It's over 20 years since I first went online...

[HollowTalk]

I was just thinking how different life is now - then we still had five channels (just) and a dial up connection. We'd only just started using emails at work and mobile phones were huge and expensive to use. You got what was given as far as entertainment was concerned and you paid by cash or cheque for everything you bought.

What difference do you think another 20 or 30 years will make?

But my worry is that with compulsory implants

I'm not sure. What would they be for? Like trackers?

Now everything is filmed with the rise of home surveillance and phone cameras I wonder if an implant would film your day. Then in like black mirror or something you can rewind if you were a witness to crime or in general wanted to prove something or see memories for real.

I will be dead.

I reckon it’ll be harder to be anonymous online soon and do things like I do here (name change every few months)

My dad loves gadgets so we got a modem for our home pc in the mid 90s and I read his 'internet for dummies' book, can still tell you that url stands for uniform resource locator!
Was intrigued about this internet business, went online with Mosaic browser, had seen (lengthy) urls in Select mag so went on loads of band websites, comedy ones, etc plus NME chat. Used ICQ and later msn messenger, was a bit addicted actually and sort-of met my now-dh online (but met irl quickly).

Was frustrated that internet shopping (topshop etc) took so long to properly take off. Read LiveJournal etc. I loved seeing the Internet 'grow up' and it was largely a positive force back then. Swapped mixtapes and sheet music with strangers.

Now I think it's generally a cesspool full of malevolent forces and gullible idiots...

Thinking it was amaizing you coukd ask Jeeves anything and some things had more than one page of results!!

I remember in school as we already had a family computer. My dad was total tech nerd. I already knew how to use one. So whilst rest of the class had computer lessons (3 to a PC!) I was left alone to just "play" on the internet. I was only about 7..!! Imagine a teacher doing that now..!! Safeguarding would have a field day.

I remember windows 93 launching and queing up outside a shop for it to open with my dad. I was 4. I ashume i first went on internet not long after. For what I dont know.

I am another who remembers getting online access for the first time and wondering "what on earth do I do with this then"?

In the late 80s my boss had a mobile phone - the size of a brick - and I remember going to a meeting and borrowing it. Oh how I felt walking into that meeting with the phone in my hand ...

I also remember borrowing his car which had remote central locking which was just amazing. When you pressed the button and the car beeped and the lights flashed everyone turned to look.

I havent a clue where we are headed - in terms of technology or anything else really, but I do have concerns about how society is changing. In 20 years time I will be 67 and probably still working!!

I think babies will be chipped or bar coded when they are born, there whole life will be linked to that, social security number, banks, pensions, grades st school, you'll buy items through your chip, go online thru your chip, nothing will be private it will all be on the chip!

In some ways it will make life easier, want a chocolate bar -scan your chip! I others life will be much harder, everything you do, everywhere you go will be recorded on the chip.

I would fight tooth and nail for that not to happen but I do think that it will!

Amazon reminded me that I have been shopping with them since 2001. Not many people I knew shopped online then.

I pay with my apple watch if under 30 quid and its such a pain to get my purse out if its over lol (pin protected)
There's no limit if you use Apple Pay with an iPhone (i.e. with Touch ID/Face ID/typing in your passcode).

No limit with the watch either.

If someone knicks your phone or your watch they can’t use your credit card without your fingerprint/watch.

So in that respect it’s more secure than your credit card.

Sorry that should read fingerprint/pin of course!

It will take more than 40 years, but I think the future of transport is the hyperloop. It will eventually form a global underground transport network, replacing cars, trains, planes and sea transport - other forms of transport will only exist as a novelty, like we have heritage railways today. It will probably take at least 200 years to get to that stage.

If I had any descendants to pass them on to, I would be buying shares in one of the hyper loop companies - it would be like buying shares in IBM or Apple back in the 1960s.

Yorkshire imagine the threads on here: AIBU to get de-chipped from my toxic parents.....???

My, rather depressing, prediction is that we wont have driverless cars. We wont need cars at all as we'll never need to leave the house.
I already do all my grocery shopping on line and Amazon lots of other stuff.
Given the chronic teacher shortage I would not be at all surprised if education becomes at least partially home based via the internet.
We'll become very insular, probably give up on relationships and just order sperm if we want a child.
I may have been watching and reading too much dystopian fiction!

I first got on the internet in 1995. My dad (now retired) was a software engineer and quite an early adopter of all things tech. This clashed with my mums ideal of never spending any money on anything!
Our first computer was a 386 with Windows and I thought it was amazing.
In the same year, the headmaster at my school worked very hard and got the school a grant for a computer lab and a dedicated IT teacher. Up until that point we'd only had a handful of ancient apple macs. We then ended up with a huge number of networked computers and I was part of the first group in the school to take IT GCSE.
I learned to program in basic and how to make a database on Access.

My favourite non smart phone was the Motorolla Razor, it was hot pink and I loved it! Kept it going for ages. I also thought that smart phones were expensive and a bit pointless. To be fair, the early ones were!
Now they're cheap (if you know where to look) and we've dropped the smart.

