We're 6 years past the future that Marty McFly traveled forward to.
I just flipped on the TV an Boogie Nights is on. A movie made 24 years ago about a time 20 years earlier. I don't feel like 1997 was an entirely different era the way 1977 was. But I suppose that's just the increasing perspective of getting older.
Any other media strike you as odd?
They're making a "That 90s show".
If they're living (and not wrapped up in some sex scandals) all of the actors from "that 70s show" can revive their characters. From a strict continuity perspective, they're a little bit too old now (not too old, but the 70s show came out in 1998, so the 90s show should have come out in 2018)
But 77 to 97 was immense. OBD2, Internet, email, computers, video games (pong vs N64)... it's a huge difference. I still see a few cars from the 90s just about every day. In 97, I did not see 20 year old cars with regularity. In comparison, the last 20 years was shorter than the 20 years prior to them.
Some of the first sci-fi movies have predictions that we'd first make it to the moon in the 24th century. Didn't account for the Space Race and other factors.
Always makes me wonder about what movies we are watching now that will be so out of date in 30+ years.
Generally I find books to be more susceptible to that kind of thing. The book John Wick is based on, Shibumi, has a nefarious shadow government that has a super computer that keeps tabs on everyone in the world. Its written almost a quarter century before MySpace was founded and if you don't know the age of it going in it completely takes you out of the book. Good book though.
Your grandma certainly had a MUCH harder life than Christy Brinkley!
(and a lot fewer "modifications")
(post disappeared, had picture of grandma)
One of the Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur, dies early and the other lived a long life. That one was given a honorary nasa position on the moon landing.
That's a life well spent. He had a hand in not only the first flight but also the first moon landing.
Listening to Quiet Riot today is basically the same as listening to 40's music in the 1980's...
John Welsh said:One of the Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur, dies early and the other lived a long life. That one was given a honorary nasa position on the moon landing.
That's a life we'll spent. He had a hand in not only the first flight but also the first moon landing.
What's really amazing is that both events occurred during one lifetime.
My 103 year old neighbor just passed away. Imagine the differences from when he was born in northern Montana in 1918 to the SF Bay Area in 2021.
In reply to Tom_Spangler (Forum Supporter) :
Opps. I got the significant event wrong. It was not first flight and moon landing it was first flight and supersonic flight.
Orville died at age 76 on January 30, 1948, over 35 years after his brother, following his second heart attack, having lived from the horse-and-buggy age to the dawn of supersonic flight.
On April 19, 1944, the second production Lockheed Constellation, piloted by Howard Hughes and TWA president Jack Frye, flew from Burbank, California, to Washington, DC, in 6 hours and 57 minutes (2300 mi, 330.9 mph). On the return trip, the airliner stopped at Wright Field to give Orville Wright his last airplane flight, more than 40 years after his historic first flight.[132] He may even have briefly handled the controls. He commented that the wingspan of the Constellation was longer than the distance of his first flight.
I remember in 1985 looking forward to Partying Like it's 1999. That party came and went 22 years ago!
Happy Days came on in 1974 and was set in 1955. It seemed really, really old. Cars were old, styles were old, technology was old, etc.
if they made it today, it would be set in 2002.
In reply to mtn :
I was just talking to my kids about that the other day. When I was in high school, there was no such thing as a "normal" daily driver from the 1969 model year taking kids to school. But it's not really that crazy that I'm daily driving a 2000 Excursion. In the early 90's a late 60's early 70's car would be pretty much falling apart and every trip would be a crapshoot. Now, the biggest problem is that it doesn't have steering wheel controls for bluetooth.
John Welsh said:In reply to Tom_Spangler (Forum Supporter) :
Opps. I got the significant event wrong. It was not first flight and moon landing it was first flight and supersonic flight.
Orville died at age 76 on January 30, 1948, over 35 years after his brother, following his second heart attack, having lived from the horse-and-buggy age to the dawn of supersonic flight.
On April 19, 1944, the second production Lockheed Constellation, piloted by Howard Hughes and TWA president Jack Frye, flew from Burbank, California, to Washington, DC, in 6 hours and 57 minutes (2300 mi, 330.9 mph). On the return trip, the airliner stopped at Wright Field to give Orville Wright his last airplane flight, more than 40 years after his historic first flight.[132] He may even have briefly handled the controls. He commented that the wingspan of the Constellation was longer than the distance of his first flight.
