LogFAQs > #905615809

WhiskeyDisk posted...

but if you're really expecting me to believe you could have forseen a modern cellphone back in the mid 90s, yeah, I'm calling hindsight bullshit on that one

Cell phones were already a thing then. And I'd already watched them evolve from massive bricks anchored in a car into something you could carry around with their own built-in antenna.

Smartphones, no, but it wasn't entirely out of the question even then to put 2 and 2 together and potentially see how the various elements mind wind up getting integrated. Even harder sci-fi was already coming up with examples of that sort of thing, and cyberpunk had pretty much gone even farther than where we are now.

Someone in 1995 might have laughed at you if you tried to sell him an modern iPad or iPhone, but he wouldn't necessarily have thought you were insane if you predicted we'd have those sorts of things 10-20 years later.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

since even a powermac still had what amounted to a box the size of 4 or 5 pizza boxes under a 12" tube TV.

Older than most PotDers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Siemens_PCD-3Psx.JPG

Came out when I was 21, almost the same size as the laptop I am currently using:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Compaqarmada7800.jpg

Also older than most PotDers, and also not much larger in most dimensions than the laptop I am currently using:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Outbound_Systems_Inc._Model_2000.jpg

Came out when I was 17, and could easily be confused for a laptop you could buy today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:540c_open.jpg

Laptops weren't universally huge and ridiculous at that point. There WERE smaller models, and they were getting smaller every year. Again, not hard to predict a future reduction of size of 200% when you'd already seen a reduction closer to 1000%.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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