Vr is pretty damn cool IMO, also emulation.

The fact almost any computer after 2010 ish can basically play every single game made for every console ever up to probably ps1/ps2, is insane.

Yeah MicroSD should've been replaced eons ago.

I recently bought a JBL Trio everything in one box music thing.

It has the ability in almost real time, there's a bit of buffering, to unmix any music I stream to it from my phone. You can dial out vocals, the guitar, drums, etc.

Being able to separate the tracks in audio, let alone do it in basically real time, would have seemed like black magic in the 70s. Hell, it seems like black magic now.

Led mouse instead of trackball/mechanical mouse.

Personally, I'd go with 80s/90s nerds, as it would take a special kind of 70s nerd to understand digital storage enough to be wowed by a 4tb sd card.

Multi-gigabit network speeds being common in people's homes. 400mbps+ wifi speeds being common too.

4KUHD tvs and on your phone. Small B&W crt tvs were extremely common.

Bluetooth headphones, cords were a pain.

The more I say, the more I think, basically everything.

That image has gotta be fake, right?

SDHC only goes up to 32GB and I'm pretty sure the successor SDXC only goes up to 2TB

I'm not quite sure how a card can be both U1 and U3 too

SD express should be able to surpass 2TB, but I don't know if 4TB micro SD express cards have been made yet

Being able to look up and verify just about any fact in seconds via a magical device that fits in your pocket and only needs to be charged once a day, then never using it to do that.

Cloud services in general. Tech used to all be local, regardless of what it was. Everything cloud would blow the minds of people from the 70s. Though, we all know the tradeoffs these days

I'd imagine someone living in the 70s during the insanely fast computer power progress would have no problem believing that a newer system could emulate older system's code... Wouldn't be surprised that it was already happening back then.

who the fuck can afford that shit if you don't get scammed first 🤣

We went from dumb terminals to personal computers, now were back to dumb terminals

Having a portable device that can play any song you want still blows my mind. I had a Walkman as a kid and thought that was great but being able to listen to anything at the touch of a button is so next level

They can print whatever size they want on it if you’re buying from AliExpress 🤪

You are 100% correct, there is no such thing as a 4TB SD card. Largest you can get is 2TB. Western Digital has shown a 4TB MicroSDUC and even 8TB SDUC card at shows and events, but I don't think it has found its way into production just yet. And with the extreme prices of flash these days, I doubt they will release it any time soon. The 4TB card would probably be $1500 - $2000 retail, who is going to buy that? And what is the use case?

The picture is some mockup someone made or maybe AI generated, but not of a real card.

i might get shade for it, but LLMs.

Laptops are so damn thin and light now. A MacBook Air M5 is just an insane thing to me when I saw it at Costco

It could be a real card from Temu. It's actually a 1 GB card, but it says it's 4TB.

When I was a child my parents worried that microwave ovens would make their own food toxic, and told me TV would ruin my eyes. Now they sleep with a wireless super computer plugged in to a world wide-network, with a camera and lidar pointed at themselves around the clock.

Yep, for example, emulation was being used at IBM in the late 60's (and a descendant of it is still in use today, called z/VM): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/CMS

I'm still amazed by the fact that PS2 was backwards compatible with PS1 cause it had a PS1 module inside. Also, PS2 super slim was way too sleek, even for today's standards

You can actually store 4TB on most those cards (if you're ok with automated data deletion to make room)

I remember reading in the 80's, can't remember where (this 60's Time-Life book series, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Science_Library), where they were discussing the latest advances in training neural nets, and the idea that with a big enough net they could simulate the human brain. Maybe those Time books are on archive.org, I'll have to look for them sometime.

On Wikipedia it seems that research dates back to the 40's, but work was definitely in progress in the 50's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network_(machine_learning)

So for us old farts, LLMs (even though it's different technology obviously) seem more like "finally" because since Eliza we've been hearing and dreaming about it for ages. Too bad that the reality of them is so dark! And every movie and show tried to warn us: 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Ultimate Computer (Star Trek TOS), TRON, Terminator 2... but we thought "nah, that's just the movies".

With what?

Lol I physically recoiled when I read that. I know that's been a thing for a while, just still gets me. 4tb is a Lotta floppies.

Back in early days of Aliexpress, I was looking at a bike frame by Trek. I messaged the shop and ask if they stock Specialized as well. Shop replied “Yes, of course we can put whatever decals you want on it”.

