For the jellies that were adults (or young adults) in the 1960's or 70's: Would you have believed that everyone in the future would carry a personal device, that did a bunch of things that you couldn't even do back then?

Umm. No. The Polaroid instant camera was enough to freak me out.

Yes, I did imagine these kind of things. I was a sci-fi and fantasy fan all my life and have followed tech advances, especially in the medical field. Star Trek, yes!

Dick Tracy’s radio watch and Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone were about as high tech as it got. There was a episode of Mayberry RFD where they stop a car with a car phone that operated though a mobile operator. That was unimaginable.

I received a microwave as a wedding present, and the idea of reheating leftovers right on the plate without them drying out was pretty amazing.

I was just discussing this with my cousin the other day. If you’d told someone 20 years ago that you took a picture with your phone they’d have thought you were a nut!

I was a child of Star trek. I thought we would all have Tricorders, which could do all kinds of things!

@TheLoneMonk No to what? All of it?

@faye How William Shatner changed the world…

@PandoraBoxx My mother said she was afraid of the microwave when she first got it. AFRAID! Seems silly today. But when you look at how much sodium and hydrogenated oils are in all microwavables… maybe we should all be afraid.

@knitfroggy Very true. Or if you said you could browse the web with your phone… 30 years ago. (Whats the web?!) How would you even market that? How would you have marketed the IPhone in the 1960s?!

The HP 65 pocket calculator was ultra hight tech in my senior year of engineering school. Slide rules before that. I thought that maybe some day we might have Star-Trek like flip open communicators, but probably not in my lifetime. Computers were monster things in an airconditioned building. Your had to hand write your Fortran IV program. Type it on punch cards with a test problem, come back 4 hours later and find that your program stopped at line 10 due to a syntax error. Those were the days. I’ve hated computers ever since.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land My dad majored in Math and Physics. He told me that they used to use those cards as Frisbees.I can only imagine how frustrating that was.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land, forgot about the HP calculator, which was the hot christmas gift my junior year for all the boys at the local Jesuit high school. It cost as much as a year’s tuition – $365. Being able to not use a slide rule was pretty awesome.

The first computer I used at work was a Wang desktop model with a 5–¼ floppy disks. The printer was pin feed paper.

I don’t believe I have ever even seen a slide rule. Which is odd considering my dad is a mechanical engineer and talked about it all the time.

Not a clue since we didn’t even have PCs then.

@PandoraBoxx that was a good price. I paid $600 for mine in 1972. Carried it in a leather holster like a nerd-gunsliger

heeheehee. I can so see it.

@mowens, my mom would put a plate in the microwave, and then make us all leave the room.

Hey! I was alive in the 70s, too! OK, I was an itty-bitty kid in the 70s, but I also still can’t believe we have this technology now, either! I used to help my 1st grade teacher run our weekly math quizzes off of a mimeograph machine in 1975. I remember punch cards. I don’t think there were any computers capable of doing what an 8GB iPhone can do now, and had there been such a beast, it would take up entire square blocks in 1975!

@PandoraBoxx Three cheers for Agents 86 and 99!

I was thinking about the calculators the other day. I saw some in the dollar store that cost…$!.00!!!

The phones of today ARE a marvel. I just got a new one last Saturday & it’s amazing what this thing does. Also my car. It’s scary! A heated steering wheel? Get out! It sure is sweet, tho.

We must do homage to telephones shaped like products, the hot item of the early ‘80s. Note the attached cord. Sports Illustrator led the pack with with the football phone, free with a paid subscription.

I remember the excitement when cassettes came out – no more vinyl – you could carry them about in your pocket
I sold about 20 cassette players to friends at work.

Four words: Dick Tracy’s video wristwatch. : )

Ever heard of the Brownie Hawkeye camera? when it first came out, it was like a new model of a cellphone today. everybody wanted one for taking still shot photographs. this was a big deal back then. i compare your question to a caveman, coming out of his cave and into our century. imagine trying to explain the automobile to him. that would truly be an experience to attempt. i remember when the first calculator went on sale. eveyone wanted a Texas Instrument calculator. the price, simply because it was new, was out of sight. again, everyone wanted one, especially students in high school and colleges. for a while, some were banned. and, lets not forget about the first Mickey Mouse wristwatch that came out in the 50s. it was a treasure then and still is today. its really funny how we can compare objects of our lifetime, compared to objects of your lifetime. and, if a person cannot change with the times, his time is just about up. good question. john

Of course not! I remember the day our neighbor got cable and I asked, “What’s cable?”

Life-long sci-fi fan here. I was reading the Dick Tracy comics when it was a two-way wrist radio! I thought we’d all have flying cars (or at least hovercars), and interplanetary travel would be an everyday thing. One of my favorite restaurants was called The Launching Pad.

