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

183 replies

HollowTalk · 18/01/2019 21:01

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?

OP posts:
HollowTalk · 20/01/2019 13:05

Rather than the high street dissapearing, I wonder if product placement will become reality placement with the high street being product placement settings. Rather than branded shops. For example in a restaurant and like the plate/ glass/ cutlery you could scan it and have it delivered to your home. In a library browsing and download or have the paperback delivered, like the soundtrack and download it. At the doctors and like the art on the wall - buy it or download it. See it, scan it, buy it.

I'd really like that!

OP posts:
HollowTalk · 20/01/2019 13:08

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.

This doesn't tie in with the rise in sale of FitBits, though, does it?

OP posts:
brizzledrizzle · 20/01/2019 14:39

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.

If you buy too many chocolate bars your chip will be blocked from buying them so the government (the NHS will have long gone) can stop you from buying them. Instead you will only be allowed to buy a set amount, kind of like rationing but forcing you into buying healthy foods and not being allowed to buy more food until you have eaten the stuff you have bought because the chip will have software which knows the use by dates and will have some way of knowing what you have eaten and what you haven't.

People will be forced to weigh themselves and the chip will store it on a central database which will automatically modify what you are allowed to buy if you are gaining weight when you don't need to.

NopSlide · 20/01/2019 15:05

If you buy too many chocolate bars your chip will be blocked from buying them so the government (the NHS will have long gone) can stop you from buying them. Instead you will only be allowed to buy a set amount, kind of like rationing but forcing you into buying healthy foods

Honestly I would pay for this service...

brizzledrizzle · 20/01/2019 15:28

Honestly I would pay for this service...

I was thinking much the same...it started out as a big brother post and turned into something that wouldn't be a bad idea if it was voluntary (before I need my tin hat!)

Skittle22 · 20/01/2019 15:36

I remember studying A level computer science. A whole year of my life wasted working out how many rolls of wallpaper to paper an average sized room.

Also remember guy in Comet (remember them) when buying a computer, offering us a choice between a new thing called 'the internet' and a pile of cd roms. Then feeling very smug that I hadn't fallen for his sales patter and the latest 5 minute wonder Blush

DGRossetti · 20/01/2019 15:41

I was online at Uni (via JANET) in 1984. Used to chat with students in the US (mainly). My entire course was centred around computer networks, and we were messing around with ideas that morphed into the WWW.

Email was pretty well established though.

My real name is in a posting to the KERMIT archives dated 1987. For years people googling my name couldn't understand how.

Of course now that's older than some managers Grin

Hedwigsradio · 20/01/2019 17:12

We didn't get a computer until 1999 when I was 18 but we wernt aloud to use the internet as it cost to much. When I finally did get one of my own at 23 I never knew what to go on so it just sat in the corner. I am still yet to really use online shopping as the idea of having to send things back seems a pain in the neck.

PutYourShirtOnMartin · 20/01/2019 17:21

I bought my first computer for home in 1995. I had started teacher training that years and I had touched my first computer on that course. I was very anxious about touching it as I thought I would break it...I couldn't even turn it on in class.
So I bought my own as I knew I would need one soon. It cost £1200 in 1995. I had just bought my house the year before for £28000 so £1200 was a lot of money.

It was a Pentium processor... the first one.

I used AOL to dial up ... I had an email address but I didn't know anyone else with an email address so couldn't use it! My dad said it was a fad and wouldn't catch on. What was on the web was pretty basic, mostly odd chat rooms. Any web pages had few graphics and they were basic.

So much for being a fad

theDudesmummy · 20/01/2019 17:32

The first time I saw a computer was in 1978, I was in the school "computer science" club and we went to see THE computer at the university. It was the size of a room and you communicated with it by feeding punched cards onto a "hopper". We got it to work out the value of pi to about a hundred places in a matter of...minutes. I was amazed...

Younger people now would be astonished how backwards we were! I also remember "trunk calls" (did not live in the UK as a child). If you wanted to phone the UK you had to book your call a day in advance...

DGRossetti · 20/01/2019 17:34

Younger people now would be astonished how backwards we were! I also remember "trunk calls" (did not live in the UK as a child). If you wanted to phone the UK you had to book your call a day in advance...

We had to book a call from Nonno and Nonna ....

theDudesmummy · 20/01/2019 17:38

First time on internet was around 1992, got onto a Compuserve chat room by trial and error. I remember with great clarity the moment I realised I was actually connected in real time to mutiple people in other parts of the world while sitting in my back bedroom. I literally got a kind of a head rush and palpitations and though "wow, this is a game changer"...

XingMing · 20/01/2019 18:23

I had my first computer-word processor in 1984, worked remotely in the UK from 1989. and my first e-mail address was numeric. By 2040, I really am not able to make predictions; I shall be 85 FFS. I hope I shall still be competent to buy my groceries online.

