Things We Could Do More Than Half a Century Ago But Can No Longer Accomplish
Newer is not always better, newer is just newer.
- In 1969 we could land a man (or men) on the Moon and come back to Earth
- In 1976 (50 years ago) we could sit in a coffee shop and look at people's faces instead of a tiny screen of a skinnerbox
- In the 1970s chart hits typically involved a multi-instrument arrangement, not modulation in a studio where people can play no musical instruments or even read musical notes
- In 1966 or by 1969 chatbots could emulate a human being (convincingly enough to fool some humans) on a computer with a clock cycle of as little as "around 100 Kflop/s" (100,000 floating point operations per second; for comparison, "Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPU computing processors reach around 515 gigaFLOPS" - i.e. more than a million times faster... to tell kids to kill themselves while burning the planet for "training" and handling silly prompts).
- 50 years ago we could repair many things in our cars when or if they broke down; there's a lot written about touch screens vs knobs in cars (mechanical parts accessible to a bare hand). To be clear, physical knobs is a UI issue and also a matter of driving safety, but safety of drivers and passenger no longer matters because "[t]he illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion." (Source/origin)
- 50+ years ago people had extensive collections of music, e.g. platters. DRM + streamed/volatile music changed that (LP, CD vs DRM'd streaming).
- After WW2 there were not many news deserts. Consider local radio vs station consolidation and local press vs newspaper consolidation. Competing narratives can lead people towards what is true and defensible based on verifiable facts. The 4th estate was strong, unlike now.
- People's postboxes and mail (e.g. electronic mail equivalent) wasn't always full of so much noise and scams. There was no spam (spam is caused indirectly by Microsoft products). People could focused on what mattered. There were no robocalls (laws not enforced). It can moreover be noted that phone audio quality has plummeted. Now we have landlines that won't work if the Internet is down or there's a power outage.
- People's median wages have declined precipitously relative to the cost of living [1, 2, 3], resulting in various crises (including marital, mental, capacity to deliver decent upbringing of future generations). It should be noted that home ownership is related to that; overpopulation is rife, more so given that the carrying capacity of the planet plummets too [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] (blocked by gratuitous JavaScript). Salaries aside, employees were not forced to be available after hours and overtime work was paid extra (not just 'per time', the pro rata rate was higher for overtime, weekends, holidays, late or exceptionally early hours as well) and there were basically no illegal non-competition contracts whose sole goal is to keep salaries down (akin to price-fixing, downwards, for those who did all the actual work).
- "50 years ago was pre-Reagan," we are reminded, "and there was still public education in the US (long story about consequences)," [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] so people were literate and could read proper information, properly.
The above helps refute the "appeal to novelty", aka Argumentum Ad Novitatem, which is a well-known logical fallacy yet one of the main, perhaps the main, distractions used to promote software, "usually proprietary crap," as an associate puts it, and "(that includes faux open [software] like systemd)", hosted by Microsoft's proprietary platform and managed by Microsofters on Microsoft's payroll.
In closing, "newer is not better. Different is not better. Only better is better."
As noted earlier today, citing an older article, appliances were once designed to last and be repaired rather than engineered to be unrepairable while constructed to fall apart very shortly after the warranty expires. █
Image source: Big 7094 system; Photo: IBM