We walk around with a little rectangle in our pocket that gives us access to the sum total of human knowledge, but we mostly use it for looking at funny captioned pictures, the same pictures over and over just with different captions.
It’s called a phone but no one ever uses it as one.
Also, the “video telephone” that everyone always so desperately awaited from the future? Yeah, we have that; no, nobody uses it, because we can’t be bothered to dress up for a phone call.
I also thought no one used facetime until I worked retail recently… The amount of people I saw come in on a facetime calls where they both just had their cameras pointed at the ceiling was bizarre and boggling.
Tell that to the tonnes of people that facetious in public but neither them nor the person they are calling are actually in frame
That pretty much sums it up.
The phone never leaves my side, but I dread getting an actual phone call.
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Statistically? Ok, you have to learn Mandarin and there are these things called time zones but you only get one but shouldhave at least 3.
Like 1 out of 4 people at the time were from China.
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Mandarin probably wouldn’t help you much, since only about 40% of people in China even understood it, the 7 decades since then have changed that by quite a lot.
Probably how we went to the moon and then later successfully sent a rover to Mars to study and take pictures. It’s something I can’t really explain on a technical level but it happened
In the fifties they were aspiring to that already, engineering seemed unstoppable. May not understand how we could pull it off and then our own kids don’t believe us, though.
Frankly, the hard part would be explaining why got there and then just sort of stopped. They’d be disappointed we don’t have a permanent lunar colony and manned missions to Mars yet!
Why is every comment just about the US? Skin color, school shooter drills, actor president, support for Russians by US politicians…
Lemmy try something more international:
France and Germany have founded the European Union.
First Japan, and now China (and Taiwan) and Korea are the technological superpowers.
Car industry in the UK basically doesn’t exist anymore.
Cuba is still communist af and yet looks like a chill place.
Czechoslovakia has split. (Funny how even 30 years after the fact some people don’t believe it, so I can imagine it being inconceivable before.)
There are 8 billon people.
We still don’t have nuclear-powered flying cars.
We still don’t have nuclear-powered flying cars.
Not because we couldn’t make them, but because the idea is really stupid in the first place.
Most difficult imho would be to explain why we haven’t advanced any further. If the person is 50 in 1950 he started with horse carriages and saw development to intercontinental bombers, rockets etc. The landing on moon would astonish him, advances in medical sciences and computing too but he probably would ask: “And what are you using that neat little gadgets for?”
I’m using this little gadget for all my banking needs, a significant amount of my shopping, to stay instantly connected with friends/family and strangers with common interests all around the world, to almost instantly find information on almost any topic, to watch any of a hundred thousand movies or TV shows instantly on demand, and it’s also a telephone.
I think you’re severely underestimating how our daily lives have advanced. We’ve advanced so far that we don’t even regularly use the thing that would blow the mind of someone from the 50s, like calling someone on the phone. Calling someone with your phone would already blow their mind, because the first handheld phone didn’t happen until the 70s. But we don’t really call people anymore. We send instant messages or if we want “a call” we do video calls, which is guaranteed to blow their mind because a) most people in the 50s had a black and white television, so being able to see colored picture in real time is just next level shit, b) you can see someone else in real time on the other side of the planet and c) it’s going to feel like you’re there because the image quality from the 50s is like a cave painting compared to what we have today. And that’s just calling someone. Imagine what else would blow their mind, modern cars probably.
Maybe I’m underestimating individual benefits of digitalisation. But I tried to remember talks with my grandfather. He was born in 1912 and lived to the age of 87. He could remember the coronation of the last austrian-hungarian emperor Karl. People then were not as individualistic as we are today. Technological, social or cultural advancements were seen more on a collective scale. The mere possibility of calling or texting someone didn’t impress or astonish him much. Especially in the 50’s and 60’s promises of a bright and shiny future were made. Just think of the exploration of space or the deep sea with proposed bases on moon, mars or the seabed. It wasn’t called the atomic age for nothing. What I experienced was that those now long dead relatives appreciated the individual improvements of their lives but they felt a certain slow down in regard to an overall progress of society.
Also, remember that the previous generations versions of a “phone call” was the mail, or sailing across on ocean, or being carried by a horse, or even walking for years or decades to get to the person you want to make contact with.
Porn mostly
This I disagree with. Porn has always been widely available throughout human history, it just wasn’t as widely openly available and distributed as today. Case in point, my grandfather died in Vietnam back in '63, all of his barracks stuff went into a box that was sent home. My grandmother never opened it, to the extent it was still sealed with navy tape from the 60’s. When she died, my father didn’t even know it was in the attic.
