

2000, the Year Formerly Known as the Future - dpup
https://medium.com/we-live-in-the-future/cbd6bdc6b283

======
jasonkester
There were a few y2k technologies that I'd like to get back though.

Email was nice, back when it consisted of nothing but emails from people you
knew. And the occasional spam that could be knocked out by simple keyword
filters.

Usenet was nice. Even with that dial-up netzero account you had access to a
HN-esque level of intelligent discourse on pretty much every subject
imaginable. Now we only get that with tech.

But back then you had essentially a HackerNews for rock climbing, one for
chess, one for rocket science (with real rocket scientests there who would
answer your questions), and ones for discussing whether an imperial star
destroyer would win in a fight with the USS Enterprise.

But then Spam happened and it killed both those things. The Usenet went away
in the span of a single year, to be only fractionally replaced with a series
of terrible PHPBB boards that nobody could find and you certainly weren't
about to meet any real rocket scientests hanging out in.

Not sure I'd trade my iPad to get all that back, but it was still pretty nice.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I think we eventually got Reddit in place of the crappy PHPBB boards.

~~~
aerique
Reddit is a nice alternative to Usenet but not really a replacement since it
is centralized as opposed to Usenet's distributed nature.

As for e-mail, if you have a decent provider spam is a solved problem. It
hasn't bothered me for years.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Trust me, if it didn't cost extra as a part of ISP packages nowadays, I'd be
on USENET.

------
precisioncoder
Hmmmm it seems the author wasn't online in 2000... Online Technologies:
LiveJournal, ICQ, MIRC, MSN Messenger, AOL Messenger, or starting July 1, 2000
for those who wanted to rule them all Trillian. Pretty much everything that
our modern web architecture does could be replicated there. It's just easier
and slicker now.

I'd normally wake up, (computer was of course running 24/7) check ICQ for
messages, check on my downloads and chats on MIRC, read my friends LiveJournal
posts and head off for school. If I needed a big file I would burn it to cd
the night before and could simply grab the cd, for something small can always
post online on my file server (don't remember what I used but remember having
a semi easy solution that ran locally on my home computer). Pretty much
everything we do now I could do then, just the time lag was bigger, didn't
really matter to me though, you just plan ahead a bit more. If I want to hang
out with someone send them an ICQ, they'll get it when they're home, etc. In
the meantime I'll log onto an MMO, maybe an old school MUD, Ultima Online, or
Everquest. Or maybe I'll play some CounterStrike. On my broadband internet.
Yes things have advanced in the last decade, but 2000 was far from the
technical wasteland that this article paints.

------
rachelbythebay
I like the saying "the future is not evenly distributed".

October 2000: My digital camera was $500, not $5500. I used to carry it all
over the place. Not everyone relies on pockets!

November 2000: I did a 4800 bps dialup call over an analog cell connection to
get a map going in a pinch while parked in a rental car far from home. The
hardest part was figuring out where I was so as to have a meaningful "start"
address for mapquest. _That_ involved getting lucky and finding a storefront
with a number visible, then looking at a yellow pages site for all of the
locations of that store in the town I was in to see which one matched. That
gave me a street name and now I had a starting address.

(Newark, DE, you are on my list of miserable places to navigate at night.)

Normal people would never do the 4800 bps PPP craziness with images disabled,
but a $500 camera from CompUSA (remember them?) isn't that special.

------
prawn
Beyond 2000 was a future/tech show that aired in Australia when I was a
teenager. I can remember one segment showcasing a little drivable vehicle of
some sort that unfolded from a suitcase and wanting one for myself.

As we neared 2000, people would joke about the show's name and its future.

The Wikipedia page for the show
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Tomorrow_(TV_series)>) suggests that it
eventually suffered from budget cuts as well as competition from other
sci/tech shows. But here we are more than a decade beyond 2000 and though I
admittedly don't watch much TV other than food/travel/doco shows on SBS
OnDemand, it saddens me that there seems to be nothing there to capture the
expectant wonder for the generations to come.

So much of popular television is entranced by the bland present.

This year I preordered the MYO gesture interpreting device and backed a
Kickstarter project for wireless and colour-changing light globes. Someone on
Kickstarter invented an origami-like fold up kayak.

I hope the average kids of now see these things and dream of what's to come.

