Gen Xers and older millennials really just want to go back in time to before the

[skluth]

Any Gen X or millennial can always take a job where they are isolated so they can experience it. I spent a year on Diego Garcia and another on Midway Island when I was in the Navy. You could get the news daily if you really wanted but most people just ignored what went on in the world and caught up when their deployment ended. It was far more pleasant to read a book on the beach or wander aimlessly around the island. (Neither is big enough that you'd get lost.) Isolated jobs are available both in the military and civilian worlds but nobody wants to do them for fear of missing out (which I found out is called FOMO only a couple years ago). I probably wouldn't have enjoyed Adak as much as Midway or Diego Garcia though.

Frankly, it would be tough to go back. Not just pre-internet, but pre-everyone having a credit card, pre-SF/fantasy becoming mainstream, pre-being able to instantly get in touch with your friends, pre-waiting until 7 PM when the rates changed for long distance calling, pre-cable TV ubiquitousness, etc.

[kalvado]

Any Gen X or millennial can always take a job where they are isolated so they can experience it. I spent a year on Diego Garcia and another on Midway Island when I was in the Navy. You could get the news daily if you really wanted but most people just ignored what went on in the world and caught up when their deployment ended. It was far more pleasant to read a book on the beach or wander aimlessly around the island. (Neither is big enough that you'd get lost.) Isolated jobs are available both in the military and civilian worlds but nobody wants to do them for fear of missing out (which I found out is called FOMO only a couple years ago). I probably wouldn't have enjoyed Adak as much as Midway or Diego Garcia though.

Frankly, it would be tough to go back. Not just pre-internet, but pre-everyone having a credit card, pre-SF/fantasy becoming mainstream, pre-being able to instantly get in touch with your friends, pre-waiting until 7 PM when the rates changed for long distance calling, pre-cable TV ubiquitousness, etc.

With Starlink, there are few places without network access.
St. Helena is getting a fiber and now has an airport. Amundsen -Scott base has satellite connectivity - not 24 hours I believe. I assume Even Midway would have Starlink options...

[formulanone]

There's a difference between "before constant connectivity" and "before the internet existed".  In my opinion, the right balance is in between–i.e., before smartphones.

That would mean The Matrix was right, and the best time to live was the late '90s. 

Yes, the late 90s was the sweet spot for the Internet and technology. 

At the risk of sounding too simplistic and brooding, the Internet of the 1990s accommodated and mutated itself to an existing society. With increased portability and overall connectivity in the last 15 years, society now tries to accommodate and mutate itself to the Internet.

The basis is that computing was originally a method to solve problems, but the entropic laws of diminishing returns argues that we will solve them at a slower rate than creating them.

[Henry]

Maybe Prince knew something about 1999 that we didn't ("2000, zero-zero, party over, it's out of time")...and BTW, I'd take my stacks of vintage records and CDs over the all-digital shit that we have right now.

If I asked some of my drivers something simple like, "I-88 is called what?", they would look at me funny and say just I-88. Thing is, if you are listening to the traffic reports on either WBBM or WGN, the 2 stations that will do traffic reports consistently, they don't refer to 88 as such. They call it the Reagan Tollway.

Wait a minute, aren't we forgetting WLS? Same format as the other two, so that would make it three.

[lepidopteran]

Could this forum even have existed in the 1990s? I understand that 2009 (the actual year this forum was created) was a late start, but the 1990s seems early.

The equivalent for this forum in the 1990s would have been the Usenet group, misc.transport.road.  There was really no moderation needed, since at the time, pretty much the only people with access to Usenet -- or for that matter, even knew what it was -- were college students and faculty, researchers, and employees of some larger companies.  True, the month of September could be problematic, as freshmen with newfound access to Usenet would post derisive "get a life" messages to mtr or other groups that had non-mainstream interests.  But for the most part, the unmoderated forum did fine.  Not sure exactly when it was that "Eternal September" began, but the Usenet groups became better known over time, opening the door for more trolls and other problematic posts (groups often referred to the amount of useful discussion as the "signal-to-noise ratio").  The real death knell, though, was when spam became more and more frequent and more sophisticated, reaching the point where even the moderated groups had trouble keeping spammers in check due to falsification of header information.  Eventually, open access to Usenet made it useless as a discussion medium.