When he passed back in '15, I was cleaning out this attic and found the box. Ontop some actually really cool shit- you guessed it, I found a literal shitload of vintage porn. Grampy was dropping loads left and right with these bitches. A LOT of hair back in the day I might add.
Florida Man
A lack of ‘whites only’ signs.
What a dumb answer that completely ignores that was a topic of debate at that time. The concept and topic was WELL known. 17 upvotes 🤦♂️.
Brown v. Board of Education was filed in 1951, and decided in 1954. The desegregation movement was well underway. Some folks from that era might not be happy that segregation went away, but I don’t imagine too many would be surprised.
Mobile phones and the internet.
mobile phones are easy, in 50s some of people would be familiar with (ww2 era) military radios that could transmit voice, just explain that you don’t need to carry entire backpack of radio equipment, everything fits in this small device
Mobile phones as phones—yes, maybe that’s easy. But that we don’t actually use them to TALK to people would be weird.
explain that as portable fax machines. google search or any social media would be a complete mystery however
and also we managed to reduce power use few thousand times, and we use frequencies some 1000x higher than these old radios, up to 15000x if we insist
There was also Dick Tracy and his 2-way wrist radio.
It […] used an aerial wire that ran up the inside of the wearer’s sleeve
oof ouchie
have you ever seen a RF burn?
I don’t think that was a feature of Dick Tracy’s wrist radio.
range 1500km, this is completely doable on standard amateur radio equipment, you just need few hundred watts of power
this is what happens when you’re too close to an antenna handling power like that (lifted from reddit):
A few years ago, when I lived in-town, I had an issue. I came home from work one evening and immediately began to tune up the radio so that I might work some grey line DX when I noticed that my tuner was having difficulty tuning within the 20m DX window. I reset and again, it failed. I looked out the window and noticed, to my horror, that some moron had decided to hang laundry from my 80m dipole.
Quickly, I realized that the culprit must have been my neighbor who had a habit of using or taking my property without asking. I gathered his laundry in a basket, walked next door, dropped it on the doorstep and went back home. Just to be sure that he got the memo, I dropped a handwritten note atop the laundry which basically read “That’s not a clothesline, it’s an antenna. This antenna will have 100-200W (TS-480HX) on it, so don’t touch it! Contact with the antenna will result in terribly painful RF burns- no kidding. Don’t touch the antenna. Don’t hang things from the antenna. Don’t come on my property.”
Not wanting to get sued by some payday-seeking jerk (many of those in this area), I tied lengths of Caution tape to the legs of the dipole to act as a visual warning.
Guess what? Halfway through a conversation with a delightful ham in Brazil, I heard intense screaming from the backyard. I ran to the back window and found my selfish, moronic neighbor holding his forearm where it had contacted the dipole as he tried to rehang his wet laundry.
He threatened to call the police, so I just called the sheriff, who happened to be the local ARC president. Threatened with a Criminal Trespassing charge, the neighbor let it go and never returned to my yard. On the plus side, all of my missing tools were mysteriously returned within a few days, too.
To wrap up this ramble, I felt bad about him being injured, so the sheriff and I paid him a visit to check on his progress over the subsequent couple of months. It wasn’t quite as bad as he had asserted and he did recover. I have since moved to avoid yahoos such as him.
Ok… what does that have to do with a fictional wrist radio in a comic strip?
I believe @skillissuer is pointing out that in order to broadcast the 1500km that Dick Tracy’s watch was said to have would require a ton of power. That power would make it dangerous to have on your wrist. That’s just what I pieced together through context though.
If it was the early 1950’s, then: Black people and white people can use the same facilities. There aren’t “black bathrooms” and “white bathrooms.” There aren’t separate water fountains depending on the color of your skin.
Segregation was still around a mere 70 years ago.
Were Americans in the 50’s as surprised when they travelled abroad?
You have to goto the store to buy milk instead of having it delivered fresh
My parents still do. The person who delivers it also delivers butter and eggs.
I’m not sure where the butter and eggs and stuff come from but he owns the dairy the milk comes from and he’s part of a cooperative that pay for the equipment. According to him it’s just not worth selling to the big stores as he makes more money with fewer customers doing it himself.
nature and resources are not infinite. you are responsible for your actions no matter how terribly hard your childhood was. you cant buy a house for a years loan. we are all fucked.
Why the Nazis are back, and in America of all places
They are back In germany too. Although I wouldn’t call it they are back, but they are open about it again
Seeing how much overlap they have with the KKK, I don’t think it’d be that surprising
The internet
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