~~~
lancefisher
I watched Beyond 2000 all the time growing up in the U.S. It was a great show
that really spurred on the imagination. I always got a kick out of how they
said "aluminum" in Australia.

~~~
prawn
Made me wonder if there are sites for kids that introduce and explain cool new
advances in technology? Safe and without off-site links so parents feel safe
letting their kids browse it?

------
joshAg
What we remember as 2000 is actually closer to 2005:

* Wifi, laptops, andcell phone are ubiquitous, smart phones are just beginning to emerge.

* laptops are reasonably powerful compared to desktops.

* Streaming media works fairly well.

* Broadband internet is fast enough to stream movies at a decent quality.

* LCD screens have pretty much replaced CRTs.

* TV is no longer just 480p.

* Social networks exist.

* google maps, and mapquest exist.

* wikipedia exists.

* gmail is in beta.

* MP3 players have hard drives instead of flash chips and can store a large number of songs.

Another great way to realize how ancient 2000 was compared to now is to watch
the first few seasons of the west wing.

------
eksith
Checking out the French ideas from 1899-1910 on what 2000 would be like :

[http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/06/30/france-in-the-
year-...](http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/06/30/france-in-the-
year-2000-1899-1910/)

"The New-Fangled barber" isn't quite there yet, but we do have electric razors
and trimmers. Then again, the electric trimmer is fairly old at this point.

"An Arial battle" and "Torpedo planes" bombers, ground attack aircraft and
fighters. I'm not surprised the first use ideas for aircraft are in war.

We have "Aviation police" of sorts, except they're a combination of air
traffic controllers and the FAA. And the near-collisions in "Aero-Cab station"
are eerily similar to what has already happened. We also have air-mail, but
"Rural Postman" with his own flying machine hasn't quite happened yet.

We don't have "intensive breeding" machines per-se, but the poultry industry
is pretty automated these days.

We have drones today except they don't have a guy with a looking glass. We
have "electric floor cleaners" that don't involve a maid.

Am I the only one shocked that the maid uniform has essentially stayed exactly
the same (maybe with shorter skirts). I mean, look at military uniforms. The
helmets in particular have changed a great deal. Same with police uniforms.

The "well trained orchestra" is basically a synthesizer. "House rolling
through the countryside" is real today and we call them Dollies
(<http://hmrsupplies.com>)

"At school" knowledge download is not quite what we have, but Wikipedia and
Google come close. After all, almost everyone these days carries a mobile
device even if they have no other electronic device on them.

"Madame at her toilet" is kinda out there, but you could say those new multi-
head showers are _almost_ that.

"Battle cars" we've got 'em and they're tanks/armored cars.

"A Croquet Party" underwater is a tourist thing and even happens in backyard
pools.

A "Whale bus" is basically an organic submarine that we haven't built yet, but
the company Innerspace has built a dolphin sub.
<http://www.seabreacher.com/dolphin>

All in all, that's quite close to what we would have had if idealized
projections came forth and other disruptive technologies like automobiles
didn't become as common first.

Still bitter about not having my flying car yet, damnit!

~~~
tempestn
They sure were big on flight and diving back in 1900-1910, weren't they?
Understandable that flight was the most futuristic technology conceivable at
the time, but I was surprised to see all the underwater stuff (although in
retrospect it makes sense for the same reason).

Makes me excited to think just how unbelievable 2100 will be from today's
perspective. Or, with exponential growth of technology, say 2040. You really
can't extrapolate, because it's the _completely_ new things that will be
really revolutionary. (Is that redundant?)

~~~
eksith
Not redundant! :D

The sea was (still is?) the last frontier of exploration on our own planet, so
I figure they must have thought we would have sorted out all its mysteries by
now. They didn't know about deep sea smokers, tube worms or the Mariana Trench
obviously, or that we'd still be flabbergasted by some of the things we find
in the deep oceans today.

A part of me thinks that technolgy will soon begin retreating to the
background where it belongs. As Clarke's third law states : _Any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic_ Which means future tech
will be tech without looking, sounding, feeling like tech... if that makes
sense.

I'm picturing an oak cabinet or chest of drawers that tell me how many socks I
have remaining and that there are blue ones in the laundry. Or a kitchen that
looks like it belongs in the 1930s, but has a smart fridge telling me it's
time to turn over the trout in its marinade because I'll be putting it in the
smoker Saturday.

I think we'll see more of a return to original materials like wood, stone and
steel (or modern materials that perfectly mimic it in texture and feel) all
the while being "smart" (or the 2040 equivalent of what that means). We're
already seeing a lot of that in our surroundings where people are becoming
more nomadic with fewer possessions or multi use tools and a drive toward less
"connectivity" as in people and more connectivity in gadgets.

Bottom line is that no matter how "different" we imagine ourselves to be
tomorrow, there's a thread of nostalgia connecting us to yesterday. That may
be stronger than alloy we can invent.

------
meric
At work, you show your boss your presentation «Invent Dropbox before someone
else does». You realize while presenting to your boss the idea isn't feasible
because home internet connections of 56kb/s aren't fast enough to share files
without hogging users' phone lines for hours at a time in the first place.

