You know you're getting old when ...

[Kinsm]

My great grandmother was born in 1882. I remember her well from my youth and when when she died in 1979 I remember thinking she'd lived in Westwood with gas lights and an outhouse as a child and had lived through the development of publicly available electricity and plumbing, the transition from horses to automobiles, from trains to planes, two world wars, a pandemic, the inventions of the telephone, radio and television and watched a man land on the moon live. I wonder if any generation could have lived through more impactful technological achievements?

I don't think so.

[BernieCarbo]

My great grandmother was born in 1882. I remember her well from my youth and when when she died in 1979 I remember thinking she'd lived in Westwood with gas lights and an outhouse as a child and had lived through the development of publicly available electricity and plumbing, the transition from horses to automobiles, from trains to planes, two world wars, a pandemic, the inventions of the telephone, radio and television and watched a man land on the moon live. I wonder if any generation could have lived through more impactful technological achievements?

She also saw the invention of the computer, plastic, and penicillin.

[RedTeamGo!]

I think people are underrating how much computers have advanced in the last 20 years and the internet in general.

[westofyou]

I think people are underrating how much computers have advanced in the last 20 years and the internet in general.

Agreed, the amount of progress in the last 25 years is mind boggling

[RedTeamGo!]

Agreed, the amount of progress in the last 25 years is mind boggling

My brother builds his own computers. He’s a big PC gamer. About 6 years ago he built a top of the line machine, invested tons of money into it. I was talking to him last week about building my son a PC that I could also use for some old school gaming off Steam (I am a big Warcraft 3, Starcraft, and WoW fan - well, at least I used to be). Anyways, I asked him about his PC and he said he is going to upgrade soon, and he said my iPhone is way more powerful than the PC he built 6 years ago. Really puts tech advancements in perspective.

[Kinsm]

I think people are underrating how much computers have advanced in the last 20 years and the internet in general.

Computer advancements are amazing but they don't come close to what SunDeck's great grandmother lived through. She went from pilgrim to modern times. Electricity, Ovens, Microwaves, Running Water, Dishwashers, Washer & Dryers, Flushable Toilets, Cars, Planes, Telephone, Radio, TV, Women's Suffrage, etc... All that stuff is taken for granted today.

[Roy Tucker]

I think people are underrating how much computers have advanced in the last 20 years and the internet in general.

Moore’s Law has continued to hold true but has shown signs of slowing down.

[SunDeck]

My brother builds his own computers. He’s a big PC gamer. About 6 years ago he built a top of the line machine, invested tons of money into it. I was talking to him last week about building my son a PC that I could also use for some old school gaming off Steam (I am a big Warcraft 3, Starcraft, and WoW fan - well, at least I used to be). Anyways, I asked him about his PC and he said he is going to upgrade soon, and he said my iPhone is way more powerful than the PC he built 6 years ago. Really puts tech advancements in perspective.

Imagine the Apollo missions and how many buildings of hardware would have been required to equate the power of even an early smartphone. Two things come to mind; the scientists who got those vessels around the moon and back were pretty darned talented and that so much computing power today is utilized on ridiculous things by comparison.

[dougdirt]

My brother builds his own computers. He’s a big PC gamer. About 6 years ago he built a top of the line machine, invested tons of money into it. I was talking to him last week about building my son a PC that I could also use for some old school gaming off Steam (I am a big Warcraft 3, Starcraft, and WoW fan - well, at least I used to be). Anyways, I asked him about his PC and he said he is going to upgrade soon, and he said my iPhone is way more powerful than the PC he built 6 years ago. Really puts tech advancements in perspective.

The iPhone is great and all, but on no planet does it have the computing power of even a medium grade gaming computer from 6 years ago. That computer would include at least a 3.5 GHZ quad core processor, 16 GB of RAM, and at least a 6 GB vRAM graphics card.

The current iPhone 12 has a 2.99 GHZ quad core processor and 4 GB of RAM.

