The folks in this thread are misinterpreting the comment. It's not that someone from 1970 wouldn't understand the concept; it's that they would rightfully think that it's stupid and judge you for putting up with it.
The 70s might not want to throw shade…
This is the food equivalent of a liminal space, I do not like it and I wish to shed blood over it.
Normally these aspic dishes look vile but I might be able to get down with this one, provided the contents were cooked well.
Did anyone ever actually eat this sort of thing, or was it just the recipe book equivalent of a fashion show? Or perhaps it's just regional. I sure as hell never ate that in the 70s.
Apparently my grandparents did in the 70s and thought themselves very futuristic for it. That being said my grandma is well known as the worst cook in the family and my grandpa was known for mixing all his food together “because it’s all going to the same place anyway”…
That's twice I've posted that this week.
Can confirm, have boomer parents who wonder wtf is wrong with everyone just freely giving up all their personal data to the people they spent 15 years being drilled not to give their information to.
On the other hand;
“I don’t care because I have nothing to hide.” - My mother, born 1961, when told she should stop using Chrome.
Even in the early 00s it was already hard to grasp for some folks. I had friends who called me a liar for claiming that I could charge my mp3 music player by slotting it in the USB port of my tower as opposed to swapping out AAA batteries
When "Lithium Ion" sounded like something from Star Trek.
In the early 2000s??? Are you sure they weren’t just messing with you?
I'm not sure about the timeline on portable mp3 player development and popularity, but this was 2002 or 2003 and I was the only one in my friend group who had one with a li-ion battery as opposed to AAA-batteries.
"USB doesn't deliver power, it's for file transfer!" I was told. Some of my friends were also really stupid, though. That could have contributed to this wonder of technology.
A few years back I remember reading a headline along the lines of:
"Google Android Ice Cream Cream Sandwich for Galaxy 2 available on Sprint"
And I thought that someone from just 5 years earlier would have been really confused.
Well, I realize that 1970s sounds like an age of dinosaurs to some people... But, people back then weren't cavemen. They had electricity, batteries, video cameras, telephones.
The concept of an electric outlet in a couch is easy - not sure, but they might even had such things back then. Like to feed a lamp or something. USB is just low voltage and different connector, from the power transmission perspective.
The concept of a speakerphone with video signal is also easy. The only thing to grasp is that the devices and batteries became that miniature and efficient. Oh, and wireless.
Explaining that all video and voice recordings from all these neat devices are actually stored by a gigantic corporation, processed with voice and face recognition algorithms, and used to enrich personal profiles collected on all parties of the conversation to boost profits of said corporations, and many people even pay for this - THAT I would find complicated to explain.
Mobile phones wouldnt be strange by the 70's. Two way handheld radios and car phones been around since the 40's and the first cellphone was demonstrated in 1973.
XLR connectors and related systems have been around since the 50s. The precursors to USB, like ADB and PS/2, were being released commercially by the mid 80s. I agree that the concept would not have been mind blowing in the 70s.
"In the future we have a standardized cable called a Universal Serial Bus, and it's used for connecting to computers for things like information and/or power transfer. They're super versatile, you know those personal computers you saw in the news last year? Well a USB could be added to connect a future computer without a keyboard and mouse to a keyboard and mouse with the same port and never worrying about brand differences or multiple types of wires or any of that, which makes them easily replaceable parts.
They're so common that you find USB ports on devices, walls, and even people's furniture. The reason you might want it in your furniture is to connect your handheld mobile phone which will run off a grid of towers transmitting low energy high frequency radiowaves, but their batteries drain pretty fast during regular use and need to be recharged frequently. People spend a lot of time on their phones in the future."
"So can you like order a pizza from anywhere?"
"Yes but people in the future don't call anymore. They use a tiny screen on the face of the phone to access a digitally transmitted form to fill out that has all the food options, payment info, and recieving address. You can even get financing for it, the payment split up in smaller regular payments automatically transmitted from your bank balance."
"That's rad!"
"It is not. We hate the future."
Yeah if there's one thing that wouldn't be easily explainable to people from the 70's, it's the lack of technological optimism in the current zeitgeist.
Um... no. Having been an adult in the 1970s, I can testify that people read a great deal more then than they do now, and among the things they read were such optimistic tomes as 1984, I Am Legend, The Death of Grass, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or anything else by Philip K. Dick, The Egghead Republic, anything by Kurt Vonnegut, Silent Spring, the works of Harlan Ellison, and I could go on. Problem was then what it is now: corporations can pay for and broadcast lies faster and louder than a whole lot of worried people can yell and point and warn*. Don't be fooled by selective hindsight: there were a whole lot of people getting pretty nervous, even in the 1970s, and being told we were worrying needlessly because history could only move one way....
*To quote Jonathan Swift (the probable originator of the idea that Terry Pratchett brought to Millennials) " Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it." (1710)
"This was a dire warning. The unabomber may be insane and have questionable methods, but many people think they had a point in the future"
I once charged my portable blender using a power bank daisy chained to one of my laptops which was also powering a desk fan, the future is strange man.
the future is a fucking fire hazard
"Electrical fire hazard" is definitely something someone from the 70's would understand.
Wait, you have to charge those Spyware doorbells?
Only if they're not hardwired in - lots of people where I live just stick them to their doors so there's no wires.
When I was last shopping for furniture, one of the immediate disqualifications was anything that required a power cord. I don't need or want anything motorized, built-in chargers, bluetooth speakers, and I especially don't want LED lighting in my chairs. All that crap is designed to fail / break. Not to mention that standards change quicker than furniture gets updated in my household. Most of those USB ports were old 5V USB-A crap that can't keep up or crappy old bluetooth standards & antennas with poor quality speakers that I would never use anyway because my receiver is far, far better. And fuck LED lights in everything. Fuck that to Hell along with the people that make/invent that bullshit.
They had electricity in the 70s. They were missing standards, but they had electricity.
Just tell them our pet rocks are now cameras and instead of a regular wall plug we have a tiny plug for charging tiny things.
A couch with a power outlet baffles me
Might as well have it if your couch has electric adjustments anyway...
They'd probably be confused as to why it needs charging. "I don't charge my doorbell, so why the manual process? Is running copper wire prohibitively expensive in the future?"
My digital thermostats have Alexa built in. When I first installed them I went around telling people "I know I live in the future because my thermostat can play the Beatles".
Also, I have a heated coffee mug. I have legitimately used the sentence "My coffee mug is doing a firmware update."
I swear this is getting stupid. One day someone is going to shove a battery pack up the butt with USB port sticking out "omg tech dude, I can charge with my butt"
It’s pretty bold of you to to assume that this hasn’t been done already; I’m sure there are more than a few with a flared base for safety.
Charged a weed vape using the Xbox once. Times have changed
1970s is easy: the doorbell has a real small battery like in your car that can be recharged. It then has a built in radio to transmit a TV signal to a handle held computer/mainframe.
Couches have built in power for convenience.
Okay but the most important question: where do I get a couch like that?
My cord is always the wrong length lol
I once recharged my vegetable chipper at my desktop computers which honestly was weird enough.
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
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