Remember that misc.transport.road was a text-only group, often viewed on VT-100 series terminals that couldn't even display graphics, let alone video.  If you wanted to send a picture, it had to be sent as an e-mail attachment, or less often as text-based UUEncoded image, though non-binary groups like mtr frowned on these since the made the posts too large.  And of course, the Usenet groups could only be viewed from a network-connected terminal, so you obviously had to wait until you could get to one.  More tech-savvy folks could use a dial-up modem, but that ran kind of slow, unless you had one of the faster 14400 or 28800 bps modems.

[Rothman]

Could this forum even have existed in the 1990s? I understand that 2009 (the actual year this forum was created) was a late start, but the 1990s seems early.

The equivalent for this forum in the 1990s would have been the Usenet group, misc.transport.road.  There was really no moderation needed, since at the time, pretty much the only people with access to Usenet -- or for that matter, even knew what it was -- were college students and faculty, researchers, and employees of some larger companies.  True, the month of September could be problematic, as freshmen with newfound access to Usenet would post derisive "get a life" messages to mtr or other groups that had non-mainstream interests.  But for the most part, the unmoderated forum did fine.  Not sure exactly when it was that "Eternal September" began, but the Usenet groups became better known over time, opening the door for more trolls and other problematic posts (groups often referred to the amount of useful discussion as the "signal-to-noise ratio").  The real death knell, though, was when spam became more and more frequent and more sophisticated, reaching the point where even the moderated groups had trouble keeping spammers in check due to falsification of header information.  Eventually, open access to Usenet made it useless as a discussion medium.

Remember that misc.transport.road was a text-only group, often viewed on VT-100 series terminals that couldn't even display graphics, let alone video.  If you wanted to send a picture, it had to be sent as an e-mail attachment, or less often as text-based UUEncoded image, though non-binary groups like mtr frowned on these since the made the posts too large.  And of course, the Usenet groups could only be viewed from a network-connected terminal, so you obviously had to wait until you could get to one.  More tech-savvy folks could use a dial-up modem, but that ran kind of slow, unless you had one of the faster 14400 or 28800 bps modems.

I remember friends getting involved in all those fun acronyms back then that started with Ms -- text-based multi-user games and whatnot by 1990 or so.  Never knew anyone or even labs with Digital VT-100s (ETA: Ah, maybe one lab, come to think of it), since IBM PCs became "ubiquitous" pretty quickly.  Heck, my family had access to the Internet (text-based Yahoo!, even) in the early 1990s (1994, thereabouts) thanks to my mother being an early adopter.

That said, I didn't get on m.t.r. until my days in college -- the much later 1990s -- and only dabbled with it then.  Spam hadn't hit it yet.

[kalvado]

Could this forum even have existed in the 1990s? I understand that 2009 (the actual year this forum was created) was a late start, but the 1990s seems early.

The equivalent for this forum in the 1990s would have been the Usenet group, misc.transport.road.  There was really no moderation needed, since at the time, pretty much the only people with access to Usenet -- or for that matter, even knew what it was -- were college students and faculty, researchers, and employees of some larger companies.  True, the month of September could be problematic, as freshmen with newfound access to Usenet would post derisive "get a life" messages to mtr or other groups that had non-mainstream interests.  But for the most part, the unmoderated forum did fine.  Not sure exactly when it was that "Eternal September" began, but the Usenet groups became better known over time, opening the door for more trolls and other problematic posts (groups often referred to the amount of useful discussion as the "signal-to-noise ratio").  The real death knell, though, was when spam became more and more frequent and more sophisticated, reaching the point where even the moderated groups had trouble keeping spammers in check due to falsification of header information.  Eventually, open access to Usenet made it useless as a discussion medium.

Remember that misc.transport.road was a text-only group, often viewed on VT-100 series terminals that couldn't even display graphics, let alone video.  If you wanted to send a picture, it had to be sent as an e-mail attachment, or less often as text-based UUEncoded image, though non-binary groups like mtr frowned on these since the made the posts too large.  And of course, the Usenet groups could only be viewed from a network-connected terminal, so you obviously had to wait until you could get to one.  More tech-savvy folks could use a dial-up modem, but that ran kind of slow, unless you had one of the faster 14400 or 28800 bps modems.

