Why are so many sci-fi's set set close to now, when the technology clearly won't exist?
POSTED BY: chrisisall
UPDATED: Tuesday, December 4, 2007 22:12
VIEWED: 12199
PAGE 4 of 6
Once all that so-called "future" technology crashed in Roswell in 1945, it was known to be possible. Nobody knew how much or for how long the government would keep it hidden - from us or from "the commies".
Also, many of these are portrayed as parables, but when not set in the past, parables are called "scifi". These parables intend for us to question what could be if we allow technology to advance, thereby inhibiting the advancement of technology which would then prove to be present in the near future that the story predicts. This is the reverse of the self-fulfilling prophecy. A good example would be the Terminator series, or any other scifi paradoxes.
On the other hand, Star Trek was supposed to be centuries in the futurre, and we already have some of those gadgets.
In terms of the stiffled advancement of computer technology, nobody would have predicted that Bill Gates would have held hostage computer technology and reversed it's advancement, nor how Apple has managed to withold it's advancements. It would have been illogical for past story writers to think that a geek like Gates would have revolted on the cool progress of computer advancement in favor of the business decisions of property theft, racketeering, extortion, etc just for pure greed.
Many people don't even remember that the IBM PSII Personal Computer technology in 1986 was far more advanced than the computers we use today. Gates made sure IBM didn't make those profitable.
More migth not recall that it took us 7 years from 1962 to get to the moon in 1969, yet we've not done much since then - the technology has been available, but when the U.S. elected Carter, America no longer could fund those programs until Reaganomics brought back the economy, which was then wasted from 93-01. There was no logical reason we would not be in space now, so it was predicted as such.
Recall that there is not a single car made today that has fewer miles of wiring than was in the first Apollo mission landing on the Moon in 1969. Were that technology applieed to space as much as autos, we'd be flying up there.
Remember that Orwell's 1984 was futuristic, yet not too far off course.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The link never shows up right but you can easily search the title of the article in google. First site that pops up.
Or for a text version try here: http://www.yorktownhistory.org/homepages/1900_predictions.htm
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
And if someday on some little piss-ant moon/My hand is a little too slow, or my aim a little bit off/At least I’ll go down fighting, not lying abed surrounded by quacks - "Sir Warrick" by Geezer
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:IBM made sure they weren't profitable, the same way Apple killed their own products. The closed proprietary hardware standard both companies pursued made their units harder to maintain, and more costly to buy. I'm no fan of Bill Gates, but its market forces that prevented both Apple and IBM from getting the strangle hold they wanted. I'd add that the PS2 wasn't some super advanced machine that IBM released through the goodness of their own heart, it was a machine they were hoping would bring the PC market back under their control, using an OS they co-wrote with Microsoft- OS2 (incidentally take a look at OS2-Warp, released in 1989, and see if you can see any similarities between it and Windows 95).
Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
Many people don't even remember that the IBM PSII Personal Computer technology in 1986 was far more advanced than the computers we use today. Gates made sure IBM didn't make those profitable.
As for it being more advanced than modern PC's, that’s crap. It was more advanced than the original IBM PC standard released in 1981, which all modern PC systems have developed from (it’s their great great granddaddy), but it has been updated in the intervening years. All the advanced features of the PS2 were actually incorporated into the PC AT/XT standard by the time the first Pentium processors started appearing, and they've been vastly improved since.
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
No one can see their reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The PC At/XT could not, can not, and never will be able to incorporate all of the superior architecture of the PS2. The current versions are based upon the 1981 rudimentary architecture, and will always be the dumbed down version of what could have been.
Yes, todays PCs have greater memory, faster processors, but all hogtied by the inferior dumbed down version of Personal Computer.
Even if we assume you are correct that todays PCs include the superior technology of the PS2, it took a decade to get there, and this shows how the computer technology was stiffled and advancement reversed for at least that duration, if not to this date still. Scifi writers of the past were likely to have not known this would happen in the logical world of computer gurus.
And lawful "market forces" do not include racketeering, extortion, and property theft like Gates perfected.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:The innovations of the IBM PS2 were: VGA graphics, MCA BUS, 72pin SIMMs, the 3.5inch Floppy Disk and the PS2 Keyboard and Mouse ports.
Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
The PC At/XT could not, can not, and never will be able to incorporate all of the superior architecture of the PS2. The current versions are based upon the 1981 rudimentary architecture, and will always be the dumbed down version of what could have been.
Yes, todays PCs have greater memory, faster processors, but all hogtied by the inferior dumbed down version of Personal Computer.
Even if we assume you are correct that todays PCs include the superior technology of the PS2, it took a decade to get there, and this shows how the computer technology was stiffled and advancement reversed for at least that duration, if not to this date still.
Taking each in turn:
VGA is well behind the current PC state of the art.
The MCA Bus is comparable to PCI, slower than PCI-X and not even in the same league as AGP or the PCI-e standards.
72 pin SIMM memory is well behind the SDRAM DIMMs used in PCs, even before DDR RAM was introduced.
I don't even bother with a 3.5 inch Floppy Disk drive in my machine any more.
Most people, including myself, use Keyboards and Mice that have USB connections.