That said, if you want to know how far computer tech has advanced in the last 6 years, take that hypothetical gaming rig I talked about above, and realize that for probably the same price, you can get a 12 or 16 core processor at 3.8 GHZ, 16 GB of RAM, and an 8 GB vRAM graphics card for the same price. While it's tough to compare games on that, when it comes to performing tasks - take something like video editing - the new machine is probably 2-3 times as fast at the task than the other one.

[BernieCarbo]

Imagine the Apollo missions and how many buildings of hardware would have been required to equate the power of even an early smartphone. Two things come to mind; the scientists who got those vessels around the moon and back were pretty darned talented and that so much computing power today is utilized on ridiculous things by comparison.

Not to mention the bulk of the equations they solved was with slide rules and log tables. Incredible.

[Kingspoint]

My great grandmother was born in 1882. I remember her well from my youth and when when she died in 1979 I remember thinking she'd lived in Westwood with gas lights and an outhouse as a child and had lived through the development of publicly available electricity and plumbing, the transition from horses to automobiles, from trains to planes, two world wars, a pandemic, the inventions of the telephone, radio and television and watched a man land on the moon live. I wonder if any generation could have lived through more impactful technological achievements?

That timeline makes for a great book.

I've thought about that question a lot,...what 97-year period would have someone witness the most change (though you ended yours with technology achievements).

I think about the period from 1800 to 1897 in the United State. John Adams was the President, while settlers were just crossing by foot over the Appalacian Mountains into the grassy plains of the Ohio Valley. That area was filled with every animal that North America had abundance of over the last couple of thousand years with Panthers, Grizzlies and Wolves everywhere you go at nightime and woods outside the plains so thick that you couldn't see any daylight for weeks while you walked. Even the Buffalo were on the Eastern side of the Mississippi.

Witnessing the evolution of wilderness to individual cabins, each made by hand with an adze, and the creation of towns when someone hauled a millstone over the indian paths of the Appalacians to create the first areas of commerce along a river, and thus a place to meet and gather and build around to create the backbone of a community. Then to go from there expanding Westerward in search of new opportunities to becoming the first to see the tall grasses of Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska, grasses so tall that herds of Buffaloes could hide in them, and they served a purpose....they kept the prairie floor cool so that the thermals we have today would not create the tornadoes we now get because all of the tall grasses being gone, replaced with cement mile upon mile upon mile.

But, as the landscape changed on the prairies, the search for more opportunities found it's way westwardly again into the Valleys of the Sacramento, Rogue and Willamette Rivers or in the Ocean shores of Northern California where rich farmland awaited the patient and rich minerals awaited the impatient.

Throughout all of this there were wars, but wars that took part mostly in the East, a second one with England, one spurred on the independent nature of the Texans, and another to try to resolve what couldn't be resolved when Thomas Jefferson was amending the Constitutions that John Adams wrote for Massachusettes and George Mason wrote for Virginia to turn their words into a Federal Constitution that joined the States along the Atlantic seaboard. The wars fought by individuals who sought their way to opportunity westerly were of a property rights nature (though the South could claim the same thing from their perspective in the Civil War), and these hardy individuals protected their beliefs with guns, the only force available before courts could follow them into their communities.

Lastly, someone who witnessed this period saw the springing up of town after town and the disappearance of so many short-lived cultures that are too numerous to count. The only thing certain during this period was change. What started as a walk across the Appalacians ended with automobiles driving down mainstreet in the Midwest and Plains and skyscrapers beginning their ascent in the East and in San Francisco in the West.

For me, this is the greatest change in American history for any 97-year period.

[BernieCarbo]

That timeline makes for a great book.

I've thought about that question a lot,...what 97-year period would have someone witness the most change (though you ended yours with technology achievements).

