I remember our accountant at work getting a Nokia Communicator. The first time (I think) anyone had ever thought to integrate a PDA into a phone. I'd had Psion Organisers since 1998 (XP, then LZ64 then Series 3a then Revo) but the idea of combining that with a phone was revolutionary.

People tend to forget it's a computer in their pocket that happens to make phone calls. They complain about battery life, and fail to consider what they actually do with the device. My work Samsung Note II will actually last all weekend on one charge if I just leave it switched on. Start using it, and the processing power required by the applications, plus the electricity required to light its large screen soon take their toll.

Oh yes, I remember film cameras. Having to wait until you'd finished the film before you could get it developed. I've lost count of the number of photos I have of the inside of my fridge. You just had to hope you'd got it right, because there was no opportunity to check. And film (and developing and printing) weren't free, so unless you were doing something commercial, you were conservative with your shots. Go back far enough, and flash bulbs were one shot devices that cost you money every time you used them.

Flat Earthers? I think some people just like to be seen as thinking outside of the box. I think a lot are playful believers, doing it for the sake of argument. They know there's too much evidence of a (roughly) spherical Earth. They simply ignore anything that disputes their theory as being part of a conspiracy (I'm not sure what anyone has to gain from making us believe that the Earth is a sphere.)

Tide pods? Kids have always done dares. Ring that doorbell and run away. Some of the stuff I did as a kid was positively idiotic. One involved riding a kid's tricycle with no brakes, while wearing roller skates, down a very steep hill. I could easily have badly injured myself (or worse) the speed I was doing when I got to the bottom.

I used to think the anti-vaxxing argument was complete nonsense. I've since seen what appear to be reputable studies showing a correlation between concentrations of aluminium in the brain and autism. So there may, potentially, still be something in it with respect to vaccines that contain aluminium. However, it's a matter of risk mitigation, and I still believe that the risks of not vaccinating are much greater than those of vaccinating. Of course there are other exposures to aluminium, but few that inject it directly into the bloodstream.

[yournewswire.com]

My dad bought an IBM 8088 for about 4 grand back in the day. It had a 20 MB hard drive, and he was giddy. "I'll never fill it up*," he said.

Fast forward 15 years from there, and I'm replacing his 20 GB drive with a 100GB drive and tell him, "You realize the drive I'm replacing is 1000 times the size of that drive you'd never fill up, yeah?"

?

AmazIng, Isn't It ?

You have more computing power in your pocket than NASA had available for the Apollo missions.

My first computer was in college. It was a vax. You know, like HAL. I learned fortran and basic on the vax while working on my elec degree. It was wild. When I was working, they brought my first desktop to me. I was not thrilled. The gave me one to take home to check inventory. That's when I got addicted. All that information at your finger tips. AoL was not free then. I went to happy hour everynight on AOL. A couple $500 monthly bills stopped that.

Technology has changed and improved, not necessarily humans. Evolution takes much longer. The dumb will still reproduce though. Does technology make us smarter or more dumb? More free to be active from less time consuming chores, or lazier just sitting there with a screen in our faces? Depends on how you use it I guess. At what point can we blame both nature and nurture for stupid people? If some have a basis of being generally smart from their DNA, but nobody teaches them in their environment, then it's possible to do very dumb things. No?

Cats do possess a special power, in this age of information.

I often have those wow moments, indeed we have come a ways on some things.

@STylisticidiot Yeah, I am with you on this one. Our generation have gone through exciting times technology wise. I think it could be really cool if we could go back in time to ONLY 30 years and bring a smart phone to show off. I can see how people would be amazed just at the camera capabilities (since there was no wireless internet service 30 years ago, most of the device would be useless). I hear you and completely understand. I have dedicated my whole professional life to Consumer Electronics (more than 30 years ) and I got to see first hand the most amazing technologies being developing in front of my eyes. The thing that gets me going ( you started it, so now deal with my endless blah blah blah, ok?) as I was saying, the thing that really excites me is to think by extrapolation, if what we have today would amaze people from 30 years ago, by the same token I wonder a lot what is it going to be like in the next 30 years???... I bet we could come up with a list of ideas and possibilities. Here is one just to get started, video will get so much computer power that users will have the capability to configure any movie with the actor or actress of their preference, or they could drive the plot to a different ending...that's just entertainment. What about having the capability to transform mass into energy and then travel to distant places at the speed of light?.. I know, the craziest the idea the better, right???... anyhow, enough for the time being..... Cheers !!!

Cool.

Wow!

My 1st computer had a 5 MB hard drive. I though I was in hog heaven!!! I would never fill that up. Just got my latest computer. 1/2 terrabyte. damn.

The Real Time Computing Center in Houston that ran the Apollo missions in the late 60s and early 70s was composed of two very large IBM mainframes, each with approximately 64k of memory on each. and ran at like 1 megahertz and maybe had a few megabytes of live storage. i wrote this a few years ago commemorating the Apollo missions for zdnet

[zdnet.com]

To put that in perspective your average low power IoT smart controller for something like a wifi connected thermostat or a lightbulb hub has 512K of RAM and 1MB flash and runs at like 100 megahertz. thats easily 100 times more powerful than all of the computer power nasa or a large corporation had combined. Thats easily one of the most miniscule compute devices used today and is incredibly common. it costs maybe $10. Your fitness tracker is more powerful than that.

[marvell.com]

Now if you really want to see transistor disparity read this. i wrote this in 2011 so its now pretty outdated but it should give you w feeling for what the moores law rollercoaster has been like. transistors on chips have doubled every 18 months since the introduction of the microprocessor in the early 1970s.

[zdnet.com]