~~~
garrettlarson
Xdrive was around:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20001017113816/http://www.xdrive....](http://web.archive.org/web/20001017113816/http://www.xdrive.com/)

------
rm999
2000 wasn't that bad for me. AIM was a decent social network (back then people
used their statuses to share what was going on). Mapquest was very competent
at providing directions. Pirating music was at least as easy it is today (and
finding new music was pretty easy too). Yahoo news and many others like it did
a great job of aggregating important news. The path to portable music was
arguably pretty mature with portable mp3 cd players and minidisc. My
university library let us borrow a 2 MP digital camera; sure, we couldn't
afford to buy the camera, but I still have 1000s of photos from that camera,
many that look fine printed at 4x6 and 8.5x11.

The true life changers from the article for me: smartphones with always-on
internet (these existed in 2000, but they were overpriced and sucked), laptops
+ wifi, and wikipedia. Also, amazon - I do almost all my shopping online now.

------
rdl
I don't understand the "no laptops, no wifi" people -- I had first and second
generation Wavelan IEEE pc cards and HP Omnibook 5700ctx laptops since ~1998.
Ricochet modems also helped (the Metricom things), although mostly I just
stuck to places with ethernet available.

Yahoo mail _always_ sucked. I pretty much never used a single Yahoo product (I
didn't care about Yahoo! Finance at the time, which is the only one I'd use
today other than flickr)

Yes, at the time desktops with big CRTs were still superior (I think I was
using a Linux box running slackware and also had access to HP-UX and AIX and
Solaris machines) to laptops. Desktops still are superior for a lot of things.

~~~
robryan
I think the fair comparison though is the mainstream then vs the mainstream
now. No doubt there were early adopters ahead of the curve (although the
article was framing the person as one of these)

~~~
rdl
It's just weird how early adopters were so far ahead of the mainstream in the
1980s (UNIX workstations! 56k/T1/T3 WAN or 10Mbps LAN, or even FDDI!). In the
1990s, I was a teenager and had (by being smart, not particularly rich) a
decent UNIX workstation (Linux) and 9600bps dialup from pretty early on, and
by being at a top university and doing consulting, a laptop which would be
borderline respectable today (if super heavy).

Today, a homeless guy can have a functional machine of his own, or use
something at a library, and children/mainstream/etc. users can use
approximately the same machines tech experts do.

It's basically range compression between what high-end people have and what
the mainstream has.

~~~
robryan
Yeah very much so. I have a retina MBP, whether your a billionaire CEO or
someone with a half decent wage in a tech job your probably using a very
similar retina MBP. (Assuming you are after an OSX machine, not that your
going to get much better power/ weight and screen quality elsewhere ATM)

------
blackhole
I was 9 and ecstatic about getting to stay up until midnight to see the NEW
MILLENNIUM. It was disappointing the next day when nothing seemed to change.

Boy did things change during high school.

------
lsc
In 2000 (or, at least, by 2001) I had a palm v with a CDPD wireless "modem"
thing. The minstrel, (I kept mis-spelling it in ways that looked like
"menstrual," to the great amusement of my friends and co-workers.) It worked
fine; the only problem was that the palm V only had one serial port... if I
used the CDPD modem, (which doubled the thickness of the palm v,) I couldn't
plug in the keyboard, meaning SSH wasn't really practical. (on-screen
keyboards have never worked for me; not then, not now.)

The external keyboard for the palm V was pretty nice, though, assuming you had
a flat surface. The serial port made a pretty solid connection and held the
phone up at a reasonable angle; something I haven't been able to reproduce
with a modern smartphone and external bluetooth keyboard. (To be clear, the
bluetooth keyboards work fine; I just haven't figured out how to hold the
phone at a reasonable angle while typing with both hands.)

So yeah, really? I wasn't all that less mobile then than I am now. I mean, I
had a thinkpad running linux then, just like now; sure, it was slower, but it
ran linux just fine. Configuring wireless, sure, was a pain in the ass then,
and it's easy now, but eh.

~~~
Ogre
I had a minstrel modem back then for a little while too. But I didn't have it
very long before I cancelled it. I also had a phone with limited email and
other online capability around 2003, and a work-provided PCMCIA cell modem
around 2004, but I didn't have mobile internet again for real again until the
iPhone arrived in 2007. For me, the future paid a visit in 2000 and a few
times afterwards, but it wasn't here to stay until June 29, 2007.

(I didn't have to look that date up)

------
noblethrasher
The thing I miss most about the year 2000 is that randomly meeting new and
interesting people was literally effortless.

~~~
jimmyfw
Can you elaborate on this? Where would you go to meet these people?

