When was the last time that using a computer felt futuristic for you?

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When I got my 486 in the early 90's, I would hole up and play the early CD-Rom games, many of which seemed to be set in other worlds that happened to have no other people (does anyone remember the journeyman project?). Then I would go on the net to hyperreal, which used to have cool state-of-the-art rendered graphics, and listen to techno.
since then, there has been the rise of the corporate website, AIM, and other things that make the computer much more of the times.

when was the last time you felt "nostalgia for the future"?

― Aaron Grossman (aajjgg), Thursday, 5 September 2002 02:16 (twenty-three years ago)

Man, where are the personal jetpacks already?

― lyra (lyra), Thursday, 5 September 2002 02:19 (twenty-three years ago)

and robots, too! Seriuosly, nobody seems to even give a shit abous space travel anymore, except Lance Bass!

― Aaron Grossman (aajjgg), Thursday, 5 September 2002 02:23 (twenty-three years ago)

i don't get the new library catalogue system, that makes me feel old, simultaneously futuristic.

― di smith (lucylurex), Thursday, 5 September 2002 02:24 (twenty-three years ago)

gor more typos on my part. except tonight it is beer instead of ouzo.

being behind can make the current seem like the future... I can't wait to get my own cellphone (seriously)!

― Aaron Grossman (aajjgg), Thursday, 5 September 2002 02:26 (twenty-three years ago)

Newer than the Dewey Decimal system?? I'm trying to remember the last time I went to a library, I think they still used Dewey.

― lyra (lyra), Thursday, 5 September 2002 02:28 (twenty-three years ago)

oh its not the catalogue system itself, (its not dewey, btw) but the way you access it on the computers. its mental.

― di smith (lucylurex), Thursday, 5 September 2002 02:43 (twenty-three years ago)

are you talking about the stupid new yellow/blue catalogue search engine? the old text-based one is much better (ie more efficient).

the new apple iMac/whatevers look fairly futuristic to me, but I've never used one.

― Ess Kay (esskay), Thursday, 5 September 2002 02:54 (twenty-three years ago)

aaron, i'm intrigued that you drink ouzo. how do you prefer it and how much would you drink in a sitting? (you don't have to answer that) :-)

― ron (ron), Thursday, 5 September 2002 03:07 (twenty-three years ago)

yes thats the ones, esskay. i just take one look at them and run away.

― di smith (lucylurex), Thursday, 5 September 2002 03:07 (twenty-three years ago)

Mosaic, definitely.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 5 September 2002 04:44 (twenty-three years ago)

A few days ago, when I was explaining www.allmusic.com to a friend. The usual explanation is "like IMDB for music", but she hadn't seen IMDB either. So I said that when they were going on about putting an entire encyclopedia on a CD back in the day, this was like that only updated regularly.

Also the time that I read about h2g2.com, which is finally implementing the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy now that the technology has finally caught up to that described in the books.

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Thursday, 5 September 2002 10:53 (twenty-three years ago)

Watching live Japanese high school baseball on a laptop in bed.

― Fritz Wollner (Fritz), Thursday, 5 September 2002 11:13 (twenty-three years ago)

Every time I use ping or tracert.

― toraneko (toraneko), Thursday, 5 September 2002 12:12 (twenty-three years ago)

The spring of 1989, editing 3D bathymetric plots on a Silicon Graphics Iris 2400 workstation. Probably no fancier than any other CAD/CAM system of the time, but I felt like I was working for NASA. Everything since then has been hopelessly mundane.

― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Thursday, 5 September 2002 12:52 (twenty-three years ago)

(I don't drink ouzo often. I have only had it straight. A couple of nights ago, I had two glasses. I could have handled a little more, but they were $5 apiece and until I get a new job I can't spend too much money. After drinking lots of Limoncello on my trip to Italy last year, and I am in the process of exploring liquers. My parents let me try ouzo when I was 14 because we were planning on travelling to Greece. We ended up going to France instead.)

― Aaron Grossman (aajjgg), Thursday, 5 September 2002 13:30 (twenty-three years ago)

In the '80s when we got the PC Junior for X-mas.

― Mary (Mary), Thursday, 5 September 2002 16:43 (twenty-three years ago)

my computer, my new hot shit sexy pure as fuck mac makes me feel like im interfacing with HAL.

― anthony easton (anthony), Thursday, 5 September 2002 16:50 (twenty-three years ago)

i still get a delighted gurgle when i use kartoo

― bob zemko (bob), Thursday, 5 September 2002 17:03 (twenty-three years ago)

Finally getting Soulseek to work on a Mac and hearing the first few notes of [I forget] to confirm it was actually working (even though I'd used Napster and Audiogalaxy and Limewire and OpenNap loads previously).

