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.
and yet we are told that it’s too hard/expensive to add a 16 gb Video Cache to a consumer graphic card.
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.
Ultrabright LEDs
They were d a r k back then.
SDR (Software Defined Radio)
Its insane how many things you can do/listen to with a simple cheap USB stick.
psychedelics (LSD, MDMA, mescaline, psilocybin, etc) as antidepressants or PTSD treatment. It was demonized so hard during the 70s because the govt hates hippies.
Two income households that still can’t afford a single-family home.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
👉👌
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.
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
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’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
Imagine showing VR porn games to Benjamin Franklin.
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 regularly work with 800Gbps Ethernet at work
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
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.
