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I was too young in 1998 to make any realistic ideas about the future.
I’m thinking more about our progression with technogy. Though social issues as well. Was there anything close to furries in 1998, or safe spots?
There may be people who were able to accurately predict what's happened over the last twenty years, but we'll probably never hear about them because they're all so filthy rich they've completely disappeared from the view of us ordinary mortals.
I was born in 1955, eight years after the invention of the transistor and three years before the invention of the integrated circuit.
So, yeah, in terms of technology, I've seen a few changes during my life. I think some of those changes have been harmful to people and society in general but, on balance, I'd rather have today's technology than 1960's technology.
In social terms, it's common for old gits like me to long for the good old days, but I never do. The good old days really weren't all that great for a lot of people.
To take one example of a non-digital technology that has made a huge change in people's lives: Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was licensed for use on the public a few months before I was born. Before the mass polio immunisation programmes which started a couple of years after I was born, polio epidemics were common all over the world, and they caused the deaths of many children and permanent disability for many more. (One of my earliest memories is of seeing a boy in an iron lung that was positioned at the picture window of a house so he could see the outside world.) These days, most people never encounter someone who had polio and many have no idea of what the disease actually involves.
It's a similar story with many other diseases which have been eliminated or drastically reduced by immunisation programmes.
(Us humans being such perverse creatures by nature, the consequence is that many idiots have decided that, since they've never seen an infant with measles or whooping cough, the illnesses can't be _that_ bad, so their little darlings won't get immunised. But that's a rant for another thread...)
No society is perfect and we've got a long way to go before it's possible for every child born to reach their full potential as a human being and live a long, peaceful and fulfilling life, but it seems to me that, in many ways, we're closer to that now than we were when I was born.
I was expecting hovercars by now & maglev trains to be the norm.
The second millenium so far has delivered robot vacuums, cloth covered plastic tubes that can tell you stuff like the weather & where the nearest cake shop is. And in fairness some amazing Lamborghinis.
Yeah, we had furries back in 1998. They were referred to as children in fancy dress outfits.
In 1998 I was 18 and a jobless little shit.
Now I’m 38 and a rich, taller shit.
Life is good
They used to have a TV show in the late 60's called, "The 21st Century". It was about how thing would be now. I think I can safely say that it was wrong on pretty much all counts. Especially concerning work. Americans are working more hours now than ever before. And the whole family has to work just to make ends meet.
Back in the day, the husband could work 8 hours a day and that would support everything. This country has been on a downward spiral in every way I can think of ever since 9-11. And it gets worse by the day.
I hate to say it, but I think the god-damned Unabomber was right. Technology and industrialization will be our downfall.
Yes I did, in 1995 Microsoft changed the world. On August 24, 1995, Windows 95 was released to the public, beginning a revolution that has helped shaped the technology world for the next two decades. It was by no means the first version of Windows, Home computing had been around for more than a decade, but nothing before, had had the same impact, and they were not so common. Win 95 as well as being a technological breakthrough, introducing features that still define Microsoft’s operating system today, Windows 95 was an unprecedented cultural phenomenon. Microsoft beat all its competitors (like Macintosh) and kept them down for over a decade. Computers started to become popular like never before in the 90s both from households to large corporation, by 1998 when Windows 98 came out the world had become more dependent in computers in 3 years than it did ever before (and Bill gates the richest man in the world). Various scifi movies like The Matrix in 1999 also had huge influence on computers taking over ideas of computers taking over and controlling human lives one day. Since the mid 90s computer revolution technology has been booming, and by the 2010s the smart phone revolution arrived. Microsoft Windows still remains the most popular OS for desktop, and even though popularity of desktops is declining, smart phones, tablets, etc are becoming popular, but it still remains in respectable position especially in corporations and work places. However it was Windows 95 that brought the popularity of computing to the global main stream and start the phase of technological revolution that lasts to the present day, and since then people have become more dependent on technologies than ever before. Did I see this coming you ask? I am a living witness to the Windows 95 revolution and seeing its escalating popularity and people's dependency on devices using such OS then I did for see the modern phase of the technological revolution since 1995 that persists to the present day, computers are there everywhere, and people are more dependent on them today than ever before...
In 1998 I remember having to think really hard for something to look up online, it was the first time I used the internet. So I'm at the library and here's this computer and I can search anything I want but all I can think of is Beavis and Butthead so I went to MTV and sat there forever while a picture of one of them wearing knights armor downloaded one little line at a time. I was thoroughly unimpressed and at that time I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to use the Internet much.
There was furries and safe places were limited to old white men mostly.
Also I remember in 2003 (when I was 12), I imagined an invention that was basically a transparent touchscreen pane of glass that was a full-fledged computer. I thought that maybe in a hundred years we'd get something like that. While the tablets that we have now aren't transparent, I still never imagined we'd have anything like them by now.
And I remember, around the same time, playing Snake II in school on my mobile phone, and then going home to play GTA: Vice City on my PS2. And I imagined that in about fifty years you might be able to play Vice City on a mobile. I imagined that it would be on the tiny 1 inch screen of a Nokia 3310, in black & white, and just as pixelated as Snake II. I never entertained the possibility that just 10 years later there'd be a HD remaster of Vice City released for iOS/Android.
Well most of the stuff we have now I just never would've even been able to imagine back then. Sure I thought of a lot of things that we don't have now like flying cars and robots and stuff, but all the things that we take for granted today I would've thought was impossible back then.
Just things like ordinary regular people being able to use a computer. I thought that if computers became more advanced, then they'd also become much more complicated and that you'd have to be some kind of scientist or computer hacker to be able to use them. I also thought that all the jocks would never touch a computer cos they always put down computer users as nerds, so I think it's hilarious now that they all use them.
I never imagined that everything would become digitised, so that you could hold your entire collection of films, entire tv shows, music, books, comics, games, everything, all on a single hard drive that you can hold in your hand. I always pictured myself in the future as owning massive shelves chock-full of all my collections of that stuff.
I'm still amazed by how all the advanced expensive professional editing software can now just be downloaded by anyone and is so easy to use that children can learn to use them. That even those highly advanced complicated pieces of software now all have completely free/open source versions that are just as good like GIMP, Audacity, Blender, Unity, etc.
So yeah, fuck the flying cars, we're in the future!
I don't think anyone once would've been able to imagine the internet and the effect it had on the world and all that you can do on it. It makes it hard to imagine how things will be in another 20 years from now.