Amazingly Accurate Tech Predictions

[v10superduty]

Not really RV related but I just had to post this somewhere.. :@

I just watched an old TV show called "Beachcombers".
Since was a Canadian show many may not have heard of it?
This particular episode was from 1988. The gist of this show is a couple competitive guys with boats in the coastal British Columbia town of Gibsons Landing (actual place)who salvage logs, barges, whatever, that need towed in off the ocean.

In this episode Relic (one of the dudes) gets a bill from government that he knows he paid, when his enquiries are answered with the "computer" must have caused issue, he calls in a young fellow he previously met to figure this out.
So this 15ish year old brings his laptop, (the size of a portable sewing machine) and "hacks into govt website and solves the problem.
He then encourages Relic to look farther and they figure a way to steal deals from Nick (the other salvage guy) so Nick puts out a call for help.

So now a 16ish (has a drivers license) girl shows up with her 25 pound laptop and they hack into the (all DOS)government website and battle back and forth over the net.
The kids end up becoming friends and as they are leaving town one of the dudes says to the other something like

"Imagine if a bunch of these kids gang up together what they could do?"

How could a writer back in 1988 so accurately predict this stuff? If he is still alive today he must be chuckling.. :B

[dewey02]

Back in the early 1980's, we had an IBM Office System 6 in our building. It was a dedicated word processor that used 8 inch floppies. We thought we were ****in' in high cotton!

[MrWizard]

Jerry Pournelle is one of my favorite authors
I've been re-reading his CoDomimiom universe and series for the past week, ebook down load from Baen books
Finished "Spaceship for King David" just the other night

Any way, way back in the early 70's he had characters with pocket computer technology, one little device that was computer and communications and reference library, calculator etc..carried in your shirt pocket
Sounds like our smart phones we have in our pockets

[B_s_Bunch]

rjxj wrote:

WA7NDD wrote:
I worked at a collage for 35 years, and had the opportunity to be on the "so call" Internet before Windows. All IP addresses were numbered addresses type in and all "web pages" if you want to call them that, were in plane text, and no pic's. This was around 1988 as I remember. At that time, collages and industry were the only facilities with a connection to the web, and Al Gore had nothing to do with it.

But but....I thought big Al invented the net? Lol. Mr global warming and his massive pontoon boat with a jet ski lift on the back. lol what sucks more fuel than a jet ski? NOTHING!!!!!

The power plant powering his home:o

[Chris_Bryant]

Here's a good gif:

[OhhWell]

I was dialing into BBS services in the late 80's so not that wild of a prediction.

[camperpaul]

RoyB wrote:
Who still remembers the 8-inch floppies... I still have several boxes of those here. I also heard last week the US MINUTEMAN MISSLE PROGRAM still uses the 8-inch floppy for data input.



Roy Ken

My Sony camera uses 3.5" floppies for photo storage.

It serves double duty as a floppy drive for my HP Lap-top.

[strollin]

TheBearAK wrote:
late 80's when I ran a local BBS we started hooking our BBS's up through DARPA net through the local university via a phone line modem.

Pretty much the first Forums were created then. This was before HTML came along. Everything was text based. Ah simpler times.

note: BBS = Bulletin Board System. Many BBS's started up in the mid 80's and hung around until Mosaic (first web browser) and what we now see as the forums made them obsolete. Most BBS's were dial in, some had more than one line, but often the smaller ones just had a single line, so only one person at a time could be posting.

In 1984 I bought a 1200 baud modem which came with software and numbers to call on-line services such as Delphi and Compuserve. Both of those sounded expensive so I never called them. I went back to the store where I bought the modem and asked how I could find out about Bulletin Boards that I had heard of. The guy printed out a list with about 10 numbers of local BBSs. Once you connected to one BBS, there were lists you could download of other BBSs so there was no shortage of them to call.

A few years later I served as the Co-Sysop for the IBM employees BBS.

[Chris_Bryant]

RoyB wrote:
Who still remembers the 8-inch floppies... I still have several boxes of those here. I also heard last week the US MINUTEMAN MISSLE PROGRAM still uses the 8-inch floppy for data input.



Roy Ken

And reading Jerry Pournelle in Byte magazine (all 300 pages, back then) telling how he would never use a 3.5" floppy, and 5.25 inchers were suspect.
Now they're getting 185 terabytes on a cassette tape.

[TheBearAK]

late 80's when I ran a local BBS we started hooking our BBS's up through DARPA net through the local university via a phone line modem.

Pretty much the first Forums were created then. This was before HTML came along. Everything was text based. Ah simpler times.

note: BBS = Bulletin Board System. Many BBS's started up in the mid 80's and hung around until Mosaic (first web browser) and what we now see as the forums made them obsolete. Most BBS's were dial in, some had more than one line, but often the smaller ones just had a single line, so only one person at a time could be posting.

[strollin]

Definitely remember 8" floppies. One of my first tech jobs was as a test tech working at Shugart Associates on their SA800 8" floppy drives.

[RoyB]

Who still remembers the 8-inch floppies... I still have several boxes of those here. I also heard last week the US MINUTEMAN MISSLE PROGRAM still uses the 8-inch floppy for data input.



Roy Ken

[SRT]

As an addendum to my previous posts I now have a desk top with dual processor, solid state C: drive and terabyte hard drive and a "ton" of fast memory. Luckily my son is in IT and can help me when I get in trouble. Technology is great, if you can understand it....:B

[SRT]

garry1p wrote:
Well I guess I must be really OLD having worked on drum memory, CRT memory and the most unique was a delay line memory that looked just like a long spring.

Yup, I can remember those "huge" rotating drums where the read/write heads traveled back and forth. Also those 2' rotating discs. Boy, when the read/write heads moved......:B Boy, that sure brings back memories of paper tape output (before high speed printers). Putting the tapes into a Flex-writer (electric typewriter with a paper tape reader fixed to it's side) to printout on continuous printer paper.

IBM model 24 keypunches for input. Occasionally the punch card readers would get out of adjustment and you would have to clean out a card jam. Then we got the magnetic tape servos with 2400' tape reels. I could go on and on, but you'd probably get bored after a while....:W

[SRT]

Francesca Knowles wrote:

v10superduty wrote:

How could a writer back in 1988 so accurately predict this stuff? If he is still alive today he must be chuckling.. :B

:h

How old ARE you, anyway??? You talk as if 1988 was back in the Stone Ages.

By 1988, practically this whole country had not only electricity, but cable TV, microwave ovens, and cordless phones. As for computer/internet technology: Ever see the movie "War Games"? link. Made in 1983, and based on then-existing technology.

I first got into mainframe computers as an computer operator in 1961 when memory consisted of a bunch of metallic donuts about the size of a dime. I was in various parts of computer/programming technology until I retired about 10 years ago. It seems that about every two years technology expanded (Moore's Law). After a while to understand computers you had to specialize in one area. Now I'm just and "old fart" and need my grand kids to some times help me use the iPad or iPhone...:B