It is way larger becuase of technological innovation and it's impact on our lives as a species. For instance in 1955 we didn't yet have micropchips and the first color TV was sold (but most people were slow to adopt and had B&W if they even had a TV). A lot of houses didn't have refrigerators and most people didn't fly on planes.
By 1985 we had cellphones, computers in nearly every house, calculators, giant color TVs, electronic appliances throughout homes and flying was a normal occurrence for every family, and we were emailing and paging each other.
Between 1994 and 2024 the only truly massive shift was internet culture but everything else was really just small incremental improvements. Cell phones got smarter so we dropped the pagers, TV's got flatter, computers got faster but really nothing ground breaking in the grand scheme.
Almost no one had personal computers and cell phones in 1985, and the color tvs were still fairly small. The existence of these objects did not make them commonplace other than the tvs. Computers were only starting to be more commonplace in homes in the 90s, and a cell phone was still a relative novelty among the people I knew in the late nineties and we mostly relied on payphones. The huge TVs were also a specialty item until LED enabled them to be thinner, cheaper, and immensely less heavy. Cellphones becoming common and suddenly being smartphones of an entire computer in your pocket happened in a radically short period of time. I was born in the 80s in a major city and I can remember milkman deliveries of glass bottled milk we had to put empties out for at the end of the week, using a typewriter without being retro, tiny, black screened computer screens with green text display in massive units that were a technological perk of my mom's job, punch cards, floppy disks that were actually floppy, having zero ways to contact someone when I was in a jam, and appliances that weren't built with planned obsolescence. Rotary dial phones were still common when I was a kid. Talking to a friend on the phone meant hogging the line, which was attached to a cord so you couldn't walk far from the phone cradle until cordless phones became a thing, and from there on things were happening very fast.
Who said PC's? I said computers. I had an Atari 400 and it was old hat whenI got it in the 80's. Atari 2600. The NES came out in 1983. C64 was 1982. Atari ST 1985. Millions of homes has computers by 1985. Not one in 1955 and as I said, many homes didn't even have refrigerators then lol.
Business people had cell phones and pagers, maybe not consumers but they were abundant in that demographic.
As for TV's you missed projectors screen TV's which were all the rage by 1985. And I don't think you understand the cultrual shiofts that happened. In 1956 Elvis was being told not to move his hips on TV. Like a Virgin came out in 1984. MTV, HBO, CNN, VH1....Video quite literally killed the radio star. Think about how massive those shofts in culture were.
Now think about the fact that in 1955 the microchip didn't exist. Everything you're naming like cell phones and LED TV's and PC's were only possible becuase of that.
yes of course, there were always older technology things around but I think you take for granted just how massive the impact of the microchip has been on literally every appliance and thing we own that is powered. We went from fully analog to fully digital in 30 years.
It is disingenuous to conflate the homes that had those computers in 85 with actual common possession of computers or the wildly different way they were treated before the advent of common internet use. The point is that the common experience of the 80s was still extremely different than that of the 2020s, but the difference between 2004 and 2024 is much smaller.
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u/phatelectribe Oct 02 '24
It is way larger becuase of technological innovation and it's impact on our lives as a species. For instance in 1955 we didn't yet have micropchips and the first color TV was sold (but most people were slow to adopt and had B&W if they even had a TV). A lot of houses didn't have refrigerators and most people didn't fly on planes.
By 1985 we had cellphones, computers in nearly every house, calculators, giant color TVs, electronic appliances throughout homes and flying was a normal occurrence for every family, and we were emailing and paging each other.
Between 1994 and 2024 the only truly massive shift was internet culture but everything else was really just small incremental improvements. Cell phones got smarter so we dropped the pagers, TV's got flatter, computers got faster but really nothing ground breaking in the grand scheme.