Thank you. I'm not sure how old you are, but I found out that somewhere in a man's mid to late 40s a change starts to happen. No one really talks about it, but if you don't bitch about something every day then the next time you shower you fall and break all your hips.

At first you only need to bitch or be generally contrary for no good reason for a few minutes each day, but it slowly increases each year. My dad just hit 70, and at this point he seems to need around 5 hours per day. I know it seems tiresome and pointless and annoying as all hell, but the truth is old guys just don't want their hips to break.

Unrelated, but very similar, you start to need to ramble on endlessly about something no one around you cares about more and more each year, or else your head explodes. This is why eventually most older men end up either bitching about something or rambling pointlessly pretty much every time you see them. :/

Alright, now that you've had time to collect yourself, lets discuss this.

You're saying my statement was ludicrous, because as you said "No, the vast majority of things we used today were not science fiction in the 70s."

The first early electromechanical computers began to pop into reality at the very end of the 1930s. ENAIC, the first general purpose digital computer showed up in the mid 1940s and weighed 30 tons. Until the mid 1970s "computers" were massive mainframes coded with punch cards. It wasn't until the late 1970s that dumb CRT terminals became more common.

The very first foundational models of what we now call "computers", the MITS Altair 8800, Apple II, and Commodore PET, were born in 1974 and 1977. All three combined sold an estimated 60,000-100,000 units from those years until 1980. While the bulk of these sales were to hobbyists, professionals, schools, and small businesses we can be generous and go with that 100k figure and say that all 100k went to individuals for personal use.

That's still 100k out of the 4.5 billion person population at that time. That's about .002̅ % of the population. Being a generous as possible with the sales numbers and purchasers for the hot new consumer computers that existed in the 1970s, perhaps 1 person in every 45,000 people had one.

Now lets be even more generous. Of course if you get a shiny new Apple II in your home you're going to want to show it off to everyone and let everyone use it. And of course even though this was many years before The Oregon Trail or Prince of Persia, and even the first "killer app" VisiCalc, the life-changing home spreadsheet program didn't launch until October 17, 1979 at the very end of our "70s" window, so there wasn't much to do with it other than trying to learn coding and typing in code examples from magazines they will all want to.

So even though absolutely best case only 1 in 45,000 people has a computer, each of those 100k PC owners will show 50 other people, let them all use it just as much as they do, and teach them everything know. Fucking amazing. Saints all of them. And everyone really cared because most random people can't help but love BASIC. So even though only a maximum of 100k of the earliest potential home PCs had been sold, we're going to say 5,000,000 people have real experience using them by the time 1980 rolls around.

Even in our absolutely ideal, computer loving utopia where everyone adores plain text and basic coding without even being able to conveniently make something as thrilling fun as a spreadsheet at home....

That's still .11% of the population, 1 in 900, people having any experience with a potential 'home computer'. For the vast majority of humans having a home computer at all was the stuff of science fiction, not reality. The vast majority of humanity and nearly everyone all of those people interacted with didn't have one or know anyone who did. Even for those who did have one, the concept of virtually all humans walking around with a computer in their pocket that's hundreds of millions of times more powerful than that Apple II, only .3" wide, with a built in screen with a resolution 83x better than than the High-Res Apple II monitor, and all the other capabilities a modern phone has... it wasn't even science fiction. It wasn't even something genuinely imagined and described in fantasy books for nerds. Science fiction had devices roughly analogous but I honestly can't think of a single science fiction example from the time that comes close to describing a modern phone. Most of the similar devices are laughable weak and nearly functionless in comparison.

If you've read more and can point me to some 1970s science fiction containing devices very much like the phones of today, please let me know. I'm a huge nerd and technology and reading are my main passions. I'd love to read them!

That explains my statement. It wasn't ludicrous, it was simple fact.

On the other hand the statement you made in your first reply was:

"No, the vast majority of things we used today were not science fiction in the 70s.

Mobile phones, the Internet, satellites, etc. all of these things existed before the 70s."

That's all bullshit.

Mobile phones? There was an initial prototype in the mid 70s, but the very first commercial model cell phone didn't exist until 1984. It cost the equivalent of $13,400 and was something very few people had any actual contact with even in the mid 80s. For virtually all of humanity, it was the stuff of science fiction well beyond the 80s much less the 70s.

The internet? Of course the 'modern' pre-ad and AI raped internet didn't exist publicly until 1993, but even Usenet access wasn't established for approved university researchers until 1980. A tiny fraction of a percentage of humanity, engineers, researchers, and military building and learning to utilize restricted computer networks that few people had knowledge of let alone access to is not at all "the internet". Any of those researchers would be completely shocked if we teleported them from 1974 to today and showed them what we consider normal use a few decades later. "The internet" most certainly did not exist for the average human in the 1970s beyond science fiction stories.

Satellites? That's your third example? You're trying to say that most people in the 1970s used satellites daily? Of course you're not. That would be nonsensical. You're just saying that satellites existed. So? Of course the bulk of people had zero interaction with them. They weren't riding around on them, or programming, or launching them. They didn't have a pet satellite to be friends with their pet rocks.

Today?

Right now I can pull up a live satellite feed showing the earth. Several of them, actually, in many different places. That isn't something restricted to just military access, anyone can do that. I've seen my general area through satellites in orbit, live, on my home computer. I've seen it on my pocket computer. I've worn VR glasses and walked around a virtual recreation of my neighborhood from before I moved here, and done the same to visit areas of the country I used to live and missed seeing.

Yes. The vast majority of the technology we interact with daily in 2026 was a science fiction fantasy dream to humanity in the 70s. I don't know if you were bickering just to bicker, because you feel like you were there when few people online were so you know the real truth, or if you're just very behind on the technological advances that can be used in the home or on the go from the last 10-15 years. Perhaps a bit of both.

If you've never bothered to set up your personal favorite songs streaming from the cloud or your phone to follow you and connect automatically to whatever other of your speakers or vehicles you move to, it's really cool. I loved the sound system in Cruel Intentions, and always nerdily dreamed of being able to drunkenly wander the house and have Vangelis Bladerunner soundtrack follow me along wherever I went.

I'm not a fan of connecting everything to the live internet, but done right home automation has gotten so much better over the last handful of years than it was even a decade ago. What we consider old cell phones are capable file/media/ftp/http servers. I take a lot of photos for work, and now when I take a photo or video with my cell phone or DSLR it automatically syncs to my work computer and a home backup drive. It works within seconds from the bulk of the planet.

I have full access to everything on my home network from anywhere, on my phone, laptop, or virtually any TV screen. From most places I can do anything I want with them and have it streamed to me on whatever screen I'm using with low enough latency that my eyes can't tell a difference to if I were sitting there at home.

I can wander hundreds of virtual worlds and games from a genuine first person point of view, turning my head and moving to move around the virtual environment. If that technology never improves at all from this moment on it's already better than I'd dreamed it could be as a kid. And it is still improving, if not as slowly as the financial giants who wanted to force it to grow fast so they could own it has hoped. You can now create and share digital replicas of places. Visiting your parents house. Your kids. Favorite places. As someone with Aphantasia finally having the ability to revisit those places and times is priceless, and even though in time a lot of them will likely become things that make me want a drink it's a stockpile of places and times I want to keep building so that even when they're lost in time they won't be lost to me.

Don't miss out on it, and not agreeing offhand that so much of is is the stuff of science fiction in the 70s... that seems like you are missing it. Lots of things are shit in the world at the moment, but still try to look at the wonders and the toys and the advances as if you'd just stepped forward from the 70s to today.

I hope you enjoy your day, and find something new to marvel at today and every day to come.