Are you suggesting this is a bigger change than say, 1910-1940, or 1920-1950 to use your timeline? I don't really understand what you are trying to say in the above.

Beyond that, most of the bones of the information systems were already there in 1993, you'll have to add at least another 20 years, if not pre-computer, to make it "alien".

I think ubiquitous cell phones would be a surprise, but it's hard to argue that is a bigger change than say, automobiles.

Ubiquitous everyone carries a smartphone mobility that isn't plugged into centralized information sources should perhaps, in retrospect, been predictable in 1993 but I don't think it was obvious. It certainly wasn't 10 years earlier to the vast majority of people other than as a hand wavy Foundation-style Galactic Library (which tended to be the SF-type prediction).

Also, don't take what I wrote to be "No one could have predicted this" but rather someone teleported in time would be just amazed about these aspects of ubiquitous information retrieval.

> Also, don't take what I wrote to be "No one could have predicted this" but rather someone teleported in time would be just amazed about these aspects of ubiquitous information retrieval.

The interesting thing is if you move that window just a couple of years forward to about 1995 and just after I'd seen Windows 95 and AOL and multimedia CD ROMs, I don't think nine year old me would have been amazed by the 28 years of difference at all. Bigger, faster, everyone uses the internet instead of brochures and often instead of TV... all of this seems obvious and this "social media" thing everyone in the future is obsessed with sounds a lot like the description of Usenet in the 1995 how to use the internet book. People use it for work, but why wouldn't they? (nine year old me didn't have a particularly sophisticated idea of work, but he was used to Dad having a home office and knew that was why he bought the new computer). The basic form was nailed early on, it just took time for the user base and infrastructure to catch up.

Smartphones are cooler, I guess. The tech's less cool without understanding the innovations in capacitive touchscreens and just seeing it as a neat hybrid of phone/console/PDA, but even with cellphones already being a thing, there are a lot of nineties plots revolving around the assumption that person A and person B wouldn't communicate whilst on the move, never mind look up information to solve their problems.

> there are a lot of nineties plots revolving around the assumption that person A and person B wouldn't communicate whilst on the move, never mind look up information to solve their problems.

Yeah, movie and TV writers have been really struggling with how to maintain dramatic tension since the smartphone. Could be a reason why we have all the junk superhero sequel movies, and all the junk serial killer TV series, where all the action is post-facto.

In my suburban California high-school circa 1990, there were multiple kids carrying "digital" pagers and a few with cell phones. They didn't seem like time travelers. Others would gossip as to whether they were rich, spoiled brats or maybe selling drugs.

It is true that pocket information was either printed material or something more specialized like an electronic dictionary. The newest information-delivery fad was multimedia CD-ROM applications. On the TV front, product infomercials were already a familiar cliche and CNN had already debuted live-streaming war coverage with the first Gulf War.

The local libraries had a mix of physical card catalogs and digital catalogs. There were still banks of microfiche readers to view archived newspapers. The digital catalogs were a mix of green-screen terminals to some centralized computer and some starting to be based on regular PCs running a library kiosk application. The libraries still had more space dedicated to the stacks of books than contemporary ones which seem to have more lounges and meeting spaces.

The equivalent of internet-based shopping was ordering from printed catalogs either by mail-order or phone-order. Most products would ship in 2-4 weeks instead of a few days unless you paid silly money for expedited service. There was still the lingering concept of cash-on-delivery, where you would give the UPS driver money or a cashier's check when they delivered your package rather than paying the sender in advance. You were more likely to buy clothes locally unless ordering from a company like Columbia or LL Bean.

The "everyone carries a smartphone that can talk to various information sources" part was an easy extrapolation of things that already existed in 1994: Motorola Envoy, a ~tablet (well, PDA using parlance from those times) with a wireless modem, was released in 1994. General Magic, a company that aimed to build such a device, was created in 1990.

I grant you that the existence of such easy to query information sources was probably less predictable.

I would argue that the smartphone is a smaller change to society than the quickly ubiquitous automobile.

You can argue about precursors to automobiles on that adoption curve, but there were many precursors to the smartphones on the go connectivity such as the first pager system launched all the way back in 1950. And of course the internet had been around for decades by 1993.

We think of the internet as a huge revolution in how people shop for example, but fundamentally it’s the same basic idea as introduced by the ubiquitous sears catalog by telephone or even mail.

>Also, don't take what I wrote to be

Again, this confuses me. I was pointing out that the current rate of change is not obviously more rapid than about 100 years ago. If you are trying to provide a counterexample I think you've failed to establish one, and if you weren't I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve, other than a generic "gee, the internet has come a long way in the last 30 years". I don't think anyone would claim it hasn't, but I don't get your point, I guess.

Star Trek communicators and tricorders come pretty close, but then again that was predicted for the 23rd century. One beef I have about The Expanse is that they have cell phones, albeit fancy holographic ones. Not sure we will still be using that paradigm, we may have moved into wearable devices or something involving direct brain communication by then. We are already on the verge of that.

There has been a huge shift in the way we interact with government and banking services. I no longer have to visit the motor vehicle registry to get my car registered (used to be an annual PITA), don't have to fill out a paper form and mail it to do my taxes, I renew all my insurance online rather than going into a physical building, can check my bank balance any time I want, transfer money etc.