I remember friends getting involved in all those fun acronyms back then that started with Ms -- text-based multi-user games and whatnot by 1990 or so.  Never knew anyone or even labs with Digital VT-100s, since IBM PCs became "ubiquitous" pretty quickly.  Heck, my family had access to the Internet (text-based Yahoo!, even) in the early 1990s (1994, thereabouts) thanks to my mother being an early adopter.

That said, I didn't get on m.t.r. until my days in college -- the much later 1990s -- and only dabbled with it then.  Spam hadn't hit it yet.

For me it was going from non-networked PCs of late 80x - early 90s to networked PCs. I actually worked with true VT100s in the early to mid 00s. They were pretty much single-task machines at that point, likely leftovers under "it ain't broken... " approach. i did a few fun things with Lynx on them, but I bet I was an extreme minority among users.

[Max Rockatansky]

Doesn't every generation develop nostalgia for the era they grew go in?  When I was a kid there was a ton of 1950s and 1960s nostalgia.  Nowadays it's 1980s and 1990s nostalgia being peddled. 

[kalvado]

Doesn't every generation develop nostalgia for the era they grew go in?  When I was a kid there was a ton of 1950s and 1960s nostalgia.  Nowadays it's 1980s and 1990s nostalgia being peddled.

Absolutely. I bet most of us, if taken to those ol'good days by the time machine, would really suffer from simplest everyday things suddenly missing.
With that,  enough realism here. Please shut up and let us old farts enjoy those sweet memories.

[GaryV]

As a Boomer, I was very glad that ATMs were invented just about the time I was in college,

I'm a mid-range Boomer, and when I was in college I remember taking my bike in the drive-thru lane because it was open more than the lobby.

[hotdogPi]

Doesn't every generation develop nostalgia for the era they grew go in?  When I was a kid there was a ton of 1950s and 1960s nostalgia.  Nowadays it's 1980s and 1990s nostalgia being peddled.

I want to move forward myself. That said, technology from 2010 to 2020 changed much less than any previous decade in our lifetimes. However, other things unrelated to technology have improved from 2010 to now (e.g. acceptance of transgender people).

[ilpt4u]

As an older Millennial/38, I have a feeling that a bar concept requiring patrons to not have phones with them is interesting. Have a phone check-in service upon arrival for those that have them in possession upon entry and return them upon departure, of course

I wasn't "bar age"  very long before smartphones took over. But I can tell you they were more fun, but that may have just been me being in my early 20s

Smartphones change the social dynamic at bars, clubs, etc, and typically not for the better

And yes, in my fantasy "no smartphones"  bar, there will be a landline behind the bar and a working payphone near the door!

[kalvado]

Doesn't every generation develop nostalgia for the era they grew go in?  When I was a kid there was a ton of 1950s and 1960s nostalgia.  Nowadays it's 1980s and 1990s nostalgia being peddled.

I want to move forward myself. That said, technology from 2010 to 2020 changed much less than any previous decade in our lifetimes. However, other things unrelated to technology have improved from 2010 to now (e.g. acceptance of transgender people).

There is a period of rapid growth followed by an era of diminishing returns for most technologies. You use "technology" as a synonym to electronics,  but thinking about cars - there is only that much change in past 20 years as well (if you are not talking hybrid or electric). Cancer treatment, on the other hand, is changing quite a bit (although all of us hope not to learn that firsthand).

[1995hoo]

Maybe Prince knew something about 1999 that we didn't ("2000, zero-zero, party over, it's out of time")...and BTW, I'd take my stacks of vintage records and CDs over the all-digital shit that we have right now.

....

The boldfaced is a popular misconception. CDs are digital–hence the ubiquitous logo.

[Rothman]

Could this forum even have existed in the 1990s? I understand that 2009 (the actual year this forum was created) was a late start, but the 1990s seems early.

The equivalent for this forum in the 1990s would have been the Usenet group, misc.transport.road.  There was really no moderation needed, since at the time, pretty much the only people with access to Usenet -- or for that matter, even knew what it was -- were college students and faculty, researchers, and employees of some larger companies.  True, the month of September could be problematic, as freshmen with newfound access to Usenet would post derisive "get a life" messages to mtr or other groups that had non-mainstream interests.  But for the most part, the unmoderated forum did fine.  Not sure exactly when it was that "Eternal September" began, but the Usenet groups became better known over time, opening the door for more trolls and other problematic posts (groups often referred to the amount of useful discussion as the "signal-to-noise ratio").  The real death knell, though, was when spam became more and more frequent and more sophisticated, reaching the point where even the moderated groups had trouble keeping spammers in check due to falsification of header information.  Eventually, open access to Usenet made it useless as a discussion medium.

Remember that misc.transport.road was a text-only group, often viewed on VT-100 series terminals that couldn't even display graphics, let alone video.  If you wanted to send a picture, it had to be sent as an e-mail attachment, or less often as text-based UUEncoded image, though non-binary groups like mtr frowned on these since the made the posts too large.  And of course, the Usenet groups could only be viewed from a network-connected terminal, so you obviously had to wait until you could get to one.  More tech-savvy folks could use a dial-up modem, but that ran kind of slow, unless you had one of the faster 14400 or 28800 bps modems.

I remember friends getting involved in all those fun acronyms back then that started with Ms -- text-based multi-user games and whatnot by 1990 or so.  Never knew anyone or even labs with Digital VT-100s, since IBM PCs became "ubiquitous" pretty quickly.  Heck, my family had access to the Internet (text-based Yahoo!, even) in the early 1990s (1994, thereabouts) thanks to my mother being an early adopter.

That said, I didn't get on m.t.r. until my days in college -- the much later 1990s -- and only dabbled with it then.  Spam hadn't hit it yet.

For me it was going from non-networked PCs of late 80x - early 90s to networked PCs. I actually worked with true VT100s in the early to mid 00s. They were pretty much single-task machines at that point, likely leftovers under "it ain't broken... " approach. i did a few fun things with Lynx on them, but I bet I was an extreme minority among users.

Heh.  I'm sure my workplace still has a Wang word processor around here somewhere...

[Rothman]

Doesn't every generation develop nostalgia for the era they grew go in?  When I was a kid there was a ton of 1950s and 1960s nostalgia.  Nowadays it's 1980s and 1990s nostalgia being peddled.

Yes, nostalgia is peddled.

For me, though, I have no interest in reliving my childhood.  Sure, knowing then what I do now I would make different decisions and spend my time differently, but that fantasy is not enough to overcome the fact that I've "made it" at this point.

People tend to forget how much time we wasted in front of the TV.  I think there's a certain amnesia setting in on what life was like before information was readily available through the Internet...

[formulanone]

Maybe Prince knew something about 1999 that we didn't ("2000, zero-zero, party over, it's out of time")...and BTW, I'd take my stacks of vintage records and CDs over the all-digital shit that we have right now.

....

The boldfaced is a popular misconception. CDs are digital–hence the ubiquitous logo.

Many CDs were processed from analog information; or the master was analog and then still transferred to another analog format to digital. See SPARS codes for more information. All-digital recording was out there during the heights of CD's popularity but far from ubiquitous.

Worrying about that stuff has never been my forte. Is the clarity and overall body noticeably better than FM radio? Good enough.

[kphoger]

Doesn't every generation develop nostalgia for the era they grew go in?  When I was a kid there was a ton of 1950s and 1960s nostalgia.  Nowadays it's 1980s and 1990s nostalgia being peddled. 

Yes and no.

Yes, in that every generation considers the period they grew up in as "the good old days", and they lament how certain things have changed since then.

No, in that every generation also considers themselves to have overcome the barbaric ways of their parents' generation.  You can even see some of that in this very thread (corporal punishment).

[1995hoo]

Maybe Prince knew something about 1999 that we didn't ("2000, zero-zero, party over, it's out of time")...and BTW, I'd take my stacks of vintage records and CDs over the all-digital shit that we have right now.

....

The boldfaced is a popular misconception. CDs are digital–hence the ubiquitous logo.

Many CDs were processed from analog information; or the master was analog and then still transferred to another analog format to digital. See SPARS codes for more information. All-digital recording was out there during the heights of CD's popularity but far from ubiquitous.

Worrying about that stuff has never been my forte. Is the clarity and overall body noticeably better than FM radio? Good enough.

