> In “Scenarios,” a special edition from 1995, the guest editor Douglas Coupland took it upon himself to compile a “reverse time capsule,” which he deemed “not a capsule directed to the future, but rather to the citizens of 1975.” What artifacts, he asked, “might surprise them most about the direction taken by the next 20 years?” Included in the capsule—alongside non-tech items such as a chunk of the Berlin Wall, Prozac, and a Japanese luxury sedan—were a laptop (“more power in your lap than MIT’s biggest mainframe”), an Apple MessagePad (“hand-held devices are replacing secretaries”), and a cellular phone. Scanning my apartment, I can spot progeny of all three. One suspects that, were we to engineer our own reverse time capsule today and ship it back to the citizens of 1995, they might not be all that surprised by the direction we’ve taken.
I remember 1995 pretty well; I think 2016 has a lot more in common with it than 1995 has in common with 1974. Honestly, I don't think life has changed all that much in the last twenty years. Sure, everyone has a smartphone, and back then almost no-one had a _cell_phone, and the Internet is faster, and computers can do more and are more reliable, but things really aren't fundamentally different.
We had the Web then, and we have it now. We had internet communities than, and we have them now. We listened to music then, and we listen to it now. Computers have been integrated far better into our lives, but they're doing essentially the same things (I still remember watching a QuickTime video of The Spirit of Christmas back in 1996; that's no different in kind than Hulu or Netflix, just in degree).
> > One suspects that, were we to engineer our own reverse time capsule today and ship it back to the citizens of 1995, they might not be all that surprised by the direction we’ve taken.
Well, yeah, though I think the changes wrought on the average persons way of life from 1995 to 2016 were in some ways greater than 1974 to 1995, the things that have changed the most aren't so much the kind of bits of kit that would go in a reverse time capsule. The ubiquity of digital communication is a huge change, and the software and services that the average person regularly consumes based on them are -- but the bits of kit that we use to access them, at least in outline, wouldn't be all that surprising in 1995.
> We had the Web then, and we have it now. We had internet communities than, and we have them now
For vastly narrower definitions of "we" in 1995 than in 2016.
And, perhaps especially in 1974, after they got over the shock of using an iPhone or modern laptop to access the Internet, they'd be equally flabbergasted to see that voice access to this "Star Trek computer" still doesn't really work.
>For vastly narrower definitions of "we" in 1995 than in 2016.
Yep. I was probably still just using BBSs at home in 1995. I probably had access to the Internet with Mosaic running on a workstation at work by then but I don't think I did at home. (Some of the commercial BBSs became ISPs but that was probably a few years later.) Wikipedia tells me that AOL was still charging hourly fees in 1995 as, presumably, was Compuserve and others.
So in 1995, we were on the cusp of more broad-based Internet and Web access but it was still pretty limited.
As a general statement, it's probably fair to say that owning a PC was increasingly the norm by 1995 but very few were online in any significant way.
You're underestimating what a difference of degree we're talking here.
For a quick refresher of what 'cutting edge' technology was like in 1995, go back and rewatch Hackers. See those guys phreaking payphones (remember payphones?), gushing over 28.8k modems, and rocking Mac powerbook 150cs, which feature such awesome tech as a 600x400 pixel color LCD screen, and a trackball, and where major plot points hinge around floppy discs. Any computer which is sitting on a desk boasts a maybe 15 or 17 inch CRT monitor on top. There are fax machines.
20 years later, I'm surrounded by devices which have thin, black, glassy screens, each with megapixels of display resolution. Many of them respond to touch input. Half of them have tiny cameras mounted nearby which can capture high definition video. With wireless networking I don't have to wait for someone to get off the phone before I can dial a modem - I'm already connected to the internet (and the GPS network) and bandwidth is so plentiful I can enjoy high definition video phonecalls with people on another continent, essentially free.
Send back a 70 inch 4K TV, an iPhone, a photo of the Shanghai skyline, and a gay couple's marriage certificate, and I think you'll handily surprise someone from 1995.
'95 back to '75:
- no mobile phones
- no personal computers (and punchcards and 'computer time' were still a thing)
- internet didn't exist at all, apart from a handful of people
- civil rights for minorities and women still in it's infancy (much more difference 75-95 than 95-15)
- cold war at it's height, no 'pax americana redux'
- blue collar work was still very common, and poorly paid as a result - the 90s was when the trades started to make serious money
- fitness craze of the late 70s + 80s not in view yet; smoking wasn't seen as unhealthy
- portable music players didn't exist
- international travel eased considerably (though maybe as much again to 2015?)
- 24 hour trading came in in the '80s and early '90s. In the 70s, if you hadn't done your shopping by Sunday, you would go hungry...
- exotic food amongst anglos was 'stroganoff', 'stroganoff', and 'stroganoff' - the food revolution kicked off in the '90s :)
The thin glassy touchscreens we have now are seen in scifi at least as far back as the '60s; they're not all that suprising, I wouldn't think. China's industrialisation might not be so surprising either, given the amazing things Japan managed to do in the relatively short time after the Meiji Restoration - in only 50 years they were sitting at the big players' table in naval treaties limiting size of fleets, for example.
