LogFAQs > #905615795

WhiskeyDisk posted...

I see what you're saying, don't get me wrong but we both came from a time of tube TVs PO, and saying that you could really grasp a high definition display device as thin as a sheet of paper is bullshit and you know it.

By the time I was 18, I'd already played Duck Hunt in its own appropriate era (ie, the mid-80s) on a projection TV, where the screen was very much flat (even if it required three huge projection lens in front of it to put the picture there). I'd also seen LCD technology evolve from its most simplistic form in shitty handheld games in the late 70s/early 80s, to becoming more and more refined until there were things like the GameBoy in the very late 80s, and the GameBoy Color was just over the horizon (though we already had the Virtual Boy).

Laptops were probably the closest to what you're talking about, though. Paper thin? No. But certainly flat, and relatively crisp, and imagining a world where an inch-thick flat screen could become thinner isn't all that hard when you'd already seen computers go from being huge to being small enough that you could carry it in one hand.

Hell, 18-year old me had already seen and used touch-screen monitors (albeit with a stylus, not using fingers alone). So if you tried to explain the concept of a tablet to that guy he'd more than have the grounds to process the ideas of a thinner screen, that you can use by simply touching the screen, and with cell phone technology built in which can access the Internet. Yes, the idea that it would be so small might be surprising, but again, the idea that technology keeps getting smaller was already a very strongly established premise by that point.

I might be more floored by the sheer variety of apps we'd eventually see on an iPhone, and the idea that we'd essentially invent the tricorder from Star Trek (allowing us to do things like point it at the night sky and have it identify constellations by which stars it sees, or point it at foreign language text and have it real-time translate, or have it tell you where in the world you are at all times and real-world map your location and desired destinations well enough to give spoken directions). But the hardware would probably be less surprising.

8-year old me was playing Connect Four on a green monochrome CRT monitor built into the computer as a single solid block that had to be wheeled around on an A/V cart. High school me was playing games like Wolfenstein 3D and Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within on a computer with more computing power than the space shuttle and a monitor with crisper resolution than any TV I'd ever owned (and then college me played wire-frame VR with a headset and a harness a few times).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAE3XzIRX-Y" data-time="

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdcnQISuF_Y" data-time="

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybKV6rBfzV4" data-time="

Living through the 80s and 90s, you were almost primed to expect technology to keep evolving in ridiculous ways. If anything, I think the tech curve of the last 20 years or so has been more about refining and improving what is already possible in minor ways, as opposed to the reckless leap into the future the 80s-90s were.


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