The Nazis are back.
the punks tried to warn us
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.
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.
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.
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): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/CMS
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
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:
https://cheezburger.com/6923525/guys-impossible-garage-sale-find-is-one-for-the-books
using the PS1 CPU as the I/O processor when in PS2 mode, no less.
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
IIRC Alan Turing was the one who came up with the concept of emulation, so that’s nothing new.
Imagine showing VR porn games to Benjamin Franklin.
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.
Voluntarily being surveilled and profiled 24/7.
Ability to speak to a computer in free form, in dozens of languages, and have it understand you, is fucking mind blowing.
Everyone having a portable supercomputer that fits in their pocket that also has a network connection that allows for instantaneous global communications.
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…
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.
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.
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.
so that’s the guy I can blame for blinding LED vehicle headlights?
No, blame the guys who put them in the blinding LED 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
It’s also opened the door to some very interesting synthetic chemistry applications that use blue light, it’s changed the field of photochemistry
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.
Having better Internet almost anywhere, in your pocket - compared to the wired Internet even 20, not 50 years ago.
Without any sarcasms… That is some kind of wild shit.
So uhhh, why was that ready to hand?
It’s not for the hand.
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 :
That website makes me feel seen.
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.
I regularly work with 800Gbps Ethernet at work
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: https://electronics.alibaba.com/buyingguides/4tb-microsd-card-reality-check-(2026)
Immediately accessible on demand free pornography.
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.
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
500 pounds and $40,000
