mean it’s wrong on all fronts today, the avg person keeps their phone for multiple years more than they used to.

I see that, by sharing a joke, I have unintentionally started a discussion.

Whoops.

/4 year old Motorola

6-7 years of software support on a device whose screen wouldn’t last 3 months.

Samsung Galaxies have gotten 3-5 years of updates for at least a decade. Agree that non-flagships used to get shafted. But EU has now mandated aftermarket updates for specific periods.

A portable super computer, modem, video camera, telephone, address book, flashlight, compass, level, gps/navigator, tv, radio, alarm clock, credit card, ID, library, game console, translator, calendar, calculator, and more. Secured with your biometric information, charges fully within an hour, and runs for about a full day before needing a recharge.

But this one doesn’t fold in half, so I’m throwing it out and buying a new one…

I think the notion of a pocket-sized device that gives you instant access to virtually all the knowledge humanity has ever produced is hard to beat.

Quantum Leap (1989 TV series) had a similar, but less functional device.

Ziggy!!! We loved this show so much when we were kids.

Blue LEDs. We had red and green since the '60s, but blue took until the '90s to figure out and the guy who did so got a Nobel prize for it because that finally meant we could use them for white lights and full-color displays.

relevant veritasium

I remember when the only color laser pointer was red. Now you have all the colors of the rainbow.

And damn powerful. So powerful you get almost every time wayyy more than allowed/advertised.

And yet i am this close to wanting him jailed

Well not him, I guess, just the designers of all those devices that have a blue laser like led in it shining in my eyes at 4 AM in the morning. Fuck all those digital clocks, TVs, etc.

It’s also opened the door to some very interesting synthetic chemistry applications that use blue light, it’s changed the field of photochemistry

so that’s the guy I can blame for blinding LED vehicle headlights?

No, that would be the assholes who lift their trucks, or perhaps your optometrist. Properly aimed LEDs don’t blind for shit. They blind me less than oldschool projectorless halogens even.

“properly aimed” LEDs blind the shit out of me on a daily basis, because roads are not flat and smooth and always at the same elevation as the surroundings

Nah, you’re the one who has special eyes or have never driven against Teslas and such. The color temperature on modern cars LEDs already makes it feel much brighter on other’s eyes, and then the actual lumens are usually more than triple the lumens compared to halogens.

Thing is, modern headlights have very sharp cutoffs on the low beams and low beams are to be aimed down with a 1% decline. Old school ( I mean pre-projector) halogens often don’t have any cutoff and just shine everywhere. A properly aimed modern light doesn’t blind you significantly.

Multibeam LEDs are even cooler, the other car can have high beams on and still not blind you.

No, blame the guys who put them in their blinding LED headlights.

You can blame The Weeknd

Is modern media, we have games and movies and shows with AI villains like Cain and GLaDOS. We used machines to create those villains. And even within the context of a generation, we are creating those villains.

Technology isn’t impressive, it just seems that way compared to how disappointing humans are.

I dont know, have you seen “space:1999”? I think some things would be a surprise, but i also think they would be like “what the hell? No flying cars? No end to cancer? Even more wars? People just watching short videos all god damn day and not actually being productive at all?”

A modern car would be pretty impressive to someone from the 70s, even without the ability to fly.

What was hilarious about that show was all that technology, but the computer printed out answers on receipt paper

Pornhub, OnlyFans

That’s just curb crawling from home, home office for prostitutes.

Apparently, the invention of the VCR in the 80s brought an end to 70s porn cinemas, and this was one tech development few people regretted, including those employed by those establishments.

I can’t believe nobody said Star Trek. In the 70s you had reruns of the original series and the animated series short run. TMP didn’t come around until the end of the decade. I wasn’t there, but I imagine a 70s trekky would be damn grateful to have all the Trek we have today and they’d probably even love Academy (All the older not chronically online fans I know rave about it).

Edit: regardless of your personal opinion on nu trek, the answer fits the question. A trek fan from the 70s would be blown away by having 13 series and 14 movies available to watch on demand, plus books, games, etc.

Oofta, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has a 4.6 on IMDb.

www.imdb.com/title/tt8622160/

What would TNG’s first season have if it was standalone and came out today

I dunno man, but probably better than that 😂

Like a 6-7 probably

Well, now you can’t say all the older not chronically online fans you know rave about it, because I’m older, not chronically online and I think it sucks.