Using "That's Write!" circa 1992 on an Atari ST to quickly and effortlessly change text to between body and title and subheading styles with the click of a mouse.

― Graham (graham), Thursday, 5 September 2002 18:34 (twenty-three years ago)

"nostalgia of the future" is that a Proust thing?

When napster first came out. When Rise Of the Triad the video game first came out. Using the modem on our Commadore 64.

― A Nairn (moretap), Saturday, 7 September 2002 17:28 (twenty-three years ago)

Yes Commie 64!
As for Proust, I haven't read any yet, unfortunately.

― Aaron Grossman (aajjgg), Saturday, 7 September 2002 17:35 (twenty-three years ago)

My father bringing home his new 486DX-33 with SVGA graphics and me cooing into the Win3.1 wallpaper (image of a shuttle in space with Earth in the background) and thinking, "Wow, this is, like, better resolution than TV!" and being impressed by all the clicky icons for about five minutes before I actually wanted to do something useful and ran away back to DOS. And I got to run Fractint and POV-Ray, which also made me feel like Pixar chief engineer while I made yet another marbly sphere sit on top of yet another checkered plane and left it overnight to render at top res (and then usually came back the next day to find that I'd screwed up the camera settings or forgotten to put in a lightsource or some CSG had randomly gone weird and that it'd spent 12 hours drawing a blank screen).

A few years later but to a lesser extent, a new P90 (the last home-use PC in the country to be ordered with a built in 5.25" drive?) with a CD-ROM drive, running the only CDROM I had around, which was something I got free with a magazine when they ran out of the disk version. Like, wow, it's huge! I get lots of crap shareware! And I can run every file on the CD through MegaRipper looking for MODs! Oh my God, this so 0wnz those old 1.44 megabyte freebies.

(By the time we got a modem I was ver verr pleased and instantly addicted but I was a cynical ingrate and remembered the adverts for BBS-alikes in ZX Spectrum mags from 1984 that we had cluttering up the house and just thought, "Well, bah, we could have done this YEARS ago, and my mate C has had a modem for fifteen *months*, it's sooooo unfaiiiiiiiir...")

(Now I just grump bitterly about how six years after first getting online everything out there is so much bigger and more bandwidth-hogging and my modem is barely any faster. Sigh. And then I look at the Dutch Junglist HQ on web.archive.org and wallow in nostalgia.)

― tales of a geek childhood (reb), Saturday, 7 September 2002 20:23 (twenty-three years ago)

I am of course too busy downloading crap 400k .MOD files from mirrors of websites that mysteriously disappeared in 1997 that I have no time for such fripperies as editing or not coming across like a great boring dribbly loon. I can always find time to apologise, though, so, er, sorry.

― Rebecca (reb), Saturday, 7 September 2002 20:25 (twenty-three years ago)

Using a computer has never felt phuturistick to me b/c I have always bought at thee trailing edge, like. I got my ZX spectrum when everyone else was going nuts for amigaz & atari st. Then I got a Yamaha 32k memory MSX computer with built in FM synthesizer chip that NO ONE SANE actually paid money for. I got my 1040st abt 2 years after everone else, and abt 18 months before everyone abandoned it in favour ov max & pee-ceez. I am on my fourth Atari for musick, and I use this old p133 M$ bawx for interwebbing. I might drop a p200 into it(the fastest proc it can take) @ some point if I can find one. Certainly I would like a dual-proc G4 w/Aardvark sound card & UAD-1 dsp card, cubase SX, Altiverb etc etc, but I can't afford it.

― N0RM4N PH4Y, Saturday, 7 September 2002 21:22 (twenty-three years ago)

1) Installing Mosaic, WINSOCK and other crap so Win3.1 could use a 32 bit program on my computer trying to use a PPP connection, it didnt work.
2) 7th Guest was super fucking cool, a cdrom GAME?!?!?!.
3) River Raid and Kings Quest for the PC Junoir, damm i used to love bring your kid to work days at IBM.
4) Learning how computers work on an logical level and being amazed that they work at all let alone 5 plus or so years like my old IBM.

― Mr Noodles (Mr Noodles), Sunday, 8 September 2002 00:13 (twenty-three years ago)

I have an older brother who got bored for me by tying up the computer for days rendering tiny tiny pictures of spheres for me, so I can empathise Rebecca, but only by proxy.

― Graham (graham), Sunday, 8 September 2002 00:21 (twenty-three years ago)

Somewhere around 1983: King's Quest, on the PCjr, with 640K of RAM. A game with multiple screens without "lives" or "levels"? With graphics so complicated you had to sit there and watch them being drawn on the screen? And you could "talk" to it by typing "pick up rock" and "throw rock at giant"? Now that was high-tech.

