Asklemmy

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.

Modern video games.

If you sent, say, a huge RPG or simulation game back in time, or even Minecraft, anyone who understood computation would drop their jaw. What a computer can render 90 times a second still kinda drops my jaw, when I think about it.

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.

Still having no public health care.

The Nazis are back.

Having better Internet almost anywhere, in your pocket - compared to the wired Internet even 20, not 50 years ago.

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.

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.

"Cordless" isn't much of a word anymore because everything runs on batteries. Battery tech itself has come a long way.

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.

Immediately accessible on demand free pornography.

CT and MRI

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

I hope we've outpaced the imagination of somebody from 50 freaking years ago. Imagine how the 1970s would look to somebody from the 1920s.

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!

A super computer at the size of your hand. Yet, I'm using one to type this comment right now (I'm of course talking about the smartphone)

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

Without any sarcasms... That is some kind of wild shit.

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.

Any smartphone is the obvious one.

But, the first black hole was confirmed in 1971. The fact that we've taken a picture of one would be incredible, not to mention directly imaging planets in other solar systems.

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.

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.

SDR (Software Defined Radio)

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

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

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

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)

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.

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.