Edit: I’ve just found out that “not chronically online” means “too incompetent to do shit online” so my apologies for misunderstanding. I thought it just meant, you know, not being online a lot. Like me. I’ve posted to Lemmy about 10 times in the past 5 days. I have literally no other social media accounts on the Internet. I was on Facebook for like a week in 2014 before I noped out. BUT! I can make an account on Lemmy, so my opinions about Star Trek are clearly only informed by being a chronically online mouth-breather.

The people I’m talking about would struggle with Reddit, let alone Lemmy. To paraphrase Lt. Commander Nella Daren; 'You’re more online than you think you are."

my dad thinks it sucks

“not chronically online”. Has a Lemmy account.

I think people generally tend to underestimate technology levels from 50 to 100 years ago. For the most part, the biggest innovation of the last hundred years has been miniaturization rather than any one particular technological advancement. And frankly, I think that’s the answer to the question; People from the 70s wouldn’t necessarily be in awe of one particular technology, but they’d certainly be in awe of how much we’ve been able to fit into a tiny ass amount of space.

Honestly, I think they’d be more disappointed than excited. We have not been to Mars, we don’t have flying cars, and we don’t have computers that can think for themselves despite what LLM providers would have you think. Our 2001 looked nothing like that which was imagined.

Our 2001 had that tragedy

Two income households that still can’t afford a single-family home.

Mind blowing but not nerdy.

What if it’s an economics nerd?

PoC already existed back then

I don’t think the 4tb micro SD card actually exists. They top out at 2tb which might be the maximum for the protocol. Your photo actually says SDHC which is clearly a mockup since SDHC was 32GB maximum. 4TB would have to be SDUC which is the level after SDXC. Sandisk announced a 4TB card last year but I don’t think it was ever shipped, maybe due to the AI-driven shortage.

Partial AI slop: …alibaba.com/…/4tb-microsd-card-reality-check-(20…

I have the opposite: at work, I found a Sony Memory Stick to Floppy Disk adapter (with CD driver disk). Yes, you plug a Memory Stick into a dummy floppy disk, then insert it into a 3.5” drive to transfer files to/from your peripherals. If literally anyone pings me tomorrow I will post the most cursed 2002 shit I’ve ever seen.

I wonder if there is a size limit? Could you just throw a 4TB drive on there and plug and play?

I’m not sure what standard of Memory Stick it supports up to, but definitely not in the TB range*… though now I’m wondering if I could get a Memory Stick and floppy drive expensed… Would love to see a multiple week file transfer estimate lol.

The oldest computer I think I have access to, though is an iMac G4, so if it won’t accept the driver disc and a modern floppy drive, we’d be out of luck.

*unless there’s some ridiculously unholy Memory Stick to SDXC adapter I’m blissfully unaware of…

Could you imagine showing a modern game console to someone from the 70s?

I played pong in the 70s, and that seemed amazing

I remember being blown away by Nintendo 64 in the 90s.

1980’s nerd here.

I fly camera drones, sometimes for money. I can buy a DJI mini 3 for under $400 US, and it is capable of taking perfectly steady video and pictures even in a pretty good wind. It will also stay in one spot in midair for close to half an hour before the battery runs down.

And a DJI mini 3 is a cheap beginner camera drone.

Vaccines and advancements in medicine. Ozempic and its ability to bring down and counts. Etc etc.

SDR (Software Defined Radio)

Its insane how many things you can do/listen to with a simple cheap USB stick.

blinry.org/50-things-with-sdr/

waow this is cool

Full body virtual reality is cheap and affordable ($1-2K vs $145K in 1994 and $Millions in the 70s)

Full body?

👉👌

Full body allows you to move your arms and legs in VR. Joints are approximated using IK, and the more trackers one wears, the closer it approaches to film grade motion capture quality.

Link? I only know of headsets with hand controllers

Polychromatic VDU.

psychedelics (LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, etc) as antidepressants or PTSD treatment. It was demonized so hard during the 70s because the govt hates hippies.

all your dads and uncles did more LSD than you

Well let’s see. I was a nerdy kid in the 70s, so I should be qualified for this. I have to say though, my wildest dreams set a pretty high bar. I dreamed of cities in space and in the oceans. And on land, we’d build giant fusion-powered arcologies modelled after the space cities that recycled everything we used. We’d spent most of our time in these cities connected by tunnelled maglevs while the rest of the world returned to a more natural state and became a giant wildlife/archaeological park.