DangermousesSidekick · 20/01/2019 20:26

I'm also cynical about the benefits of more IT now. It's just used for everything now for no better purpose than to show off use of IT. You could often do the job better without - especially when you include the power generation needed for it - but it just has to be IT. I agree the internet is getting worse. The old WWW was amazing, having all this information and capability to learn at your fingertips, it really brought the world into your living room. Now it's all just a confused jumble of loud vocal sensationalist competing for attention while actually saying nothing of substance. excluding me on here naturally

Elderflower14 · 20/01/2019 22:25

There is a farm park near me that still uses the sliding card machine and carbon paper!!

Elderflower14 · 20/01/2019 22:27

We had Sinclair ZX81s at school in 1980/81

ErrolTheDragon · 20/01/2019 23:12

I'm also cynical about the benefits of more IT now. It's just used for everything now for no better purpose than to show off use of IT.

Depends on your field. I write scientific software, we're nowhere near plateaued yet!
I can do my job way more efficiently now we have fast broadband. I used to have to fly to the US quite regularly, now I don't. Meetings and training are accomplished effectively using Skype ... developers don't need to meet each other face to face, but sharing screens is brilliant. And the scope and speed of what we can do now, the size of computations and the information we can extract from scientific data that simply was not possible even relatively recently.

PigletJohn · 21/01/2019 00:50

Flying cars and domestic robots.

They're 20 years away.

Always have been.

ErrolTheDragon · 21/01/2019 01:05

Along with fusion reactors.

DragonMamma · 21/01/2019 01:19

I had my first PC in 1998 and it cost £1k from PC World. It was a Compaq Presario and we had Freeserve dial up for AGES.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time Down The Pub like @theoldtrout01876 did. In fact, I met one of my best mates (to this day) there.

Having seen how far we’ve come in 20 years, I can’t even begin to imagine where another 20 will see us.

I’m just glad we now have fibre broadband and don’t have to disconnect every hour.

Riversguidebook · 21/01/2019 01:39

Unfortunately humans will still be raping eachother, brutally murdering their own children and blowing up strangers for their own perverse pleasure. Religion or society will never repress us animals completely.

Doubt much will change in 20 years. But 100 years there will be no petrol vehicles, we’ll be driving electric cars, not driverless.
Nuclear energy rife. Domestic solar and wind turbine energy compulsory.

No metal or plastic cash. Currency for everything from a mars bar in a corner shop to wages to major life purchases all extracted via your fingerprint registration at birth. No debts accrued, you pay as you go on everything because you’re in a central financial database. If you want a mars bar an you haven’t been paid your wages yet that day, you just can’t have it.

Something drastic will change with haulage/logistics. Maybe they’ll re-open up the canals as transportation channels😄 slow, but well connected. Or drain them and make them into super high speed magnetic monorails.

High rise housing will make a comeback. It needs to, population growth.

‘Genetic engineering’. Everyone will reject a foetus if it’s not their preferred sex, or had too many flags on it’s future health issues, or has green eyes instead of blue, or not the right number of predicted intellectual or empathy traits.
That leads to generations of ‘perfect’ babies, who will all look like eachother, and how can you later be attracted to someone who looks just like you? At some point nature will regress and genes will start mutating regardless of any custom lab input.

School exams will become defunct, the whole school system merges, everyone has the right to free and equal education from nursery to university.

Everyone’s compulsory chipped from birth.

To be honest, most of this is stuff I’ve thought about whilst playing video games as much of it is represented there Grin

PigletJohn · 21/01/2019 01:52

20 years ago I had an isolated cottage in farmland with a phone I could use as a slow dial-up connection.

But for certain purposes I used a Teletext card in the PC, it sucked down data from the TV signal and maintained files in a specialised package. No running costs.

Sadly it stopped working on 1 January 2000, because it was uneconomic to rewrite it to Y2K standards. The s/w house attempted to migrate me onto their new web package, but it wasn't worthwhile.

artisanscotcheggs · 21/01/2019 01:52

Twenty-two years ago was when i first went online.

God I'm old.

I remember ICQ, terrible geocities websites filled with gifs and guestbooks, and usenet.

Hedwigsradio · 21/01/2019 05:42

Thinking about this made me remember my dad just before he died suddenly in 2001 aged 48 holding an old style mobile phone with what is now an awful camera saying "i don't think they can make anything more amazing than this!" He never got to see smart phones, tablets etc but I know he would have loved them/been amazed by them.

Judashascomeintosomemoney · 21/01/2019 07:10

We talk about robots as if they are 'the other'. But my worry is that with compulsory implants (and this will happen)
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.
It will be like the Clive Owen film Anon. Chipping has started already and some companies will soon make it compulsory for employees and once that happens, and we all gradually start to accept it, then governments will start doing it and make that compulsory.