I don't know about "magic." A modern smart phone might be "magic" to someone in 1860--it operates based on technologies that didn't exist back then. But by 1960, the building blocks of modern computing were already in place: digital von Neumann computers built out of transistors, radio communications, signal processing, etc. AT&T used frequency-division multiplexing of multiple voice channels in phone transmissions in 1918. The mathematical framework for modern technologies like LTE was in place by the 1950s and 1960s. Would it really have surprised anyone that transistors would continue to get smaller and faster, allowing higher complexity, higher-throughput signal processing, which would allow Facebook?
They were off on size/weight, but they guessed the capacity just about right (IBM 0681). I don't think extrapolating out pre-existing trends, for sophisticated people, be "mind blowing." Would your mind be "blown" if you learned that by 2048 you'd have a 100 petabyte drive using, say, magneto-resistive memory (or something else based on anticipated, if not fully developed physics)? Seems like hyperbole (and setting a low bar for peoples' imagination).
Reading stuff written in the 1960s about what today would be like, what strikes me is that technology is so incredibly not mind blowing compared to what we had back then. Even in the area of computers. Hell, we haven't even come up with an input device that beats keyboards, which were invented in the 19th century (electro-mechanical keyboards, not typewriters).
I think the difference is that we today have a lot more reference points for technological advances than people in the 1960s did.
Just continuing with the storage example, for decades now we've all been witness to data storage sizes growing massively, while the housing of said data storage has shrunk in size tremendously - as has the cost.
So when a couple MB of incredibly slow storage weighs thousands of pounds and costs millions of dollars, I do think the concept of tens/hundreds of GB of super fast flash memory contained within an object the size of a thumbnail would be mindblowing, whereas your example of
>a 100 petabyte drive using, say, magneto-resistive memory (or something else based on anticipated, if not fully developed physics)
wouldn't, just because we already all know how far technology has come since the 60s.
It's not so much the hardware as the combination of things. GPS+the Web+smartphones+... But, yeah, physical infrastructure has a lot of friction. So we have amazing pocket devices with access to much of the world's knowledge. But traffic jams.
They where vastly off in terms of size, weight, transfer speed, latency, and cost. In 1990 you could get a cheap RAID array so pick do you want 100x that capacity for far less than that price and weight.
Cheap in terms of multi million dollar hardware budgets.
1980: IBM introduces the first gigabyte hard drive. It is the size of a refrigerator, weighs about 550 pounds, and costs $40,000.
That’s ~1/10the the cost and 1/4 the weight they where looking for. You really could do vastly better in 1990. For ~2,300$ you could get a 700 MB HDD buy 3 and your talking 1.4 GB with redundancy for ~1% of his budget.
PS: If I extrapolate current trends and say we might get a self driving 400 HP Honda Civic in 2050. Then someone says sort of a Tito costs 3,000$ has 50,000 HP but nobody drives that under powered piece of crap. It would be a shift in how you think about things.
That must have changed rather quickly. In 1972 Alan Kay wrote "A personal computer for children of all ages". Here is the abstract:
> This note speculates about the emergence of personal, portable information manipulators and their effects when used by both children and adults. Although it should be read as science fiction, current trends in miniaturization and price reduction almost guarantee that many of the notions discussed will actually happen in the near future.
The paper is a great read. He basically imagined that in the future we'd develop the iPad and some high quality educational software for children. Forty years later, we can proudly say we've successfully developed half those things.