But I’m trying to think of what would have blown my mind to learn about back then that actually happened. I think from a technological perspective, I never saw the marriage between computers and telecommunications becoming all that it is today. I had a vague idea of something like a video cell phone, but the idea that you could grab a movie off it from some distant giant computer complex and throw it up on a big screen in your home would’ve made me giddy. And just the quality of the image and the fidelity and depth of sound that could come out of tiny speakers would’ve been shocking. Sound systems were really, really shitty in the 70s. And TVs. Well, let’s just say there was a reason you went to the cinema.

The science nerd in me would also have been blown away by discoveries made since the 70s. Birds are dinosaurs? There were real life hobbits running around on some island in Indonesia? There are ocean moons in our solar system? And if I showed up to explain all this to my kid self, he would not have believed my age when I told him. Medicine is keeping us younger now.

There are ocean moons in our solar system?

Just learned it from your post. That is absolutely mind-blowing!

Saturn’s moon Titan has liquid lakes on its surface. Those lakes are full of methane, not water.

Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa are both covered in ice, but it is strongly believed that both worlds have subsurface oceans of liquid water. Europa may contain more water than Earth.

Yeah, if there was any doubt that an outer moon could contain liquid water, Enceladus’ active geysers firmly ended that speculation.

Europa’s ocean may be on the order of 100 km in depth. By comparison, Earth’s average about 4 km. That would make Europa have far more water than Earth despite being smaller than our Moon.

It seems as more data come in, it’s getting more and more likely that subsurface liquid water is common in the outer solar system, and that many other moons have varying amounts of it. Even Titan may have water someplace below its surface lakes of liquid methane. The inner solar system is more of a desert, and we are lucky to have what we have.

If you want more mind-blowing stuff, check out discoveries being made about exoplanets (planets around other stars). These were only detected in the 90s, but there are thousands we know about now, and there are some absolutely crazy examples among them.

The collision that created the moon might have been with an ice planetoid that also left a lot of the water we have here.

And on the topic, I just watched an episode of The Universe, which was just added to netflix but was from 2011. Big thing I noticed was the CG in the show was pretty shitty. But they also made no mention about the moon creating collision despite that episode being the top 10 catastrophies in the solar system (which was also kinda a lame topic for a series about “the universe”, it would be like a series about cool things in the solar system that just focused on cool things on earth). So don’t even have to go back to the 70s for the moon creating collision to not be on the public’s radar at least.

Ah yes, good old Theia! That was quite the reveal wasn’t it? Reminds of when they finally found that the giant object that wiped out the dinosaurs struck somewhere near present day Cancun.

on-demand video bent my grandfather’s brain. He could not wrap his head around it. “What do you want to watch?” “What’s on?” “Everything. You want to watch a particular episode of Dallas? A NASCAR race from 1984? The moon landings? all 47 seasons of MASH? We’ve got a magic VCR. We can always watch anything we want. So what do you want to watch?” “Well what’s on?”

Watching him die of dementia is a major driver of my goal to die young.

My mom died of dementia. My sympathies. It’s so hard on families. Better to burn out than fade away, as they say.

me (1999): I just want 1GB of ram and 1TB of hard drive, I can’t see a world where more than that would be necessary.

We were ripping DVD’s to 200mb divx at the time and an OTA cartoon might only be 25mb because SD+compression.

Yeah, some anime are now 400 1 GB per episode. That’s what bad encoding settings do to you.

Edit: mind fart. Some Fate series are 1.2 GB per episode. 400 MB is high-ish, ~300 MB in mpeg, ~120 MB in avif webm.

Also a lot higher resolution and bitrate… And not to speak of all the advanced in compression since divx!

Back in time man. 2GB drives were monsters, screens were all 1024x768

I remember my friend getting a 500gb storage in 2005 and thinking, how the hell will she use all that space. The divx movies I downloaded were always 700mb AVI, no matter how long.

2003 was when I ad a 128mb ram to my 256mb pc. I recorded a lot of music and produce quite a few experimental movies on that pc.

Divx. It really whipped the llamas ass.

Social media in general.

Watching a lot of stuff from the era, it seemed to completely miss the mark on how social media as a concept would work.