I might be misunderstanding, but dumb terminals are super old, dating back to the 60s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_3300). The idea of having your own personal computer, rather than time sharing, was very exciting to people. Like the Apple computer kit in the 70s, and the IBM PC in the early 80s. People wanted their own computer rather than having to rely on and pay for those centralized services. So I'd say that cloud services are more like a return to the bad old days rather than some exciting prospect.

Terminals existed in libraries even in the early 80s, probably earlier than that, to replace the card catalog. And to my knowledge each library didn't have a minicomputer or mainframe in it, as that would have been way too expensive. I think they were probably using either dial up or some kind of old connection to a mainframe in the city, but I'm just speculating.

I use it for fact checking all the time!

“Hey Chatgpt…”

Yeah ps2 is just great. Still play it all the time.

I just did the math on network speed the other day. I remember our local dial up ISP upgrading to 56k from 28.8 and it blew me away, although I rarely connected above 33.6. I'm currently on 1200 mbps, nearly 23,000 times faster than 56kbps and about 37,000x faster than the 33.6 I actually received.

I can transfer in one second what took about 10 hours before. A movie I just watched would have taken over 95 days to download at 90s speeds.

Yes! I dunno if it's still reasonably possible, but I remember downloading a text copy of Wikipedia and thinking how cool that was. And earlier than that, back in the CD-ROM era (90s), digital encyclopedias were actually an exciting use of the technology and I was given one as a Christmas gift.

According to cellphone companies, apparently non-removable storage

Or having a mouse at all. Even in the late 80's, mice were a luxury item. And those horrible resistive touch screens in the auto parts store were a nightmare compared to today's capacitive phone screens.

Light pens were cool, though.

Well maybe not crazier than their wildest imaginations since there's Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.
but certainly matching it.

This however, I think anyone from the 1970s would fail to describe what they're looking at first try..

Cameras in general. Good quality film cameras took some work and were heavy. Like bookbag heavy. You’d have to carry a little set of filters (thin lens caps that screwed onto the main lens) in addition to another lens or two to get a good range of options. Now, tap, done. Copies? NP. Black and white? Tap. No need to use up the roll of color film and then switch to black and white film.

Yet now, basic websites take longer to load! Lol

Synthstrom Deluge. Sampler, sequencer, synthesizer, all in one and open source. Portable too, takes a 18650.

This video isn't solely a Deluge, but you get the sorta idea of what sort of power house this thing is in the hands of a music nerd.

At least Johnny Mnemonic hasn't happened yet... although Neuralink seems to be trying.

My boy experienced lag for the first time about a year ago while playing fortnite. Another player was rubber banding about the place.

He looks at me and says "bro why is our internet so bad?"

I was legitimately amazed that he'd never seen that happen before, and equally surprised that I'd just sort of forgotten about it myself.

The internet in general but also cellular and wifi wireless networks. Its like wizardry and black magic.

Obviously first is cell phones giving pocket access to the internet. And, what those two together have done to us. Along with, yes we all have video phones in our pockets, which would NOT be a surprise, but we don't use it that way very much at all, preferring to text each other. That would be a big surprise.

Also, OnlyFans.

Yep. It's a "write once, read never" storage medium.

Cyberpunk 2077. Video game with Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba basically as themselves, and just the whole scope of the game. And the graphics.

IIRC Alan Turing was the one who came up with the concept of emulation, so that's nothing new.

Everyone having a portable supercomputer that fits in their pocket that also has a network connection that allows for instantaneous global communications.

I think the notion of a pocket-sized device that gives you instant access to virtually all the knowledge humanity has ever produced is hard to beat.

WORM/WORN, small difference, I say ship it.

Nah, in the '70s they expected us to have stuff way better than LLMs by now.

Blue LEDs. We had red and green since the '60s, but blue took until the '90s to figure out and the guy who did so got a Nobel prize for it because that finally meant we could use them for white lights and full-color displays.

For a reminder of how quick it could be :

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com

And modern mid-range photo cameras come with crazy features. Autofocus that can detect human and even animal eyes and instantly focus on those. Lenses with whisper-quiet and crazy fast ultrasonic focusing motors. Image stabilization both in the lens and in the camera.

Oh, and your photo camera can record video, too, because why wouldn't it?