Nice People Thread Part 9 - and so it continues

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

vivatifosi wrote: »

DH says same 're email, though mostly due to strength of JANET. I worked for a major US Corp in late eighties and we had email, but I didn't know about at symbol being used in email until later as corporate interface meant you weren't exposed to that stuff.

I started using online systems in late eighties, but didn't go online proper, on something I knew of as internet until about same time as Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel in the clip. Amazing that Couric hasn't aged in nineteen years, and Gumbel was opinionated even back then.

My first exposure to the internet would have been late 80's or early 90's, via dial-in BBS set-ups some of which were linked with the old CDCnet, but didn't have an email address until 94 or so.

vivatifosi

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

The capital shortage of the future will be that of human capital, and the resource wars of the future may well be fought over people.

I'm not convinced Hamish. Two reasons. I think that there will still be resource wars in places like Africa, where the map has straight lines drawn by empire but populations spread differently. This will always result in one group perceiving unfairness, Niger delta is one example,corruption locally won't help either. Solving this may require some map redrawing, not easy.

Second, and longer term, I am concerned as to what long term impact of countries like China and Qatar buying up big tranches of weaker economies will do in the event of a major disaster, such as drought causing crop failure. Should those countries feed their indigenous populations first?

Not saying that these will happen, but they could.

PasturesNew

LydiaJ wrote: »

I find it hard to believe that that was really as recent at 1994. Most people I knew (admittedly mostly educated people) had email and knew what @ meant long before then. Heck, I was using email as my main means of communicating with my parents during my summer job over the holidays of 1988.

I was considered advanced when I got onto the Internet in 1993 - giving short talks to business people about putting their information online. Then as a temp job - Hobsons Publishers wanted me to answer the question "what is the internet and should we be on it".

It wasn't anything people were using - just academics to communicate and store files and make files available to people who knew what gopher, finger etc were.

Some big companies were starting to use it to list files and make some files/information available to people in the academic world.

In fact, after that, as an individual I could never afford my own connection. Connections were very very expensive back then.

LydiaJ

michaels wrote: »

I just think things like the number of children per woman is probably something that if you went back hundreds of years would look pretty stable and then to see it suddenly collapse is remarkable, similarly the average life expectancies, rates of education etc etc.

The number of children per woman in this country has indeed collapsed. But we have a lot more women because the population is bigger. The number of babies being born in this country isn't very much different from 1911. It's fascinating to look at the population pyramids from the census data. The baseline (number of babies aged under 1) gets a bit smaller after 1911, gets back up to its 1911 value again by 1971, and is now only slightly less than its 1911 value. However, whereas in 1911 the rest of the population tailed off in a pretty triangular shape, now it's much bigger because it stays wider so much further up. You can find the graphs on this site.

PasturesNew

I have the same number of children I had in 1901.

neverdespairgirl

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Population growth hasn't been the main worry for many years now.

Total global population is now expected to peak in 2060, and decline steadily thereafter.

The capital shortage of the future will be that of human capital, and the resource wars of the future may well be fought over people.

While I think that is possible, I think it is vanishingly unlikely, to the point of improbability.

We see our world now as stable, but in fact, it's absolutely not. The current world human population (and the UK's population, too) is based on a knife-edge of specialisation and intensity that cannot last very long.

chewmylegoff

i think the first time i used email was when i went to university in 1997, i don't think i had heard of the internet before then and i can't recall it being used for anything at school.

even when i started work in 2000, although we had email and internet connections it at work it wasn't used a huge amount. people still used faxes a lot back then to communicate. a lot of my work was done by hand rather than on computers as well.

also, although smoking was banned in our office, quite a few of our clients still had smoking rooms in their offices and i visited a couple of offices where people could still smoke at their desks.

a lot has changed in 13 years!

LydiaJ

I suppose that's the thing about being a scientist. We had email in labs and universities long before anybody had it at home.

PasturesNew

LydiaJ wrote: »

I suppose that's the thing about being a scientist. We had email in labs and universities long before anybody had it at home.

That's because you had it through the JANET system though, which was built by research/University FOR research/University. So you were cocooned in an environment that had a freely available tool not available elsewhere.

zagubov

I've got a feeling that the future's going to be a lot more like austerity-era Britain than the relative prosperity we've got now.

I suspect our parents would get along with it just fine but we're too spoilt to adjust to it.

I was a very very late internet adopter. It would have made my masters degree immensely easier if I'd had access to it.

I miss Tomorrow's World. I remember James Burke doing a TV special waaaay back int he 70s which predicted a future where we'd all live in cell-like high-rise apartments and rarely go out as we'd each have a wall-sized TV screen that would give us all the world's information. Hmmm. :think: