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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can blame The Weeknd
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.
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…
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
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
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.
Not your privacy if you can find an encrypted video chat software. I’m trying keet.io it’s been solid
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.
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 :)
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…
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.
This is it, when you look at sci-fi from that era you rarely see the analog of our current “phones”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Love it! The main reason I use reader modes in browsers is so that they look like that website.
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
SDR (Software Defined Radio)
Its insane how many things you can do/listen to with a simple cheap USB stick.
waow this is cool
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.
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)
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.
/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!
WORM/WORN, small difference, I say ship it.
This guy’s got upper management written all over him.
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
I’d say so, afaik they only go as small as a CF in 4TB.
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.
CT and MRI
i saw this on r/futurology
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3367612/chinese-scientists-build-worlds-smallest-ct-scanner-weighing-just-6kg“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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon-counting_computed_tomography
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.
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
