Computers may not have changed the look of the world too much, but they have had an extraordinary impact on the experience of being human. If people are now spending 50% of their time on screens, its in some sense equivalent to the world looking 50% different, right?
Not just in looks. Back in the 80s, we were happy when a car lasted beyond 100K miles.
Today, I'd be annoyed if my car needed anything beyond regular scheduled maintenance in that period. They're vastly more dependable, safer, better performing, and more comfortable.
I remember back in the early 80's there was a "What If" of the Superman comic series. In that one off story Superman reveals himself to the world on the Eve of 2020, which coincidentally is when all the cities on the east coast of the US are merged into one, and they rename the entire mega-city "Metropolis". The comic's popularity was discussed in Time magazine. That publication started a pop culture treatment where "the future" starts in 2020, partially because 2000 was too close and all the "cool future stuff" was clearly not gonna happen that soon.
It's something like a long running joke, but I like to celebrate "Future Day" every October 21st. For at least a few "negative years" (-3rd to -1st, IIRC), I invited friends over to my place to celebrate it together, but it's a date that was intentionally picked to a boring, ordinary Wednesday on its Zeroth year in 2015, so celebrating it alone is just usually more convenient.
The celebration itself I will always describe as quite simple, and laid back: I order a pizza from Pizza Hut, some Pepsi (and only those particular brands for reasons of verisimilitude), watch all three parts of Back to the Future (as the one long movie it has always been to me since I was a kid), and contemplate Gibson's Law.
Gibson's Law reminds us that "The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed."
It's very easy to look at the technologies that past visions dreamed of and be disappointed in some that didn't make it existence in the present. It's tougher and more rewarding to ponder what we do have, how much the technologies in our pockets, on our walls, in our homes, would have startled and astounded friends or ourselves from the past, but that we take for granted simply because they exist, that they are something we use every day, that they've blended into the background.
It's easy to get lost in the spectacle of hover boards and hover converted cars in BTTF Part 2, but there's a surprising amount of technology that did exist in our 2015 that wasn't far from that vision. If you wanted Biometric thumb locks on your doors in 2015, that was rare, but plausible. It's possible there were some kids in 2015 high on Kinect games, and never before introduced to a classic arcade cabinet, to have the way-too-strong opinion that games that need hands are kids toys. They'd be really dumb kids on the losing side of that battle (all their friends with Wiis probably laughed at them), but it was imaginably a briefly valid opinion. BTTF Part 2 faired a lot better in the brand game than Blade Runner or (especially) 2001, and the only heavily featured trilogy brand that didn't survive to 2015 was JVC merged to form today's Kenwood brand, but Kenwood will still sometimes sell JVC brand stuff for nostalgia's sake.
Anyway, long rambling above aside, it is weird that we've crossed into the "future" from when we were kids, but it's an interesting opportunity too, to contemplate where we are and where we are going. To quote one Dr. Emmett Brown, "It means that your future hasn't yet been written, so make it a good one."
I'm not sure why, but 2020 was always 'the future' when I was a kid.
And it's here. And seemingly the same as it was in the 80's just with more fun games and lower interest rates.