In the 80s, my nerdy friends were already having LAN parties and some of them set up BBS’s over spare land lines, which were sort of like an early social media just for your immediate friend group but not connected globally or anything.

Fast forward to the present day, and one of said friends invited me to a discord that was modelled after his old BBS. It’s actually active and fun to catch up with everyone who’s found their way back.

I was one of those nerds. And BBS actually were the 2ND greatest time I had, tech-wise. It was a fascinating new world, beyond imagination. I had one demoscene-board which also was the NC (net-coordinator) of a well-known message-net á la Fido-net.

And one for warez. At the height of it, one CD with a handful zerodays went for like 400 moneyz. Wasn’t about the money though.

Nice!

Actually, when I moved to a new town, I found a BBS that was a bigger deal than those hobby ones my friends were running. It had lots of people on it at a time and hosted a popular MUD, for example.

Then one day I was logging in and saw 2 options: bbs and ppp. What the heck is ppp? Well I got on the bbs and everyone was going nuts. It’s the Internet man! They became the first isp in town and they’re actually still around.

Funny thing is though, when I first got on I didn’t think much of it? The web was still in its infancy and you kind of had to know your way around. Eventually, I found my way to some ftp server (umich?) with a giant amount of warez and then I was in heaven!

Haha, yeah, the privilege of being on one of the big name’s ftps was gold. Sadly I lost all those contacts. Fairlight, razor and what they all were name…

And the time where you had to search search-engines was also cool. Then google came and changed it all. They rocked!..then they removed “don’t be evil!” As slogan and shit went downhill into hell 😒

What about your greatest time tech-wise? I am curious

Well…TFC (team fortress classic). Played leagues, had tons of fun. Camradery and fairness trumped the scene. Even in a league against one another, we helped the enemy when they were one (wo)man short. Or vice versa. And they gave their best. Because it was about fun. The more tech advanced, the worse the community of competitive games became.

Though I actually would put BBS #1 as fondest tech-times. I’m really privileged to be born just in time to see the world get interconnected and the internet die 🫣

Curiosity sated? 😁

Ultrabright LEDs

They were d a r k back then.

youtube.com/watch?v=gD5mnAxAHFY

Fascinating to see THIS comment (of all the million miracles in tech since then). I’ve always been weirdly attracted by those tiny lamps. As a kid I had a box with like thousands of LEDs of all kinds. I built even weirder things with them, like glasses hooked into the 6.3mm audio-jack that drove many LEDs around the eyes, in sync to the music. I didn’t need drugs as a wee lad 😁

Never thought they would ever need cooling in the future and can burn your eyes. Obsession with them didn’t fade though, all other tech just catched up to them in obsession-land.

I looked at making the leftt-right LED bar, hooked to binaural beats :-)

I mentioned this innovation because of how ever present they are now.

The planetary power-saving by moving from incandescent to LED for most light sources, must be staggering.

That indeed. Back then you had a 300W halogen lamp. Turn on two, and you have a decent gaming-rig running. Now all my smart led-lamps together won’t reach 300w 😁

xkcd.com/691/

Even the 1tb ones cost too much now. What, are data centers using those too??

Transferred demand.

SDDs and HDDs are too expensive, so people are using SD cards instead.

I think it’s more that the companies producing flash storage have shifted their focus to ssds and therefore lowered the supply of SD cards ?

why not both?

and yet we are told that it’s too hard/expensive to add a 16 gb Video Cache to a consumer graphic card.

Uhh very, very, very different type of memory. You could try using a microsd card if you’re happy with 10 spf I guess, I prefer measuring in fps though

10 spf is too low for me, I’ll sunburn

spf stands for seconds per frame. Ten seconds per frame.

In Johnny Mnemonic the upload in the brain was 320GB and he had to erase his childhood memories. Today it would be just a microSD. The story is set in 2021.

Star Trek mostly avoided that problem. They made up a fictional unit of data storage called a “quad” to avoid the problem of “the Borg source code is too big for our databanks, it’s 3.2 gigabytes in size.”

The author of the novelization of Wrath of Kahn didn’t see it coming; one of the scientists on Regula 1 in the book, not the movie, complains that his personal computer didn’t have enough room for a 4 megabyte “50 meg” game.

The Wrath of Kahn novel was released in 1982. The 1981 IBM PC already came with an optional 10MB HDD. So the author would have had to assume that storage space tech would basically never improve at all.