@Yetanotheruser

Yep! This is why “retro-futures” are so fascinating. : )

The push button Princess phone, the electric typewriter and cable TV were the wonders of my youth. My first job in 1965 in an insurance company was to figure auto rates on a 126 key, hand cranked adding machine.

http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/Burroughs126Key.jpg

The sad thing is with all the electronic communication devices available we are moving more in the direction of faux communication.

As a teacher, I see the things like online texts and other resources as great. Electronic grading programs keep us from going blind, and Turnitin is better than ice cream.

I was dreaming of picture phones and flying cars. I also dreamed of word processors, but I never imagined anything like an iPhone. I can tell my grand kids about “the olden days.”

The cartoon The Jetsons made me dream of things that were out of our reach at that time, but could possibly happen in our future.

Carpel tunnel reminds me of George Jetsons button pushing finger.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land gets the geekistic prize for nerd gunslinger.

Lurve. :-)

I didn’t turn 18 until 1989 and at that time cell phones were the size of shoe boxes, the world wide web, DVDs and MP3s were still 6 years away, CDs were just becoming popular, most satellite dishes were 6 feet wide and didn’t require subscription fees, most of the phones in peoples’ houses still had cords, and when I went to college, most the people I knew didn’t even have word processors much less computers and printers. It wasn’t until 2 years later that a person could even buy a digital camera commercially, and then it cost $10,000 per megapixel. Where I lived we had a comparably big 27” TV on which we’d watch the 4 channels we could tune in. If you wanted to go somewhere you opened up this clunky piece of paper called a road map. By and large, at the time, most people didn’t own movies, because until Batman was released in November, 6 short months after its release in the theaters (compared to the 2 year average for mother movies up to that time), even these 2 year old movies on an analog piece of tape could cost $90 a piece…and again, Batman retailed at $20 and you could get it for $10, which was just freaking unheard of. ‘89 was the year the Game Boy was introduced and most of us who were still in awe of our Atari 2600s (if not still our Colecovisions) were jealous of the “rich” kids who could afford a first generation Nintendo (NES). Hell, no one had even thought of something as simple as a Diaper Genie until the mid 90s.

So, I had a personal computer in the mid 80s, and was on the internet by ‘91…I was always ahead of the curve in terms of knowing about technology, but I never imagined iPhones with MP3 players, digital cameras, GPS, etc. Our culture let us think that high tech was all about video phones and flying cars…the idea of being able to carry my entire music collection around in my pocket never even occurred to me. I didn’t even want a cell phone until 2000, and the first time I logged onto the internet, it was with a 2400 bps modem, what I saw was text based on my amber and black monochrome monitor. I had ideas about the general direction things were going…smaller, faster, cheaper, more powerful, etc. But when I started college, CD-ROM was enough to blow the mind of my computer teachers. Yeah, I thought maybe one day everything would be inter-connected, but how could I have envisioned what we’ve actually seen in the last 15 or 20 years (hell, the last 10)? I don’t even try to predict what we’ll see in the next 10 years, I suppose in general I know we’re going smaller, faster, cheaper, more integrated, probably eventually all of humanity will have some sort of device they can wear or even a brain implant that connects all the world’s computers and the brains of every person on the planet…sort of computer aided telepathy I suppose, all content will be accessible by just thinking about it and your virtual account will be debited automatically.

@Zen_Again I also carried my circular slide rule as not all profs would let us use the HP65 on exams (you could program engineering equations into the little magnetic memory strips. I suppose you could also put (CIA redacted)

@Zen_Again @stranger_in_a_strange_land also gets the geekiest award for carrying a slide rule.~

@Zen_Again @chyna ((hugs)) and lurves. :^)

Does anyone still use a slide rule?

@mowens I’m pretty sure @stranger_in_a_strange_land still does.

@mowens @chyna I still know how to. Batteries and solar strips can give out. And who needs a basketful of extra numbers that are meaningless as significant digits?

We were supposed to use them for Chem class, but I never figured it out. Rule # 37 Always get a good lab partner.

@galileogirl I always got partnered with football players and cheerleaders. I did the work, they shared my lab grade.

I wasn’t a cheerleader but she was afraid of the chemicals. We got the best grade on the final because I made a lucky on the precipitates (sic) and she wrote it up.

@galileogirl That’s more like what partnering is supposed to be. I just got spectators.

My dad had a slide rule. It was FUN to play with!

I actually used a slide rule in high school!

@Yetanotheruser Remember when Transistor Radios and calculators came out?! (At about the same time!)

@Val123 I remember transistor radios from right around 1960. My brother and I each got one for Christmas, and we would put them under our pillows at night and listen to them all night.

Remember transistor radios alright – I used to listen in bed as well. Here in Britain radio Luxembourg was the tops as there were no commercial radio stations until the pirates came along later. Good memories.