"I remember 1995 pretty well; I think 2016 has a lot more in common with it than 1995 has in common with 1974. Honestly, I don't think life has changed all that much in the last twenty years. Sure, everyone has a smartphone, and back then almost no-one had a _cell_phone, and the Internet is faster, and computers can do more and are more reliable, but things really aren't fundamentally different."
I think I would be genuinely surprised and delighted by uber/lyft ... mainly because I was genuinely surprised and delighted by them just a year or so ago.
To a lesser degree, VRBO and airbnb.
We have a workable, fully electric car that isn't chintzy and dorky.
Unlimited calling, without long distance fees. We didn't have that in 1995.
ALSO, look at who got disrupted - there are zero record stores, lots of bookstores are gone, video rentals no longer exist. Circuit city is gone, Best Buy is struggling ...
But people still play M:TG just like 1995 - who would have guessed!?
I'd probably have to do a really detailed analysis to see which span of years was more different to me as a consumer--though I think the examples you cite are relatively trivial. Uber, electric cars, long distance fees are all pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things.
But to consider the difference between 1974 and 1995. Consider that in 1974, there were basically no PCs, calculators were just appearing, no answering machines, no way to record television (or to buy/rent movies), no cable, and no cell phones of course.
So no direct use of computers available to the typical person and essentially any exchange of information involved going to a physical place or exchanging information with someone at a specific location verbally.
Even thinking about 10 years+ later, I've frequently joked that if I went back in time I'd feel so information starved that I'd consider doing my job impossible.
> ALSO, look at who got disrupted - there are zero record stores
There are fewer record stores, but a lot more than zero.
> video rentals no longer exist.
Even leaving aside streaming rentals and Netflix's disc business, video rental kiosks are in grocery stores. Dedicated video rental storefronts are a lot more rare than in 1995, but video rental is very much still a thing.
> I mean, there are no more of the Sam Goody / Tower Records / etc. stores that used to be everywhere.
There also remain chain entertainment media stores of that type, though those particular chains are now gone (Sam Goody having been purchased by fye, which is one of the surviving chains.)
I couldn't disagree more; in June 2011 I wrote a post about how wildly technology had progressed in the 16 years since 1995, and it doesn't even include anything from the five years since then: https://www.reddit.com/r/raldi/comments/i91og/todays_real_li...
I think things are different, just in ways that are not necessarily apparent to e.g. normal Americans living out their lives. Our awareness of what has changed is largely confined to the specifics of our individual lives (profession, community, subculture)... but as with newspaper reporting, we make assumptions about the parts we don't interact with as deeply, only noticing acute change when it's right in our domain.
I call this the 'postmodern Potemikin village'– the constructed and maintained illusion that the world we live in is in large part unchanged from the one we lived in in e.g. 1995 (and most definitely 1975).
The clearest way to clarify what I mean is in this HN venue is maybe to say that: the B2B realities that back to the B2P experiences of most people are radically different than the ones we grew up, in many industries, unrecognizably different.
It is only the 'last mile' to our doors and into our pockets that maintains the same branded feel.
The footnote to this is of course the ubiquity and centrality of the internet (including by mobile), I don't know if there's ever been such a radical change introduced so quickly and then so uniformly renormalized to.
In this one case it's less a lack of obvious change, but a change that brought with it such a deep sense of inevitability and obviousness that we forget it's new.
But back to the change thing.
Good examples are probably Amazon and Walmart. Depending on your social stratum, the role that these play is probably equivalently profound in your life. And the core logistics behind both business [models] is predicated on a set of technologies and integrations with other related industries that is radically unlike what came before it.
In our normal human lives, we don't see the scale of that change. We just 'order a bit more for home delivery' than our parents did. Or shop at a store that's yes, a little bigger.
But that sense of familiarity about the sourcing of our lives from those places is false.
Other examples include the slow-boil but now nearly complete homogenization of the commercial landscape in the US. If you didn't grow up in e.g. the 70s or earlier, the ubiquity of a couple hundred brands and the insignificance of anything but large regional competitors (aside from in a few exceptional industries perhaps) is actually a very different and quite new reality.
Again, we still e.g. stop for fast food. It's the scale and sophistication of consolidation that is genuinely new.
This is btw in no way a value judgment, just an observation.
The point is simply, the rate of change has not actually diminished...
...it's just that the majority of its effects are in domain outside the public sphere, and hence forgotten, discounted, or invisible a lot of the time.
> Good examples are probably Amazon and Walmart. Depending on your social stratum, the role that these play is probably equivalently profound in your life. And the core logistics behind both business [models] is predicated on a set of technologies and integrations with other related industries that is radically unlike what came before it.
But we had Walmart in 1995. It was as awesome for poor folks then as it is now.