It's all been variations on the familiar since :)

― Tep (ktepi), Sunday, 8 September 2002 00:50 (twenty-three years ago)

downloading that new Missy song the other day

― M Matos (M Matos), Sunday, 8 September 2002 01:46 (twenty-three years ago)

one year passes...

so.. I had to do a deep clean of the home computer yesterday and today, which meant FDISK, FORMAT C:, etc., and I think I miss DOS. For some reason, computers seemed more futuristic when they were at their most impenetrable, when the "dialogue" was more weighted towards the machine instead of the user. now a computer seems more like a dumb friend with lots of questions. and windows gets so fucking overloaded. maybe on the first day of a new computer's life, clicking "start" then "windows explorer" is quick, but, after a few months, typing "dir /p" is sooo much bettah. and i like the small filenames. does anyone really need to call their file "the stupid essay i am working on"? why not "stupess.doc"? ;-)

this may be just a general tendency with me though, as i am more turned on by women that are like DOS as opposed to windows ;-)

― Aaron Grossman (aajjgg), Thursday, 13 November 2003 22:58 (twenty-two years ago)

I get that futuristic feeling anytime a program I use heavily, say Photoshop, gets even a minor aesthetic makeover.

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Thursday, 13 November 2003 23:02 (twenty-two years ago)

The last time using a computer felt futuristic to me would have been many, many years ago. Maybe when I first started using the internet more than 10 years ago. It seems that the more I learn about computers, electronics, and just general engineering the less impressed I am by the technological stuff around me. I was recently reading the book Immortality by Milan Kundera, and he brought up an interesting point. He mentioned how Goethe - the German poet/philosopher - understood the workings of all the devices in his house, and how in today's world it's virtually impossible for any person to do this. I sat for a while considering all the complex devices in my house, and I can say without exaggeration that I do understand how each and every one works. Given my current knowledge and the time and resources to do so, I could theoretically reconstruct even something as complex as my desktop PC. It's a bit unnerving.

For some reason, computers seemed more futuristic when they were at their most impenetrable

Install OpenBSD.

― Andrew (enneff), Friday, 14 November 2003 00:03 (twenty-two years ago)

Is this part of a hilarious sketch in which Andrew now goes on to discover he has mistakenly taped the second half of Father Of The Bride II instead of the Open University course material he thought he'd set his VCR to record.

― N. (nickdastoor), Friday, 14 November 2003 00:12 (twenty-two years ago)

And has burned his pizza?

― N. (nickdastoor), Friday, 14 November 2003 00:13 (twenty-two years ago)

using my iPod for the first time

― M Matos (M Matos), Friday, 14 November 2003 00:18 (twenty-two years ago)

Ditto, my mp3 player looks cool (it's one of those small gray Phillips/Nike rounded disk ones) and the whole loading process felt science fictiony. It only holds 128 Mb, so after using it a few days I was jonesing for an iPod, but I guess it'll do for a while.

― nickn (nickn), Friday, 14 November 2003 00:37 (twenty-two years ago)

My ibook has a bluetooth adaptor, and my cellphone uses bluetooth. So the first time I updated my todo list and address book, wirelessly between the two-- wheeeeee!

Also I love that my long distance phone bill is so much cheaper than it might otherwise be thanks to IMing, not so "futuristic" as "yay technology!"

― lyra (lyra), Friday, 14 November 2003 01:28 (twenty-two years ago)

I was going to say when I first got a CDROM drive - multimedia! Sound! Moving images on my PC!

But even seeing XP first time was a bit "ooh thats sexy" in an asthetic kinda way.

― Trayce (trayce), Friday, 14 November 2003 02:02 (twenty-two years ago)

about 10 yrs ago almost did - 2 things:

- being on the internet for the first time: clicking onto hypertext links and bouncing around user-friendly web pages of text and pictures on computers all over the world - it felt like mile-high doors to the biggest library in the world slowly swinging open in front of me

- seeing the real-time-response pseudo-3d graphics of Doom for the first time

but i think the last real time was in January 1981: loading pizza-box size disks into the fridge-sized PDP computers driving the sofa-sized Genrad ATE consoles - all dedicated-function buttons and lights and embedded CRTs scrolling monochrome info up as columns of numbers - it finally felt like being at Ash's station on the Nostromo...

i think Aaron's observation above is astute: the 'hey buddy how ya doin' approach tries to make tech more like an eager puppy, and as it generally becomes ever more invisible and user-friendly and ubiquitous it submerges below the attention-surface and the means disappear beneath the ends (but then that's its job)

(haha i can contradict everything i just said by the fact that my recent reaction to encountering a little purple USB memory stick was one of 'oh yes! finally the kind of 'little-coloured-plastic-thing-that-just-plugs-in-and-lights-up-and-works' that they showed on 60's Trek or on Space 1999!')