I'm only 54 but the world did change radically since I was a teenager. That's only 10 years since the 1993 benchmark of "alien". That was a wild 10 years.

That's the really fascinating thing for me. You were a young adult when the shift happened. I turn 40 this year and in a lot of ways it feels like it's been, mobile phones being the exception, logical incremental improvements since I was a teenager. I had a 56k modem for 2 years but got a 1.5MBit DSL line when I was around 16. Computing power has grown dramatically from my 133MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM, but nothing feels fundamentally that much different beyond the fact that half the apps I have installed on my machine are written in HTML and JavaScript, embed a full web browser, and use dramatically more RAM than they used to.

I remember the shift. I remember the upgrade from my VIC-20 to my XT to my 586, but I don't remember life being that much different. The biggest difference, for me, is this whole notion of "being available everywhere all the time" that came along first with cellphones and then doubled down with smartphones. I remember being able to take off on my bike, going to a park, and reading a book with absolutely no distraction at all. Or going to the cabin and not having an Internet connection.

In the context of everyday personal computing, I would argue computing power improvements have plateaued since around 2011~2012.

Think about it: Intel Sandy Bridge and AMD Bulldozer CPUs are still perfectly practical to use today for all everyday tasks if we put aside arbitrary software limitations (read: Windows 11). Go and install Windows 10 on a Sandy Bridge, it'll be just as practically-performant as the latest Raptor Lake for all your everyday computing needs.

It's kind of interesting to look back when you're one of the guys who also witnessed the mindblowing advances in computing we had in the 90s and 00s (like you and me). The steep climb, followed by the leveling off.

My wife still uses a C2D Macbook Pro (with an SSD and 16GB RAM upgrade, if I recall correctly). It’s totally fine for most of the work she does with it. While I needed to get a beefier laptop for the work I’m doing now (involving processing TB-sized datasets), my 2014 Mac Mini (also with an SSD upgrade) still lives happily on my desk connected to a 4K monitor.

Yeah, that steep climb was amazing! Going from 3kB of RAM, to 640kB of RAM, to 16MB of RAM, to 1GB, to 16GB was incredible. I remember my first dual CPU computer and being blown away that I could burn a CD, listen to music, and play Counterstrike at the same time (Abit BP6, 2x Celeron 450s). Maybe if I still gamed I’d be more blown away by how much things continue to evolve but in a lot of ways the newer CPUs and more RAM etc. mostly just feel like a way to compensate for increasingly bloated software in my day-to-day “office work” activities.

Maybe to you, but 30 years ago I was already using the internet. BBSes were common in tech circles as well. We didn't have google, but there were search engines to look for files that you could then FTP. AOL was already nearing their peak, them and competitors were in many ways trying to be what the internet became. 30 years ago my dad was already calling in to work from home (2400 baud was not as good as being in the office, but when a customer has a problem at 3am that was the fastest way to fix the problem). 30 years ago people would get the details wrong, but they had already imagined today's world even if they couldn't actually take part in one of the forerunners to it.

I was very much into BBSs. Never AOL, although CIS. 30 years ago? I don't think I had an Internet connection though. (Had been barely exposed to it in school in the late 70s.) Got things like competitive spec information as a product manager from requesting it from analysts we paid a lot of money to for faxing us data sheets. Pricing info was very fragmentary. There were cell phones--barely--not sure when I got my first one as a rarely-used backup device.

A mobile almost always connected world might have been something I might have imagined in some form as futurology but would probably have take different forms. See Pournelle's version of not-Wikipedia in Oath of Fealty for example.

My local university had a free dialup number that you could use to telnet into anything on that supported telnet. There were a few BBSes on the internet, but I didn't know how to do anything with it. 29 years and 6 months ago I actually went to university for the first time and my dorm had terminals, plus some of my homework actually required that I do things that were on the internet.

The first wifi connected laptops were also coming out at about that time. Nobody thought of phones as for more than voice yet (cell phones did exist, but the cost per minute was very high, and they only supported voice. They also didn't fit in a pocket).

Like I said the ideas were all in place close enough that someone from 30 years ago would recognize everything as the future they imagined - but the details are very different between what they imagined and what the reality turned out to be.

30 years ago, 1993... isn't that when Bill Clinton's inauguration was live streamed over the internet? Or was that '97? ...either way, the internet was definitely up and coming around then.

I don't know about Bill, but in '93 I was downloading porn (and genuinely useful information) in the university lab from mainly academic sites.

For reasons I forget we could not use ftp. The workaround was telnet in, cat meow.jpg | uuencode. Then copy the terminal output to a text editor, save and uudecode it open in xview. And wait for the jpeg to decode, line by line...

All this on glorious HP PA-RISC workstations.

The intervening years have been simplifying the access to information from NCSA mosaic to ChatGPT today. Amazing to watch it happen.

But I will never forget the magic of uuencode.

> But, almost anything to do with obtaining and using information would be utterly alien.

Would it? I doubt it. Computers answering 'arbitrary' queries were a trope of popular fiction for a lot longer than the past 30 years, and computers answering limited queries were already commonplace. In the lifespan of someone who was an adult in 1993, computers went from being something that occupied most of a room to something that could be found in many offices.

Also, the first cell phone was built in 1973.

For the information age to be truly alien, you have to go back to a time well before Turing machines. 1933? Maybe even further past that, to before wireless communication. 1873?