> Other examples include the slow-boil but now nearly complete homogenization of the commercial landscape in the US. If you didn't grow up in e.g. the 70s or earlier, the ubiquity of a couple hundred brands and the insignificance of anything but large regional competitors (aside from in a few exceptional industries perhaps) is actually a very different and quite new reality.
I remember people commenting about that exact phenomenon … in the 1990s.
Both of those are, I think, good example of what I was getting at: things changed hugely from 1974 to 1995, but not nearly as radically since then.
Wired was silly dumbed-down hype-catalog from the start.
It looks better in retrospect when we forget that we were dumb, young and inexperienced when it came out. They had few good articles now and then just like they have now, it depends on what kind of writers they have.
I'm not sure it's quite that bad but I was just thinking the other day that I should find out how to turn off the auto-renew that seems to have been turned on at some point. It's a magazine that I get into the house and I find that I'm in no hurry to read it any longer. It still has pretty nice design but I find very little of the content compelling any more. Yeah, there's occasionally a good article but I'm not subscribing to a print magazine for the odd article here and there.
Meh, before the first dotcom meltdown it was a toy catalog as well. I recall a pre-christmas issue in 1998 or 1999 that had to be well over 200 pages thick. It sure wasn't full of articles.
> A few moments later, I was on eBay, where I started to bid on strangers’ dusty collections of early issues of Wired, all from the years 1993 to 1995
It's interesting that the author never tried to get these from a library (or at least doesn't mention it). Do libraries not keep back issues anymore? Growing up in LA, I could get back issues of almost any magazine from the library going many decades back. Sometimes my local library didn't have it, but the LA system did.
Also, since she lives in SF, I'll bet should could just head over to Wired HQ and ask to use their collection, and they'd probably be thrilled that someone is interested in back issues. They have them all on a bookcase since the beginning of time. I used to read them when taking breaks.
I'm sure most libraries have them in storage, but perhaps not handily available and they quite possibly won't allow you to take them home. Honestly, if they're easily available on Ebay, that's probably the best solution, if for no other reason than that you'll get to read them in your favorite chair with a glass of wine.
Who wants to carry a year's worth of book-bound magazines around? Nobody can see the neon covers, meaning nobody can appreciate them amid the sea of 'regulars' at Zeitgeist.
The excerpt of Microserfs they published was for me the epitome of 90s silicon valley. Coupland hasn't impressed me since then but damn that was a perfect time capsule
My parents have a small collection of OMNI they had kept over the years. I've always meant to read through them but forgot when I had the time. Thank you for reminding me.
My mom had a Fortune subscription for most of my childhood. Both stories and ads provided a surprising perspective of the computer revolution as seen from the management side.
I don't have deep knowledge of what it's like in literary land, literature degree programs, etc., but oh goodness can they blather on, Painting Pictures longer than my interest holds.
"on MUNI, at bars, in bed in my apartment in Haight-Ashbury" sounds like someone who came from somewhere regarded as lame and is hoping that coolness is now on them.
"it’s a document of a time when consumer technology was still clumsy and undefined" -- I'm not sure consumer technology has reached its pinnacle of perfection.
And that's as far as I got. I'd actually been hoping we were going to hear something like "Here is the nonsense of 1994, which lets us think more clearly about what's probably nonsense in 2016", and maybe it's in there somewhere, buried.
> A sidebar on Wacom’s ArtPad, from 1995—“If you’ve ever sketched with a pencil, you’ll be able to use ArtPad”—made me wonder why it took Apple so long to roll out its Pencil stylus for the iPad.
Because in 1995, the handwriting recognition of the Apple Newton was so bad that it was a Simpsons joke.
I don't think the author is talking about the Newton. I think she's pointing out that the iPad was out for years before Apple released a stylus for it.
-- Which I think was because His Steveness hated styli. I guess this was because, back in the days of the Palm PDAs, people tended to lose them -- though I never had this problem.
The "original" Wired was written by people well outside mainstream journalism. It was OK for a news piece to be quirky or obscure. When it was taken over by "Encorpera" it changed greatly.
One thing I’ve noticed since moving to San Francisco is that my cohort
in the tech world doesn’t talk that much about the industry’s past.
How is the above different in any other industry? I don't hear my fellow consultants talking about the history of consulting, I don't hear my programme manager wife and her programme manager friends talking about the history of programme management etc.
I remember 1995 pretty well; I think 2016 has a lot more in common with it than 1995 has in common with 1974. Honestly, I don't think life has changed all that much in the last twenty years. Sure, everyone has a smartphone, and back then almost no-one had a _cell_phone, and the Internet is faster, and computers can do more and are more reliable, but things really aren't fundamentally different.
We had the Web then, and we have it now. We had internet communities than, and we have them now. We listened to music then, and we listen to it now. Computers have been integrated far better into our lives, but they're doing essentially the same things (I still remember watching a QuickTime video of The Spirit of Christmas back in 1996; that's no different in kind than Hulu or Netflix, just in degree).