Vr is pretty damn cool IMO, also emulation.

The fact almost any computer after 2010 ish can basically play every single game made for every console ever up to probably ps1/ps2, is insane.

Blue LEDs. We had red and green since the '60s, but blue took until the '90s to figure out and the guy who did so got a Nobel prize for it because that finally meant we could use them for white lights and full-color displays.

The Nazis are back.

Two income households that still can't afford a single-family home.

Last night my sister and I had a 90 minute conversation on our phones with full-colour, hi-res video, me in the UK, her in NZ. It didn't cost either of us anything. We're in our 70s, such a thing was unimaginable back in the day.

Everyone having a portable supercomputer that fits in their pocket that also has a network connection that allows for instantaneous global communications.

Well let's see. I was a nerdy kid in the 70s, so I should be qualified for this. I have to say though, my wildest dreams set a pretty high bar. I dreamed of cities in space and in the oceans. And on land, we'd build giant fusion-powered arcologies modelled after the space cities that recycled everything we used. We'd spent most of our time in these cities connected by tunnelled maglevs while the rest of the world returned to a more natural state and became a giant wildlife/archaeological park.

But I'm trying to think of what would have blown my mind to learn about back then that actually happened. I think from a technological perspective, I never saw the marriage between computers and telecommunications becoming all that it is today. I had a vague idea of something like a video cell phone, but the idea that you could grab a movie off it from some distant giant computer complex and throw it up on a big screen in your home would've made me giddy. And just the quality of the image and the fidelity and depth of sound that could come out of tiny speakers would've been shocking. Sound systems were really, really shitty in the 70s. And TVs. Well, let's just say there was a reason you went to the cinema.

The science nerd in me would also have been blown away by discoveries made since the 70s. Birds are dinosaurs? There were real life hobbits running around on some island in Indonesia? There are ocean moons in our solar system? And if I showed up to explain all this to my kid self, he would not have believed my age when I told him. Medicine is keeping us younger now.

Personally, I'd go with 80s/90s nerds, as it would take a special kind of 70s nerd to understand digital storage enough to be wowed by a 4tb sd card.

Multi-gigabit network speeds being common in people's homes. 400mbps+ wifi speeds being common too.

4KUHD tvs and on your phone. Small B&W crt tvs were extremely common.

Bluetooth headphones, cords were a pain.

The more I say, the more I think, basically everything.

SDR (Software Defined Radio)

Its insane how many things you can do/listen to with a simple cheap USB stick.

https://blinry.org/50-things-with-sdr/

Cameras in general. Good quality film cameras took some work and were heavy. Like bookbag heavy. You’d have to carry a little set of filters (thin lens caps that screwed onto the main lens) in addition to another lens or two to get a good range of options. Now, tap, done. Copies? NP. Black and white? Tap. No need to use up the roll of color film and then switch to black and white film.

I don't think the 4tb micro SD card actually exists. They top out at 2tb which might be the maximum for the protocol. Your photo actually says SDHC which is clearly a mockup since SDHC was 32GB maximum. 4TB would have to be SDUC which is the level after SDXC. Sandisk announced a 4TB card last year but I don't think it was ever shipped, maybe due to the AI-driven shortage.

Partial AI slop: https://electronics.alibaba.com/buyingguides/4tb-microsd-card-reality-check-(2026)

I think a 1970s American would get a kick out these:

• Global warming is real and worse than you think and no it's not going to be addressed.
• Those gas prices are going no where but up.
• Anyway we decided that all cars will be F350s.
• I hope you like pocket electronics because those are literally the only things that will seem truly futuristic to you. Everything else? Pretty much the same. Yep. We don't even live longer.

That image has gotta be fake, right?

SDHC only goes up to 32GB and I'm pretty sure the successor SDXC only goes up to 2TB

I'm not quite sure how a card can be both U1 and U3 too

SD express should be able to surpass 2TB, but I don't know if 4TB micro SD express cards have been made yet

CT and MRI

4TB??. I remember being in highschool in 2003 and we were all standing around looking at a 1GB USB. It was insane that a USB could hold an insane 1GB

My first MP3 player was a USB stick that plugged into an adaptor that had a 3.5mm headphone jack.. It let me carry 60-85 songs, There was no Bluetooth.

In Johnny Mnemonic the upload in the brain was 320GB and he had to erase his childhood memories. Today it would be just a microSD. The story is set in 2021.

Without any sarcasms... That is some kind of wild shit.

Even the 1tb ones cost too much now. What, are data centers using those too??

I got to thinking about like, Amazon. To an American in 1970, the equivalent would have been Sears, the retailer that sells literally everything though an enormous catalog. They had department stores you could visit in person and they'd publish a phone book thick catalog for mail order. And there was a time that Sears could have bought Amazon outright for chump change. I remember a Tim Allen stand-up routine where he talks about mail ordering a tool from Sears, and it arrives 6 to 8 weeks later. Shipping is now usually a matter of 1-4 days.

But no, the real answer is probably wireless headphones. Like if you were showing around a tech enthusiast from 1975 around my house, the thing that would probably break his brain the most is a pair of wireless earbuds.

Voluntarily being surveilled and profiled 24/7.

That we live inside a dystopia that is a pretty even mix of Brave New World and 1984.

i might get shade for it, but LLMs.

Computers are things you can personally own, most of the people on the planet own at least one, probably including one that fits in a pants pocket.

Steve Wozniak once proudly told his mother that some day, he'll have a computer of his very own. Richard Stallman, in his now famous usenet post announcing the beginning of GNU, says that "one manufacturer has already promised us a machine." So, Richard Stallman was working "In the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT", and even in that position there was a question as to where he was going to get a computer for his project. In 1983.

Cyberpunk 2077. Video game with Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba basically as themselves, and just the whole scope of the game. And the graphics.

Ability to speak to a computer in free form, in dozens of languages, and have it understand you, is fucking mind blowing.

I recently bought a JBL Trio everything in one box music thing.

It has the ability in almost real time, there's a bit of buffering, to unmix any music I stream to it from my phone. You can dial out vocals, the guitar, drums, etc.

Being able to separate the tracks in audio, let alone do it in basically real time, would have seemed like black magic in the 70s. Hell, it seems like black magic now.

me (1999): I just want 1GB of ram and 1TB of hard drive, I can't see a world where more than that would be necessary.

We were ripping DVD's to 200mb divx at the time and an OTA cartoon might only be 25mb because SD+compression.

https://xkcd.com/691/

Pornhub, OnlyFans

I think people generally tend to underestimate technology levels from 50 to 100 years ago. For the most part, the biggest innovation of the last hundred years has been miniaturization rather than any one particular technological advancement. And frankly, I think that’s the answer to the question; People from the 70s wouldn’t necessarily be in awe of one particular technology, but they’d certainly be in awe of how much we’ve been able to fit into a tiny ass amount of space.

Honestly, I think they’d be more disappointed than excited. We have not been to Mars, we don’t have flying cars, and we don’t have computers that can think for themselves despite what LLM providers would have you think. Our 2001 looked nothing like that which was imagined.