Okay I just looked it up, I’m going to amend my post after making this comment: The game is stated to be “fifty megs” in size. To which Carol Marcus replies “Christ on a crutch! It’s the program that swallowed Saturn!”

I’m not taking it out on the author here, Reagan hadn’t signed Moore’s Bill into law yet by 1982. The Atari 2600 had less than a kilobyte of RAM, just enough for the stack. The Commodore VIC-20 as shilled by Captain Kirk had 5k of RAM, about 8k of ROM, a diskette (formatted for the VIC-20) held 170k and a cassette tape could hold up to 300k. Also, IIRC, by 1982 Moore’s Bill hadn’t been signed into law by President Reagan yet. The exponential growth in computer capacity and power hadn’t begun. Why would the author see it coming?

Though, the author did avoid saying “megabytes” so it could be 50 “megaquads” which could be any amount of data, though that decision hadn’t been made yet.

It always impresses me that in TNG the episode they give Data’s specs that it’s still impossibly futuristic to this day.

He states his storage capacity as “800 quadrillion bits” which works out to ~100 petabytes?

In that form factor. We are getting closer to that just being normal. Right now, not possible.

Last night my sister and I had a 90 minute conversation on our phones with full-colour, hi-res video, me in the UK, her in NZ. It didn’t cost either of us anything. We’re in our 70s, such a thing was unimaginable back in the day.

It cost you internet and your privacy. 🤗

Not if they were using stolen wifi and Signal \s

Not your privacy if you can find an encrypted video chat software. I’m trying keet.io it’s been solid

Mate, back in the day there was a phone book in every home with everyone’s exact address and phone number in it. If you wanted the phone number of someone in another city, you went to the public library, which had more phone books. If the library was big enough, they had international phone books.

If someone didn’t have a phone, you could get their address from the electoral roll, again available at the library.

A lot of people didn’t even lock their doors. We did, but the key was hanging up in the garage.

Edit: my internet is unlimited - it doesn’t cost me any more to blab for an hour.

You could, however, pay a fee to the phone book company to leave your info off of it.

I remember talking to family in Australia from UK on the phone in 90s and it costing multiple £/min with noticeable delay.

Remember the pressure to say everything as fast as possible without lapsing into mundane things? Long distance phone calls were stressful.

The wheeze was to make a reverse charge call and tell the operator your name was “Itsaboy”. The call would then be declined.

I was explaining to my 8 year old son only last week about how when I was a boy phones existed but nothing like what we have today. We had one phone in each house, usually in the hallway or bottom or the stairs. Rotary and then digital. Phone books, pay phones, yellow pages, and so on.

The conversation started because we walked past an old BT glass phone box with still had the phone inside and the slot to put coins in. He asked what it was.

This one for me too. I remember watching some movie when I was younger and it had two people talking over a video screen and I thought that when that happens I’ll be actually living in the sci-fi future. Fast forward many years and I’m driving with my husband, regular old day, and as I’m looking out the window I see a girl face timing with somone at the bus stop. And it hits me, I’M HERE, I’M IN THE SCI-FI FUTURE. And that was 15 years ago. It’s missing a bunch of the other cool sci-fi shit, but it’s nailing the dystopian aspect’s full on.

The Nazis are back.

the punks tried to warn us

They never left

I don’t think you comprehend the words “wildest dreams” in the title…

Well, still no flying cars.

We can barely handle non flying cars. Can you imagine the amount of mini 9/11s drunk drivers flyers will cause?

The chance of collision in 3d space is so much lower than 2d.

It’s a lot harder to paint lanes in the sky

That’s what the chemtrails are for.

Superconducting levitation is probably the closest we can get safely. Or maybe once we got reliable assist systems.

I will maintain that we have flying cars, and we have had them for some time. They’re called helicopters.

Also, Autogyros.

4TB??. I remember being in highschool in 2003 and we were all standing around looking at a 1GB USB. It was insane that a USB could hold an insane 1GB

My first MP3 player was a USB stick that plugged into an adaptor that had a 3.5mm headphone jack… It let me carry 60-85 songs, There was no Bluetooth.