Yeah, the IBM PS2 is more advanced than the original IBM PC, but so are current PC's. They developed from the AT/XT standard, but they are not the same thing, and don't work in the same way. They've moved on, they've incorporated the innovations of the IBM PS2, and surpassed them. The advances in modern PCs are more than 'more memory, faster CPUs', if they weren't you wouldn't get them to be much more capable than the early IBMs, because the slow system Bus and peripheral connections would be a greatly limiting bottle neck.
Quote:I didn't say they did. Bill Gates didn't prevent the pickup of the IBM PS2, why would he? He had a stake in the thing, Microsoft Co-Wrote the OS with IBM. I doubt Bill Gates dodgy business practices didn't extend to harming his own business interests.
And lawful "market forces" do not include racketeering, extortion, and property theft like Gates perfected.
The IBM PS2 failed because it was more expensive, and less well supported than the competing systems. It was a closed standard, removing the very competition that has so far driven development. The PS2 was a rather cynical attempt at obtaining defacto control over the entire PC market, and would have ultimately stagnated development by a much greater degree than the maybe two years sticking with the AT/XT did.
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
No one can see their reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Born in the 50's, grew up in the 60's, I always believed we'd be living like The Jetsons sometime in my lifetime....apparently not gonna happen.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
Many people don't even remember that the IBM PSII Personal Computer technology in 1986 was far more advanced than the computers we use today.
Uh? I suppose you *could* argue that some aspects of its OS/2 operating system were unmatched until the launch of WIndows XP (which finally saw the back of DOS) and that the MCA bus wasn't really bettered until PCI came out - but both of those are now history.
The main problem is that IBM came late to the already booming PC market and used its might and reputation to flog the original IBM PC: a mediocre pseudo-16-bit take on the well established CP/M business PC , not even designed by IBM, that would have gone unremarked if it hadn't had those magic 3 letters on the front. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy that the IBM PC would take over the market - as the saying went "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
Unfortunately, software-wise, the IBM PC was no more a "standard" than CP/M. Just like CP/M, anything other than basic scrolling text output and disc reading/writing required direct access to the hardware and/or the proprietary BIOS software. However, in the CP/M world, software writers knew this and made their software portable so that it could easily be "patched" to work on different systems (anybody else here old enough to remember "patching" Wordstar with your terminal control codes?) - once IBM came to dominance, this practice stopped and more and more new software would only work on the IBM PC. The first PC cloners had to mimic the hardware and BIOS so that their machines could run standard software - and had to fight IBM in the courts.
Consequently, we ended up with millions of corporate users of software that was irrevocably tied to the specific architecture of the IBM PC, and any attempt to introduce new, innovative systems was hamstrung by the need for everything to be backward compatible. Plus, generic PC hardware enjoyed such economies of scale that using anything else seemed (relatively) absurdly expensive - its usually much cheaper to by a hugely over-specified standard PC than something tailored to the job in hand.
Apple have only been able to innovate as much as they have because they don't have the huge, inertia-ridden corporate sector to support. Consequently, they've been able to completely change architecture and OS twice (6502-> 68000->PPC->Intel; Apple II->MacOS->MacOSX/Unix). Spreadsheets, DTP, laser printers, Photo editing, video editing, local area networking, graphical user interfaces, small-form-factor computers, the modern laptop layout, digital music players, the USB bus were all popularised by Apple or on Apple systems, even if they weren't actually invented by Apple.
Sorry if this comes as a shock to those who only know the modern revisionist history in which IBM revolutionized the PC industry by introducing the first "standard" business PC into a howling wilderness of hobbyist breadboards.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Actually the first Operating System to really drop the DOS Kernel was Windows 2000 (also ME, but ME should never be spoken of by anyone). Windows XP uses an updated version of the Windows 2000 Kernel.
Originally posted by ImNotHere:
Uh? I suppose you *could* argue that some aspects of its OS/2 operating system were unmatched until the launch of WIndows XP (which finally saw the back of DOS) and that the MCA bus wasn't really bettered until PCI came out - but both of those are now history.
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
No one can see their reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
Actually the first Operating System to really drop the DOS Kernel was Windows 2000
...and NT before that. However, NT and 2000 were pitched at power users and servers and had limited games/driver support. Most regular users stuck with 95/98. I switched to NT 4 for serious work (much better) - but had to run a dual boot system with 98 for when I wanted to run, uh... graphics-intensive interactive applications :-) It was only with XP that MS really pushed everybody onto a DOS-free platform.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:True that, though I've never really thought of Windows NT 3 and 4 as parts of the Windows family like 2000 and XP (even though internally 2000 and XP are NT5 and 5.1 respectively).
Originally posted by ImNotHere:
...and NT before that. However, NT and 2000 were pitched at power users and servers and had limited games/driver support. Most regular users stuck with 95/98. I switched to NT 4 for serious work (much better) - but had to run a dual boot system with 98 for when I wanted to run, uh... graphics-intensive interactive applications :-) It was only with XP that MS really pushed everybody onto a DOS-free platform.
I bought one of the early 1 GHz machines from AMD, which came preinstalled with ME, that had a non-DOS based Kernel, but it was unmitigated shite. I installed 2000 as soon as possible, and rarely had problems getting drivers.
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
No one can see their reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME