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Nastypilot t1_jar58pc wrote

Reply to comment by Ricky_Rollin in Figure: One robot for every human on the planet. by GodOfThunder101

Question as a person born in 2005: What changed technologically since 1990's?

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godog t1_jarx6cm wrote

Born in 1991 for reference

When I was a kid, there was more or less no internet as we think of it today. It existed, but only tech nerds used it for much: images took time to load and were poor resolution, videos you can forget about, and forums were the main thing

People watched TV, read books and went outside much more

The internet slowly gained more features. When i was in middle school, the first social networks (myspace) started to appear. At first these were not full of "rage bait" stuff because the attention economy was only just beginning. YouTube was born around this time, and it was the first time the internet went from being weird nerds to being "most people"

Early devices like iPods and flip phones would become smartphones by the time I was in college. YouTube went from blurry videos that took forever to load to something like it's present form, with lots of videos and ads and things

Most of the early internet was spread across 100s of forums and fun sites like ytmnd, but by the time of the smartphone it consolidated around "the five websites" that exist today

The culture changed a lot around this. The early internet was more anarchic, and felt separated from society, but soon the two would become more integrated.

Since then, well, you'll be old enough to know what occurred

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Nastypilot t1_jarxiip wrote

Alright, thank you, that answered my question a bit.

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jambokk t1_jaruywt wrote

Pretty much everything.

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Nastypilot t1_jarvg0m wrote

Er, that doesn't really answer my question, I grew up in 2010's, earliest memory I have is from 2009, I have no frame of reference for the 90's.

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jambokk t1_jarw5ip wrote

Well the biggest one that comes to my mind that has changed everyone's day to day life, is the fact that practically everybody has an internet capable super computer in their pocket, for better or worse. Smart phones are pretty fucking sci-fi if you were born pre-1990.

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flyblackbox t1_jaszex0 wrote

The biggest things I can think of, born in 1987.

We had to make phone calls from a phone connected to a wall at all times and if you weren’t there to answer the phone, too bad. There was no cell phone service, or World Wide Web until about 1995, and only a few people even had email in the early 90s.

Trying to navigate to a physical location was a either a guessing game or literally looking at a map and trying to figure out where you were, where you were going, and running your finger across the map to see what roads went that way. If you didn’t have a map, you had to stop and ask for directions where someone else would tell you how many turns to make or what landmarks you would see on the way.

Oh and to learn any fact, you had to either know someone knowledgeable on the topic and ask them or physically go to a library, hope that had a particular book on the topic and that someone else hadn’t already taken it out before you got there.

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just_thisGuy t1_jaypeog wrote

Internet and smart phones are huge. It was very hard to find out anything before than, you went to the library and had to do a lot of research and probably only going to get good enough answers, now you could get almost perfect answers (as long as humans know about it). This is why ChatGPT is such a big deal too, you get answers even faster and more exact on more topics. ChatGPT is making me feel the same as around 1995 when Internet was becoming useful for more average people.

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