I wasn't specifically talking about Orville's life, just in general that there was only 66 years between the first flight and the moon landing. That's amazing to me.
In reply to wae :
In that vein, I remember my dad cautioning me about a certain car dealer because most of their cars had "over 100k miles." Nowadays I bet that same dealer has all 200k+ mile cars.
I still kind of regret not buying that Subaru XT though.
Listening to the 'classic rock' station:.. And hearing Nirvana.
Social media is the media tail that wags the dog. The world is not a better place because of it.
It's time.
I think it's the cars that surprise me the most in how the past 20+ years the cars look similar, but 20 years ago, that big of a difference was much more drastic. For example, a 1980 Impala looks drastically different from a 2000 Impala, but a 2000 Impala doesn't look too much different than a 2020 Impala.
1980
2000
2020
-Rob
wae said:In reply to mtn :
I was just talking to my kids about that the other day. When I was in high school, there was no such thing as a "normal" daily driver from the 1969 model year taking kids to school. But it's not really that crazy that I'm daily driving a 2000 Excursion. In the early 90's a late 60's early 70's car would be pretty much falling apart and every trip would be a crapshoot. Now, the biggest problem is that it doesn't have steering wheel controls for bluetooth.
I drove my '66 Dart to high school in the mid '90s. Although yes... that was kind of a crapshoot and definitely not a normal thing to do. There may have been a few other students with '60s cars, and definitely a few '70s cars. Although this was Georgia so there wasn't a ton of rust.
I drove a 66 Bonneville every day from ~1995 to 1999, but it was very very unusual.
rob_lewis said:I think it's the cars that surprise me the most in how the past 20+ years the cars look similar, but 20 years ago, that big of a difference was much more drastic. For example, a 1980 Impala looks drastically different from a 2000 Impala, but a 2000 Impala doesn't look too much different than a 2020 Impala.
That's because they started caring about fuel efficiency and using wind tunnels to design cars. Aerodynamics is physics, it doesn't change with fashion. :). The 2020 car makes 50% more power with the same fuel efficiency though.
The thing to keep in mind when doing these sorts of historical comparisons (66 years from Kitty Hawk to the Moon Landing, 52 since then and what have we done?) is that technologies do not advance in a linear fashion. When a breakthrough happens it opens up a whole new area of innovation, where people can make leaps and bounds of advancement very quickly. As time passes, though, the technology matures and you start to "mine out" the things that were made possible by that breakthrough and the pace in that tech slows down.
And yes, the thing that has enabled cars to last much longer is better rust protection, a number of my friends had 1960s cars when I was in high school in the late 80s here in California. Engines can be rebuilt economically (especially old and simple engines like those of the 60s), frames really can't.
As for 1997 vs now, think about computer tech. A 5G wireless connection can sustain 100 megabits per second, whereas wireless cell data in 1997 was in its infancy (I worked on a prototype system that year) and would do 9600 bits per second. That's 4 orders of magnitude speed increase.
Remember when TV just...ended? That's it. Go to bed.
Hungary Bill (Forum Supporter) said:Listening to Quiet Riot today is basically the same as listening to 40's music in the 1980's...
Not really. Quiet Riot is two guitars and a drummer with a front man. A big band like the ones led by Count Basie or Stan Kenton had more guys playing saxophone that Quiet Riot had guys. Up to 25 or 30 musicians on stage at the same time. It was an entirely different kind of production. In 2021 a band could consist of one guy, a synthesizer and a drum machine.
codrus (Forum Supporter) said:As for 1997 vs now, think about computer tech. A 5G wireless connection can sustain 100 megabits per second, whereas wireless cell data in 1997 was in its infancy (I worked on a prototype system that year) and would do 9600 bits per second. That's 4 orders of magnitude speed increase.
Around 2000, I paid a king's ransom to get a PCMCIA CDPD adapter, an HP Windows CE "pocket" computer, and the associated service for it so that I could get email when I wasn't at the office or at home. It was slow, somewhat unreliable, but it was one hell of a party trick.
Does anybody remember using "trumpet winsock" to log on to your phone line to get to the internet. And you couldn't use your phone when you were browsing the usenet unless you had a second line.
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