~~~
will_work4tears
Not the op, but my guess is people weren't glued to their smartphone all the
time like they seem to be these days. In '97, '98 I met a large group of folks
at a diner they and I both frequented. They just started chatting with me and
we hit it off and I started hanging with them.

These days, if the diner even allowed them to hang out and drink coffee for
hours on end, they'd be nose deep in mobile FB or whatever zombification they
prefer - rather than have "deep" and interesting in-person conversations.

~~~
noblethrasher
Not quite what I meant but I do think that Facebook and the like endow your
existing social network with an extreme and unnatural gravity that makes it
harder to meet new people online (outside of a dating sites) and in person.

I had a meeting a few days ago but it took them a while to unlock the door.
Ten years ago we'd all have engaged in some small talk but on this occasion
everyone immediately dove into their screens.

------
noblethrasher
I seem to remember that sending an arbitrarily large file to someone was far
more straightforward back then. Mainstream options included ICQ and AIM (with
direct connect). Slightly more esoteric was NetMeeting. Windows 98 even came
with a web server and your ISP probably wasn't blocking port 80.

------
purplelobster
One and a half years ago I didn't even have a smartphone (late adopter), and I
printed out Google Maps directions whenever I had to go somewhere new since I
didn't have a GPS. Forget all the useless apps and internet browsing while on
the can... GPS and maps is the killer app for smartphones.

------
egypturnash
I was born in 1971. I don't think I really started feeling like HOLY CRAP I
LIVE IN THE FUTURE until 2010 when I got my first smartphone. Which is
coincidentally the same year the iPad came out; when I got the second
generation of that, that was a big dose of FUTURE for a couple months.

Oh, and the Raspberry Pi. Thirty-five bucks for an easily-hackable UNIX
system. Ten bucks more for a wifi dongle and you can have damn near anything
you can imagine connected to the net.

This is mostly the new normal now but I still look back at how different
things were growing up and I'm amazed and delighted. It's... whatever the
opposite of "future shock" is. Stuff has changed a lot and I'm loving it.

------
swang
It seems the guy made an mistake. The Rio PMP300 with its 32mb of memory was
actually awesome. Every day carefully picking the 7 or 8 songs I would listen
to for the rest of the day. Blur's Song #2 usually made it because it was such
a short song.

------
orangethirty
I met my wife in 1999 through ICQ. One year after I was busy learning about,
well, how things work, if you understand what I mean. Was lucky that neve got
me into trouble. Had a blazing fast 133Mhz tower that I had traded for a
_car_. I learned my first bit of Python on that thing. Those were the days...

------
alaskamiller
I remember Y2K.

Dale Gribble was inspiring everyone to freak out in Arlen, Texas. The seniors
were getting coddled because they're the first millennium class.

The Rio PMP300 is f-ing amazing since it made it much easier than my Sony
MiniDisc recorder/player having to use sound breaks to copy MP3 tracks.

There was no WiFi but then again it's not like anyone had laptops to use that
anyways. I had to use the powerline as my network. But I do remember writing
HTML for the high school web team and thought I was amazing.

I remember not being able to send a whole album through email but then if you
knew anything you would have been splitting zip/rar files or how to fake
upload ratios to leech off FTPs anyways.

Yahoo was all you needed. Yahoo directory was good, Inktomi kind of sucked so
everyone used AltaVista, Yahoo Mail was good, Yahoo Maps was good, Yahoo Games
was good, Yahoo News was good. There were no ads but if there were there was
probably some auto-clicker to let you make a paycheck out of it.

I remember having a 5 digit ICQ number, remember AOL Profile was my Facebook,
AIM status messages was my Twitter, Netscape Navigator could be bought in a
store like CompUSA.

I remember spending all your time on a computer, or especially the Internet
Information Superhighway if anyway knew what even means meant you weren't like
them. But now it's a given.

A few years ago I reflected, thinking how far out in the future I was living
just by the good fortune of having grown up in Silicon Valley. I've been
online for 18 years now, babies then are now legal adults, and it's been three
lifetimes of watching the internet being the internet.

And compared to other industries like Hollywood which endured more than 85
years, we've barely begun.

~~~
ghshephard
I don't think Netscape Navigator was available for sale in CompUSA in 2000.
Microsoft basically ended the Consumer Browser product line for Netscape by
1999 when they were sold to AOL.

------
serf
The Rio looked absolutely no more ridiculous than the early iPods. It still
looks fine, just big.

------
gordaco
The article reminds me of this blog:
<http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/>. Although lately it's featuring
too many articles about the Jetsons.

------
otikik
The _distant_ future.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvrva8NoMLM>

------
tudorw
1997 -> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5>

------
benbou09
Napster was created in 1999.