I think about the period from 1800 to 1897 in the United State. John Adams was the President, while settlers were just crossing by foot over the Appalacian Mountains into the grassy plains of the Ohio Valley. That area was filled with every animal that North America had abundance of over the last couple of thousand years with Panthers, Grizzlies and Wolves everywhere you go at nightime and woods outside the plains so thick that you couldn't see any daylight for weeks while you walked. Even the Buffalo were on the Eastern side of the Mississippi.

Witnessing the evolution of wilderness to individual cabins, each made by hand with an adze, and the creation of towns when someone hauled a millstone over the indian paths of the Appalacians to create the first areas of commerce along a river, and thus a place to meet and gather and build around to create the backbone of a community. Then to go from there expanding Westerward in search of new opportunities to becoming the first to see the tall grasses of Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska, grasses so tall that herds of Buffaloes could hide in them, and they served a purpose....they kept the prairie floor cool so that the thermals we have today would not create the tornadoes we now get because all of the tall grasses being gone, replaced with cement mile upon mile upon mile.

But, as the landscape changed on the prairies, the search for more opportunities found it's way westwardly again into the Valleys of the Sacramento, Rogue and Willamette Rivers or in the Ocean shores of Northern California where rich farmland awaited the patient and rich minerals awaited the impatient.

Throughout all of this there were wars, but wars that took part mostly in the East, a second one with England, one spurred on the independent nature of the Texans, and another to try to resolve what couldn't be resolved when Thomas Jefferson was amending the Constitutions that John Adams wrote for Massachusettes and George Mason wrote for Virginia to turn their words into a Federal Constitution that joined the States along the Atlantic seaboard. The wars fought by individuals who sought their way to opportunity westerly were of a property rights nature (though the South could claim the same thing from their perspective in the Civil War), and these hardy individuals protected their beliefs with guns, the only force available before courts could follow them into their communities.

Lastly, someone who witnessed this period saw the springing up of town after town and the disappearance of so many short-lived cultures that are too numerous to count. The only thing certain during this period was change. What started as a walk across the Appalacians ended with automobiles driving down mainstreet in the Midwest and Plains and skyscrapers beginning their ascent in the East and in San Francisco in the West.

For me, this is the greatest change in American history for any 97-year period.

The biggest technological development of that time was the advent of the Bessemer furnace, which allowed the commercial production of steel. Before that, steel was a very expensive commodity, but once it became cheap and easy to produce, it became possible to make things like railroad rails and bridges, which made much more of north America accessible. Once we had the transcontinental railroad in place and bridges across the major rivers, there was no stopping development.

[RedsfaninMT]

You know you're old when your mother--in law shares stories she heard from her mom about hiding from Indians in wild country Wyoming in the 1880's. My mother-in law was born in 1916...no longer with us, of course.

On a sports level, I went to a Bengals "camp" and met Chip Myers, and Greg Cook...and they were just beginning their careers with the Bengals...1969. Yikes!

[SunDeck]

The iPhone is great and all, but on no planet does it have the computing power of even a medium grade gaming computer from 6 years ago. That computer would include at least a 3.5 GHZ quad core processor, 16 GB of RAM, and at least a 6 GB vRAM graphics card.

The current iPhone 12 has a 2.99 GHZ quad core processor and 4 GB of RAM.

That said, if you want to know how far computer tech has advanced in the last 6 years, take that hypothetical gaming rig I talked about above, and realize that for probably the same price, you can get a 12 or 16 core processor at 3.8 GHZ, 16 GB of RAM, and an 8 GB vRAM graphics card for the same price. While it's tough to compare games on that, when it comes to performing tasks - take something like video editing - the new machine is probably 2-3 times as fast at the task than the other one.

The point was not that an iPhone is a Cray but rather that something we keep in our pocket has more computing power than was available to NASA on the greatest technology challenge of the 20th century up to that point.

[dougdirt]

The point was not that an iPhone is a Cray but rather that something we keep in our pocket has more computing power than was available to NASA on the greatest technology challenge of the 20th century up to that point.

I thought his point was that a gaming computer six years ago wasn't as powerful as a current iPhone based on him saying that.