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Comment by madamelic

18 hours ago

Thank you for this insight!

I always wonder the views of older people. My parents are very technology forward and have been my entire life so it is difficult to gauge how different life is compared to when they were growing up.

It's easy to hear "Oh well I only had 640kb of memory and typed programs out of a magazine I got in the mail!" and see as distinct from having 'unlimited' resources and the internet.

Your insight is good ("The biggest difference is I read the news on my phone instead of a physical newspaper") that life sort of stays the same but the modality changes. People still go to the store like they did in the mid-1800s but now it is by car.

I wonder what our "industrial revolution" will be where the previous generation lived (ie: out in the country on a farm) totally different lives to the current (ie: in the city in a factory). Maybe when space travel and multi-planetary living is normalized?

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madamelic

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saulpw  18 hours ago

> It's easy to hear "Oh well I only had 640kb of memory and typed programs out of a magazine I got in the mail!"

Since I was there (young, but there), I want to point out that this crosses three eras which all felt quite different:

    1978: typed programs in from a magazine or loaded from a cassette (16kB, TRS-80)
    1983: loaded programs from a floppy (64kB, Apple ][ and C64 etc)
    1988: loaded programs from a hard disk (640kB, IBM PC and Mac).

Exact years vary but these eras were only about 5 years each. Nobody had a floppy in 1978 but almost computer user did by 1983; nobody had a hard drive in 1983 but almost everyone did by 1988.

bobthepanda  17 hours ago

To some degree this already happened with the move from the industrial city to suburbanization and then re-urbanization. In particular one of the most notable recent developments is that urban waterways are now pretty desirable places to be with parks and recreation; in most industrializing cities the waterfront was actively avoided because the industrial use made it polluted, smelly etc.