I was a late teen but the first thing I did online was watch the first BigBrother live as they did the live steaming 24/7 then and I thought I'd find it all fascinating and Orwellian. All I remember is a lot of buffering and people wandering around making tea. Anything remotely interesting was muted, still I kept watching .

*streaming obvs.

I remember emails and sending CVs online and MySpace (now almost gone). In the same way that Bebo and MySpace and perhaps FlickR have disappeared, and most notable Friends Reunited, there will be one of the larger used social media sites that will have disappeared or be so 'last decade' in 20 years or more.

I first went online in ‘97 when I started Art School. I remember chatting with people on a dance forum and a boy called Carlos in the states and I used to post parcels of sweets to each other and another boy from Germany sent me vhs videos of rare dance footage. It was brilliant.
I really hope we take a step back from social media in the future though, it’s lost it’s innocence and i do worry about the effect it will have on the future generation.

Someone upthread mentioned not being ble to be annonymous online in the future. I'm surprised that we haven't yet seen a big court case where a forum/ social platform is culpable for losses due to liability for not having full traceability of who it's member who made the liable is. I don't think taking posts down is sufficient when damage has already been done and the seed of liability is planted.

I think in less than 20 years we'll need a traceable digital signature to sign up for social platforms and own our liability. We'll still be able to mail taxi surface anonymity but be traceable to take responsibility for those comments should they have legal implications.

I feel quite negative about the impact the internet is having on society today. Back in the late 90s I was about 10, and every advance was exciting and new. I wasn't addicted and simply enjoyed having a pc, but obviously with dial up there is a limit to how long I spent on it, and for this reason I appreciated it even more. My first chat room experience was Habbo Hotel, I also played games like online pool, where you could chat with people. My brother and I would sit next to each other and do these things together, and take turns in "driving" the PC, and my dad would storm in if he heard us giggling to see what we were talking about/who were were talking to!! We had such a laugh. In the same way we appreciated having a PS1, it was all new and fun. But we still had other things in life we loved, like playing outside and drawing. Now everyone is addicted to their phones, including me, and it feels like we're trapped, but without the novelty, joy and social benefits that it used to bring. Social media is an ironic name, as it is now about showing off to others, and comparison is the theif of joy.

I think the WallE film probably isn't too far off - the part where everyone is obese and uses mobility scooters to get about, not the living in space part :) We aren't moving as much as we once did. Don't even have to get up to change the TV channel, for example. We don't need to leave the house to shop. We drive short distances instead of walking.

I think there will be some sort of pandemic because of overuse of antibiotics.

More extended families will be living together because of the cost of housing.

Offices will be almost paperless. My company got a new computer system last year and we have gone from buying 50 boxes of paper a month to less than 20 boxes already. Alongside this, less stationery is being used; fewer pens being bought as most stuff is done on a screen.

harryo I would have still been using my original freeserve email, but sadly when orange took freeserve over, we put the account into XH's name as you could get free broadband if you were on orange mobile.

When he left, orange wouldn't speak to me on the phone and XH refused to put the account back into my name. He did call them eventually but it was too late and orange had closed the account :(

Now some broadband companies like vodafone don't even offer an email address so you have to go with something like outlook or gmail.

Home telephone lines will totally disappear at some point. Vodafone have sent me surveys asking if I would buy broadband without the phone line.

I still need a landline as the mobile signal in parts of our rural area is terrible, and I wouldn't be able to keep in touch with my mum without the landline until they improve the mobile signal.

I was sitting Computer Technology as a CSE in 1986 but as I only got 17% in my mock exam, I didn't take the actual CSE. Lessons mainly consisted of us sitting in a classroom whilst the teacher dictated text to us that we had to write down and were supposed to learn but it involved words and phrases that we had never heard before. When we were let loose on the BBC computers during lesson time we spent most of the lesson playing Chucky Egg. I think I managed as much as 17% because I was able to answer the questions on binary coding which I'd learnt in maths lessons.

I also did typing as a CSE and I think that was one of the best skills I learnt in school. We started on massive clunky typewriters and it was very exciting when we progressed to golf balls and then daisy wheels. I bought an old Adler typewriter for £15 in an auction to type up my coursework. I later upgraded to an electronic typewriter that I still have upstairs in the wardrobe.

We got our first computer at home in 1999 ish, the make was Tiny and it was just over £1,000. I never imagined I would have my own laptop at home and here I am with a laptop that I hardly use, a netbook in the back of a cupboard, a desktop upstairs that's hasn't been switched on in about two years and both of us having iPads and we have an internet telly.

I used word processors in work from the late 80s onwards and very early computers from about 1990 and consider myself fairly proficient now.

Technology has changed so much and moved so quickly over the last 30 years I can't imagine what the next 30 years will bring.

Humans will have made climate change so bad that by 2050 parts of the Middle East and Mediterranean will be too hot for human habitation, so there will be millions of climate refugees.

The soil here has enough nutrients left for another 60 years of crops, so some way of feeding the huge population will need to be found.

There won’t be enough resources to provide lifelong homes, water, food, crops, animals to eat, fresh water, we are already using almost 2 ‘earths’ worth of resources and 240,000 more consumers are born each day (net).

By 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the seas.

(All this has been in Guardian articles from the last 2 years as well as various population awareness groups and climate scientists)

New average😀