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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

I was six years old during Apollo 11 and have just fragmentary memories of it. One is of my grandfather tearing up at the lunar landing and saying "when I grew up I used to carry flint and steel to start a fire" ... which would have been in the 1890s. If he grasped what he was seeing I think he'd be about as future shocked by the internet as exemplified by this link.

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I was 14 years old that day and I remember sitting on our couch absolutely transfixed. The entire Apollo 11 mission remains one of the most significant event in my entire life. For those too young to have witnessed the moon landings, for a recreation of what it was like, I suggest finding a copy of HBO’s “From the Earth to the Moon”.

the new Apollo 11 documentary that just came out is also very good

My dad even talks about that - he’s in his late sixties and has been pretty blue collar careered his whole life.

How he simply couldn’t even begin to fathom something like the internet being a thing when he was in his 20s.

Makes me wonder what I can’t imagine now that I might see in my lifetime.

I'm holding out for actually good VR

Probably I'm wrong and it'll be something else

i'm holding out for post scarcity, no more 40 hour work week

Probably over a million JS frameworks. I could never fathom such a language in my youth, let alone so many solutions to the same problem.

The future is now, my friend.

Even my mother's childhood chores included churning butter by hand. They were not a poor family. It's difficult to imagine seeing the same kind of change in lifestyle in my lifetime as the previous two generations did.

The daily life changed for most of the people by the scale of the modern technology, but the previous generations were already familiar with the concepts we consider recent.

- In the time of Napoleon France already had an operational telegraph service. That was even before the electricity could be used for it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_telegraph

- The first transatlantic telegraph cable became operational in 1858, that was 160 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable

"reducing the communication time between North America and Europe from ten days – the time it took to deliver a message by ship – to a matter of minutes."

So even then the people were absolutely able to understand the "internet." Not in the terms of the infrastructure, but in the terms of the effect. In the terms of infrastructure, even the people of today who don't directly work on that mostly use some simplifications, if they are even aware of the technical details of what is actually involved:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

The "series of tubes" (from 2006) is just one of possible analogies, which can even be good enough for some scenarios (e.g. when discussing the throughput being limited by the capacity of the installed cables).

You're talking about one specific aspect though. Yes, the concept of an email is pretty familiar to anyone with experience with telegraphs.

I'd argue the availability of information, and certainly information that isn't curated by a single source, is a pretty fundamental discontinuity.

> information that isn't curated by a single source is a pretty fundamental discontinuity.

Even in Ben Franklin’s time his paper was only one of at least four in Philadelphia.

I was mostly thinking of the science fictional trope of all mankind's knowledge being in a centralized thing-- e.g. Encyclopedia Galactica. For both societal and technical reasons (especially golden age) SF was often oriented towards benevolent centralized governments.

Sure, they might not have predicted the extent to which knowledge could be "small pieces, loosely joined", but I'm not sure that in every case they are were creating centralized structures from first principles--generally there is one new concept they are exploring/pushing, and everything else is just rebranded things from their everyday life. The Encyclopedia Galactica is nothing more or less than "The Britanica.... IN SPACE!!!!" with no more or less authority implied.

That being said, the general concept of knowledge in earlier sci-fi does seem curiously impoverished--everything worth knowing often can be held within the brain single computer/robot/polymath, or quickly established by proceeding axiomatically from a few observations.

I was really entertained by the banter between the crew as they're orbiting the moon, given the gravity of the moment. They're almost jovial, which is a pretty stark contrast to the way it's depicted in hollywood. Especially First Man; that movie was so brooding it was hard to take seriously.

I, too, was 6 years old and have good memories of it. They made a Big Deal of it in school, leading up to the launch, and we were reading books like "You Will Go To The Moon" by Mae and Ira Freeman, and seeing films and hearing stores about it.

That is amazing - the generational spans. I was born in the 1980s, but I can only imagine the feeling of that day in 1969.

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