1GB hard drive (1980)

500 pounds and $40,000

Ibm hard drive. 1956. 5MB

Yeah, digital cameras with raw images is pretty much the only usecase of TB sdcards. Keep in mind that they don’t have wear leveling and a very simple controller. Also lower quality flash than SSDs.

digital cameras … the only usecase of TB sdcards

Must be just my imagination that I use them in my handheld emulators.

TB? You shouldn’t. Or keep a bac;up. In cameras, they are used as a transfer device, the size of the sdcard determining, how long you can film/how much snapshots you can make before transfering.

It’s the only storage my emulator devices will accept.

Yes, a backup is smart.

Above knee, double amputees able to walk because of robot legs. This will always seem like science fiction to me.

It’s incredible to see come to fruition, but we definitely had advanced prothetics speculated in the 1970s.

Without any sarcasms… That il some kind of wild shit.

So uhhh, why was that ready to hand?

It’s not for the hand.

Well both their hands are free, you see, due to the cage.

They had that in the 1970s

That advertisements would be used to disrupt and control your online activities.

This is the opposite. I was watching the transformers 40th anniversary in the theatre with my son and noticed in the 80’s we had such a hard on for hover boards. In 2005 on earth Daniel had one. In back to the future it was 2015 and they had hoverboards.

Man we fucked up. I want my hoverboard.

How about the “behind the scenes” clip where Bob Zemekis claims that hoverboards are real but a parents group prevented their manufacturer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KFpv-szVVQ

In another interview, Zemekis claimed the hoverboards caused so many on-set injuries that he himself was the person who campaigned to ban the manufacturer and sale of hoverboards.

3.5 floppy disks. They still exist and still get used. I used them regularly up through the 2010s.

Are they still used for something that isn’t ancient hardware?

There is a surprising amount of “ancient” hardware out there still chugging along doing very useful work.

I know, but I thought you were implying there are new devices that were utilizing them. Nevertheless, I love seeing old-school tech still in use. My roommate had a Korg music workstation that used them.

Computers are things you can personally own, most of the people on the planet own at least one, probably including one that fits in a pants pocket.

Steve Wozniak once proudly told his mother that some day, he’ll have a computer of his very own. Richard Stallman, in his now famous usenet post announcing the beginning of GNU, says that “one manufacturer has already promised us a machine.” So, Richard Stallman was working “In the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT”, and even in that position there was a question as to where he was going to get a computer for his project. In 1983.

Ironically, we’re circling back to renting a dummy terminal to access someone else’s computer.

The irony is that phones are capable enough to do things, but they lack admin privileges despite being a device you own.

The combined computing power to run NASA and put men on the moon…now fits in my pants pocket

and yet since 1972 (IIUC) no one’s walked the Moon again.

I’m late gen Z and when I first saw a 1TB micro SD in I too had a “Wow” moment. For me 1 TB was a rather big hard drive. What I want to say is that its insane how fast technology is developing.

The technology allowed us to do such things for a while, actually. The problem was cost. What finally brought these devices to the market are insane economies of scale driving prices into an acceptable range.

A lot of the technological breakthroughs we have are not only due to science and engineering, but also economy. Humans figured how to produce very complex stuff VERY efficiently, and this allowed us to move the latest developments from the lab to enterprise, and then to consumers.

SSDs and flash storage are brilliant, pretty much textbook examples of it. So are chips, LEDs, solar panels, and much more.

I got to thinking about like, Amazon. To an American in 1970, the equivalent would have been Sears, the retailer that sells literally everything though an enormous catalog. They had department stores you could visit in person and they’d publish a phone book thick catalog for mail order. And there was a time that Sears could have bought Amazon outright for chump change. I remember a Tim Allen stand-up routine where he talks about mail ordering a tool from Sears, and it arrives 6 to 8 weeks later. Shipping is now usually a matter of 1-4 days.

But no, the real answer is probably wireless headphones. Like if you were showing around a tech enthusiast from 1975 around my house, the thing that would probably break his brain the most is a pair of wireless earbuds.

Unfortunately they don’t sound near as good. Maybe in the future they will.

Compared to a lot of headphones available in the 1970’s they sound amazing.

Not so sure about that claim. In the 70s everything was analogue. Bluetooth can barely do mp3 quality let alone CD which is still far from full analogue tape. Many headphone from back them line Sennheiser HD 414, Koss Pro/4AA, and Stax SR-X blow away anything some makes now

Allow me to re-state, with emphasis:

Compared to

A LOT

of headphones available in the 1970’s, they sound amazing.

Yeah, there’s been good audio gear for decades, but there was also utter garboleum.

My issue was back then things got better every year. People chased sound quality. Now people use Bluetooth and listen to music mixed on a laptop with autotune.

Christians of Lemmy: You think your god would have bothered creating the universe if he knew it would inevitably lead to the existence of audiophiles?

Let me guess it’s okay to appreciate good food. It’s okay to appreciate sweet touching. But it’s not okay to appreciate good audio. Gotcha

It’s one thing to appreciate good audio, it’s another to be so snobbish about it to the point of academic dishonesty.

Indeed, Sears had every chance to become Amazon. I kind of miss my old Sony Walkman with the foam earpads.

They were Amazon long before your mommy and daddy were born. Do you think Bezos had an original idea? Amazon will be as impressive as Sears if they last as long.

Wireless anything really, in the 70s everything had a damned cord.

I’m picturing Bob Barker hosting The Price Is Right with that weirdly long microphone of his in his hand with a cable draped across the set.

CT and MRI

i saw this on r/futurology
scmp.com/…/chinese-scientists-build-worlds-smalle…

“The device can be held in one hand and is the world’s smallest and lightest CT system, earning it the nickname ‘palm-sized CT scanner’,” Liu Baodong, a senior engineer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and general manager of Rayim, told the Science and Technology Daily on Monday.

The machine had a spatial resolution of 80 micrometres, roughly the width of a human hair, and could analyse objects from snail shells to medicine capsules, Liu said.

It consumed only about 200 watts, which meant it could be powered by an ordinary portable power bank during fieldwork, he said."

This is the hot shit as well:

en.wikipedia.org/…/Photon-counting_computed_tomog…

i believe that CT&MRI are also used in research. which i think is really great.
in clinical diagnostic setting, the imaging is for a single case and privacy protected… whereas in research, it is greenlighted and maximally designed for greater good of medicine.

All video graphics after Pong’s.

After pong’s … what ?

Graphics.

Huh. I must have really read that one wrong earlier.

It happens.

Graphics

Generate AI slop of anything, specially the one in this community.

I remember 4chan had a thread of images where israeli buildings got blown up.

That we live inside a dystopia that is a pretty even mix of Brave New World and 1984.

Ugh.

I always want a realpowrtful pool jet water pump filteration systems so that it pushes hard but water soft do hard soft on penis and it great ejactulations I’ve always added had in my growing so itrememberenced me to a better home. Damn the times do gooder is me that is wanting bit not.

Damn, and I thought poetry was dead

I once used my pool pump

To get it on w/water hump

Used that spigot to blown

On my penis’ part’s dome

And then I blow sperm in

The water and go n swim

LLMs - you can just talk to your computer. I used computers since the 90s and that has always been the ultimate scifi dream and it’s here.

As much as I have a love-hate relationship with these because of all the negative effects (And there are countless ones), it’s quite impressive what current Frontier models can do at this time, with very little input.

I remember cleverbot back in the day, and thinking that was peak.

You can talk to dumb chatbots since the nineties. Now they can into grammar, wow.

(I know they are way better now. But the basic fact stands.)

It’s a little bit more than that, I would say at this point.

As I said somewhere else I’m not really into LLMs, so I try to stay neutral…

I’m currently using Astra a little bit more, and it’s really interesting to see how these models work these days. You increasingly feel the (self-)reinforcement learning on these models. They developed an interesting code style (not very human…). Also the way it explores the code (and other stuff) like writing scripts on the fly to either explore or monitor, and even writing scripts to build the sourcefiles. And well, it definitely currently reshapes software development…

They did that on ST:TOS.

I wouldn’t say that’s crazier than a 70’s nerds wildest dreams. In the 70’s they thought talking to your computer was just around the corner. They would more likely be amazed that it took so long.

Not related to technology. Walking into an airport to greet or to say Bon Voyage to people at the gate!!! Now, the fucking things are like prisons!

Running to tell the woman you love to stay, before being tazed to the ground and put on a no fly list.

apnews.com/…/tsa-precheck-gateside-known-traveler…

I think a 1970s American would get a kick out these:

• Global warming is real and worse than you think and no it’s not going to be addressed.
• Those gas prices are going no where but up.
• Anyway we decided that all cars will be F350s.
• I hope you like pocket electronics because those are literally the only things that will seem truly futuristic to you. Everything else? Pretty much the same. Yep. We don’t even live longer.

Ah, ah, ah, “we” decided?

Energy Crisis 2.0

There’s things that are slightly futuristic, like lightbulbs that don’t really burn out and barely need power to run, or antidepressants that don’t completely fuck you up. But yeah, in the 1970s they’d kind of maxxed out what’s physically possible with a lot of technologies, while they were still projecting linear growth like they’d seen over previous decades.

Now I’m curious how high gas prices got in the 70’s oil crises, in 2026 dollars. Uhhh… looks like it was comparable to now, actually.

1992 born but I’ve said to my mom crazy how nothings changed. Updated to work the same as before but other than that attempts to change everything is a major flaw.

I was born in the early 80s. Things HAVE changed big time. A lot of things that we do not see on a daily basis that have changed majorly. Medical tech is one. most people do not work in the medical field and do not pay much attention to it (I am one of them!) but the sheer amount of stuff that has changed in medicine is staggering.

Like transportation hasn’t changed though. It’s all update to function exactly the same.

Not everything has stayed the same but a few things of our daily lives that we thought were going to be more extravagant or technology driven aren’t and now some of the things that have technologocal advances we wonder why the fuck they need them, like toasters. Why the fuck does a toaster need Bluetooth?

• Electric cars
• Reusable orbital rockets
• Robots
• AI

I think they’d find 4k OLED TVs impressive too. Maybe generative AI. A lot of other things like Bitcoin, eh, whatever.

I’d have to imagine, if they were also into art, that they’d absolutely flip put over the tools for digital art, 3D modeling, and 3D printing. I mean, you can make a miniature 3D model for a project, make some textures to slap on it so you can get an idea of how you want it to look, print it, and then paint it to look like your textured model. All from your house, no less.

Though, for animation nerds, definitely the jump in animation quality. I wasn’t alive back then, but when I look back at cartoons from then, I notice a few of cheap things occasionally used like solid colour backgrounds, stiff character movement, and repeated animations in certain areas to save on budget. Plus, the stories being told are a lot better, IMO, in general… despite some of the crud we get alongside the cream of the crop.

I wouldn’t even know where to begin… And I still marvel everyday about where we are today, compared to last year 😁 And I’m here since the internet began, and I had to drive to neighbor-city, be interviewed, fill out forms, join a nonprofit, just to have access to it.

I’m in awe every time I look at my e.g. phone. A thing that is a factor of like a hundred thousand or more in terms of speed, resolution, storage, in comparison to my first computer. And I carry it around. And it can connect to the net at unbelievable speeds. Without a cable.

…yet websites often load slower than back then, thanks to lazy devs, the use of 5838229 frameworks or scripts noone needs and also tracking and the likes.

ITT: People not understanding the title.

How does anyone read “wildest dreams” and answer with bad things? So many comments here are about things that were just unimaginable in a bad way, which isn’t at all what the question is about.

International Tinder Telecomunication?

Lemmy is only for complaining. /s

The Patch was hypothesized in 1988 and first documented in 1997, by a passing yacht racer. Research on the patch began in earnest in 2009.

Estimates on the size are still nebulous, as it continues to expand and shift. But I doubt anyone in the 1970s was predicting a patch of trash twice the size of Texas would appear in the Pacific Ocean over the next 50 years.

This was actually renamed to the Great American Garbage Patch

Also wish more effort and attention went into countries coming together to clean this up, and simultaneously stop any new trash from entering into our waters.

Trump renamed something again?!

• there’s now scientists working on myco-remediation creating controlled fungi that can eat plastics and polymers. 🤓

What happens if this fungi comes in contact with humans full of microplastics?

Then you get a cleansing and then you go to the er and call yourself a dumbass and then hope to god the intravenous antifungal work.

No, honestly I don’t know but you can buy a syringe of liquid culture that contains a strain of a plastic eating mushroom and the warning on the site is to not store it in a plastic fridge. You could find the plastic pile and then toss a jar of that culture on it and then toss your boat because it’s probably been hit with the liquid culture.

We got most of the tech from the jetsons ppl could envision in the early 1960s (video calls, smartphones, smart watches, smart homes), but still don’t have flying cars, cloud cities, robot maids, and moving sidewalks going everywhere.