Yes, I remember the SPARS codes well. They Might Be Giants' album Flood had the particularly odd "DAD" code. There was this perception in the 1980s that "digital" was good and that a "DDD" code meant it must be really good, in response to which I remember a couple of the audio magazines trying to emphasize to people that bad music is still bad music regardless of how it's recorded.

[mgk920]

As an older Millennial/38, I have a feeling that a bar concept requiring patrons to not have phones with them is interesting. Have a phone check-in service upon arrival for those that have them in possession upon entry and return them upon departure, of course

I wasn't "bar age"  very long before smartphones took over. But I can tell you they were more fun, but that may have just been me being in my early 20s

Smartphones change the social dynamic at bars, clubs, etc, and typically not for the better

And yes, in my fantasy "no smartphones"  bar, there will be a landline behind the bar and a working payphone near the door!

I recall an article about a bar (I believe that it was in San Francisco, CA) a decade or so ago that had a sign on its backbar that said something like "NO cell phones allowed, TALK to each other!".

Mike

[hotdogPi]

I created a Python program on my phone that calculates how much each person has to spend at a restaurant, rounded to the nearest dollar, after including tax and tip. It can handle discounts and shared items.

Example output:

I entered the four people as 18, 20, 17, and 31. Tax is assumed at 7% for Massachusetts, but if it's higher, I can change the final total and it will increase it proportionally. (If it's lower, I have to change one number in the program; otherwise, it tries to tip on the difference.)

Code Select Expand


15.1% tip
hotdogPi 22
kphoger 24
1995hoo 21
FritzOwl 38

17,4% tip
hotdogPi 22
kphoger 25
1995hoo 21
FritzOwl 39

19.7% tip
hotdogPi 23
kphoger 25
1995hoo 22
FritzOwl 39

22.1% tip
hotdogPi 23
kphoger 26
1995hoo 22
FritzOwl 40

24.4% tip
hotdogPi 24
kphoger 26
1995hoo 22
FritzOwl 41

Would this not be allowed?

[hobsini2]

Maybe Prince knew something about 1999 that we didn't ("2000, zero-zero, party over, it's out of time")...and BTW, I'd take my stacks of vintage records and CDs over the all-digital shit that we have right now.

If I asked some of my drivers something simple like, "I-88 is called what?", they would look at me funny and say just I-88. Thing is, if you are listening to the traffic reports on either WBBM or WGN, the 2 stations that will do traffic reports consistently, they don't refer to 88 as such. They call it the Reagan Tollway.

Wait a minute, aren't we forgetting WLS? Same format as the other two, so that would make it three.

WLS is still there too but I went away from them in the early 2000s when they went more for the right wing political gibberish show like Rush Limbaugh.

[abefroman329]

No, in that every generation also considers themselves to have overcome the barbaric ways of their parents' generation.  You can even see some of that in this very thread (corporal punishment).

Not the Boomers - they can't shut up about how great it was that their parents beat them.

[kalvado]

Maybe Prince knew something about 1999 that we didn't ("2000, zero-zero, party over, it's out of time")...and BTW, I'd take my stacks of vintage records and CDs over the all-digital shit that we have right now.

....

The boldfaced is a popular misconception. CDs are digital–hence the ubiquitous logo.

Many CDs were processed from analog information; or the master was analog and then still transferred to another analog format to digital. See SPARS codes for more information. All-digital recording was out there during the heights of CD's popularity but far from ubiquitous.

Worrying about that stuff has never been my forte. Is the clarity and overall body noticeably better than FM radio? Good enough.

Yes, I remember the SPARS codes well. They Might Be Giants' album Flood had the particularly odd "DAD" code. There was this perception in the 1980s that "digital" was good and that a "DDD" code meant it must be really good, in response to which I remember a couple of the audio magazines trying to emphasize to people that bad music is still bad music regardless of how it's recorded.

It's not that someone can go back in time and record The Beatles in digital. But assuming analog is better by its nature... Oh well, overcompression scars  remain forever. 

[formulanone]

No, in that every generation also considers themselves to have overcome the barbaric ways of their parents' generation.  You can even see some of that in this very thread (corporal punishment).

Not the Boomers - they can't shut up about how great it was that their parents beat them.

Classic Swedish City Syndrome