(i like Aaron's concerns with things 'futuristic')

― Snowy Mann (rdmanston), Friday, 14 November 2003 17:14 (twenty-two years ago)

thanks. that was a really brilliant thread due to the excellent work of everyone involved.

― Aaron Grossman (aajjgg), Friday, 14 November 2003 20:46 (twenty-two years ago)

I don't theink computers have ever felt futuristic to me, they are the sorta things that always feel somewhat out-of-date.

― jel -- (jel), Friday, 14 November 2003 20:48 (twenty-two years ago)

Today, when I found this:

http://maddox.xmission.com/mcdonalds_lovinit.jpg

― Curt1s St3ph3ns, Saturday, 15 November 2003 03:51 (twenty-two years ago)

Pretty much every time I fire up my laptop I have a brief "deep breath" moment of just how cool everything is. However in recent memory one thing sticks out and that was the first time I got wireless networking working.

― Elvis Telecom (Chris Barrus), Saturday, 15 November 2003 06:57 (twenty-two years ago)

seven months pass...

right now i am watching a stream of tv coverage of euro 2004 from someone in the netherlands who has hooked up their tv through a computer to Wianmp. as far as i can tell, i cant get euro 2004 my digital cable except as expensive pay-per-view.

― Aaron Grossman (aajjgg), Wednesday, 16 June 2004 17:02 (twenty-one years ago)

when I loaded Google and ILX from outside a pub on the Upper West Side, Manhattan, November, 2003.

― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 16 June 2004 17:11 (twenty-one years ago)

the first time I saw the OS X dock animation

― 0r4l R0b3rt5 (ex machina), Wednesday, 16 June 2004 17:12 (twenty-one years ago)

Aaron! Hook a brother up!!!!!! PLEASE!

― AdamL :') (nordicskilla), Wednesday, 16 June 2004 17:13 (twenty-one years ago)

who me? i downloaded winamp last night, and opened the media library window and it said "internet tv" on the left hand side so i clicked it and got a lot of options including "futebol". its streaming, for free, though it does have to buffer a lot, and there doesnt seem to be a game on at this instant.

― Aaron Grossman (aajjgg), Wednesday, 16 June 2004 17:18 (twenty-one years ago)

Next game kicks off in half an hour...

― ailsa (ailsa), Wednesday, 16 June 2004 17:20 (twenty-one years ago)

when i played a BASIC-programmed star trek game on a trs-80 II with a 8-inch floppy drive in like third grade

― mookieproof (mookieproof), Wednesday, 16 June 2004 17:20 (twenty-one years ago)

I honestly can't remember a time in which this felt "futuristic" to me. OTOH I tend not to notice/care about/want to know about technology. Maybe if my computer turned into Gigalo Joe or something, then I'd be a bit thinking of technology? It'd be freaky that is for certain.

― Allyzay, Wednesday, 16 June 2004 17:24 (twenty-one years ago)

i have to leave for work in half an hour. fudge. maybe tommorrow. there is a place that has been advertising coverage of euro 2004 in the Wash. Cty Paper, but it is one of those corporate themed irish pubs so i dunno. winamp might be better.

― Aaron Grossman (aajjgg), Wednesday, 16 June 2004 17:27 (twenty-one years ago)

OMG I just got my first mp3 player a little while ago. I feel like a retard getting all excited about something so commonplace, but, for shit's sake, hours of music carried around in a contraption the size of a cigarette lighter? I AM EXCITED CAVEMAN.

― nickalicious (nickalicious), Wednesday, 16 June 2004 17:28 (twenty-one years ago)

I tend to not think of anything as futuristic when I'm using it, but then when I sit back and realize I have just taken a photograph with my telephone and transmitted it to my computer via radio and then sent it hundreds of miles with a few button pushes, I can get a little bit of a shock. Wireless applications are easily the most futuristic things of the last decade or so.

― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 16 June 2004 17:32 (twenty-one years ago)

Getting a Rio 500 mp3 player, 64 MB, Silver, in 98 or 99, for only a hundred bucks or so, and downloading the New York Times onto it each morning, and listening to world news on the subway. Then explaining to my dad that it had no moving parts. 'How could that be?' he said.

― Linoleum Blownapart (calstars), Wednesday, 16 June 2004 17:32 (twenty-one years ago)

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