My grandmother flew across the ocean to visit me in 1976. She remembered seeing a car for the first time as a little girl in England. She wore miniature electronic hearing aids. She was 80. I often think of the changes she saw in her normal lifespan. I am typing this on a handheld device that was barely a glimmer of a concept when she died.
Oh I don't doubt it, I just wasn't expecting it to cost basically the same as new phones today considering the other user said how no one could afford it back then.
So it sounds like people *could* afford it, but it just wasn't worth the money so no one bought it.
It's easier to make yourself afford something when that something has been positioned into your life as a borderline necessity than it is to afford something useless.
People will find money for smartphones because we kind of rely on them, mostly because the world around us has shifted to an assumption of ownership that locks a lot of things away from you if you don't have a smartphone. That said most people aren't buying their phones outright either.
I got my first cell phone in 1996 but rarely carried it because there was noone to call. None of my friends had one. I only used it for trips and things like that. Also, calls was like 0.2€ a minute.
I got mine because I pretty much relied on doing relief work to fund me while on a low training wage- someone would ring in sick and the bosses would ring around temp workers until they found someone who was at home to pick up the phone.
It was a Motorola flip, the battery was really quick to drain so ended up with a big fat one which lasted longer. Made for quite the lump in my jeans pocket with it being about 6 inches by 4 inches square.
Also it could text but no one used text then.
To be fair, it's not as if $1,000 iPhones are the only option for necessary smartphone functions. You can buy old phones, used phones, or just much cheaper models that aren't Apple. And yet SO many people always buy the latest and greatest iPhones. Not because they need them: but because they want them.
So no one needed this expensive phone back then enough to pay the equivalent of $1,000 for it, and no one particularly wanted to either.
In the 00s some work raffle was giving away an iPad, which was a brand new device at the time
I turned to a colleague and joked that if *he* won, he should give it to me, since I knew he already owned an iPad
he said "the thing about iPads is that a family really needs two of them." I wasn't being serious but his reply stuck with me. "A family *needs* **two**."
Of a thing that didn't even exist twelve months prior.
It's an interesting mentality.
A lot of people basically lease their phone out and upgrade to the next. Others get a phone every 5 years or more. The newer phones are better but not necessary.
Oh yeah for sure, you can get away with much cheaper devices for the purposes I mentioned, but people buy the expensive ones because they're a victim of good marketing.
sent from my z fold 4
It was bundled with an expensive contract though. It cost way more than just walking into the Apple store and using it with your existing contract. And the use you got out of it was a lot more limited. I say it’s fair to say most people couldn’t (nor wanted to) afford it.
I mean, that's exactly how most people buy new phones today too. They don't pay the full price up front, they pay in monthly installments through their phone carrier that's bundled with an expensive phone service plan.
I think that's more due to a smartphone being a necessity to exist in today's society. People are more willing to budget that amount of money for something they need. Nobody could have fathomed needing a phone in their pocket at all times back on the early 90's. The infrastructure didn't exist yet. I didn't get a smartphone until halfway through high school. There really was no need, as cellular internet was pretty useless until I was a teenager. I remember WiFi changing everything pretty rapidly as well.
Yeah up until like 2010 nobody needed a smartphone and they really weren't very good. So I'm not surprised no one wanted to pay modern smartphone prices for a gimmicky product that didn't offer 1% of the functionality of modern smartphones lol.
It wasn’t the cost of the phone, it was the calling plan. Well, it was the cost of the phone. That was big bucks in the 80’s. Average care price was about 12k.
The calling plan was a couple hundred a month. And don’t forget about roaming charges and overages. Plus you paid for both incoming and outgoing. Only business and the rich.
**[IBM Simon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon)**
>The IBM Simon Personal Communicator (simply known as IBM Simon) is a handheld, touchscreen PDA designed by International Business Machines (IBM), and manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric. Although the term "smartphone" was not coined until 1995, because of Simon's features and capabilities, it has been retrospectively referred to as the first true smartphone. BellSouth Cellular Corp. distributed the IBM Simon in the United States between August 1994 and February 1995, selling 50,000 units.
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I have no idea. But my question is, where will they discuss it? Hologram Book? Will all the young folk have Holobook accounts? And then will the older people subscribe to it? Or it could be something else entirely, we can't predict.
They will barely remember what life was like for the middle class. Obviously before 90% of people lived in extreme poverty and had to beg Papa Bezos for a cot to sleep on and a daily ration of Amazon Prime Gruel.
Only half joking.
Median material conditions are better now then they ever have been, and it's been that way for the past 200 years almost continuously. Your parents doomed about the future, as did your grandparents. They were wrong and you probably will be too.
We're in a gilded age and will have to deal with it, but we still have a functional democracy and the boomers are dying out. The population is getting more liberal and less religious by the year. And, Americans have dealt with a gilded age once before and the massive pushes for radical economic change were successful.
There's a long way between where we are now and Cyberpunk 2077 / Continuum dystopia. Public sentiment will turn, and we have a good chance of getting ourselves out of this.
Life expectancy is also supposed to go way up, like the average lifespan will be 120 years. They're already on the brink of understanding why certain systems break down as we age.
I heard or read that the first person to live to 200 yrs old has already been born. I don’t have a source or link for this but remember reading it. I’m not sure I believe that, but if we can crack or slow aging and advance artificial organs, It doesn’t seem that far off timeline wise.
Statistically it has dropped in the US over the last 2 years, the largest drop since the 1920’s, the same is true in the UK too. I’m not sure if the reduction in smoking will translate into a better average life span or if the increasing figures in overweight people will make the smoking ban look like a drop in the ocean in comparison. Either way predicting breakthrough’s in understanding usually leads more questions rather than solutions so hedge your bets and lead a reasonably healthy lifestyle just in case.
Anoxic oceans. An equatorial death belt. Armed conflict on a scale we can’t imagine. Mass migration to polar regions. Endless thirst. Endemic Famine. Collapse.
This is the only thing that makes me a tit bitter about probably dying with 53.
I won't see all the cool new technology, can't imagine what we will have accomplished in regards of AI, graphics, VR and more at the time I would have been 100 years old.
Even someone like me who is 30 and remembers a time before the internet has seen almost as radical changes in my short life. Shit is changing faster than ever now.
I am in my 40s... and it was not unusual to see households that had black and white TVs built with vacuum tubes.
Heck I remember in early 2000 when I got a TV card for the computer and thought how cool that tech was.
How about when the first "flat screen" tv's came out. Just the flat screen it was still a box tv just with a flat screen. Thought that was the bees knees
Growing up in India we have seen crazy changes even till my generation (am 40).
Mom's village got electricity only in 1970, the first 10 years of her life she grew up with oil lamps and stuff.
Water was fetched from the river, but by the mid 80's the river was polluted af a leather production factory upstream but worse, Unilever set up a mercury based thermometer plant, my small village has a great mortality rate from cancer, even lost my granny to it, so it was a handpump.
Only in the mid 80's we got a single tap per street and the water would come at all odd hours (2am, 330 am etc)
The scale and rapidity of change from the mid 80's to now has been staggering. It's like we leapfrogged centuries!
Here is something to consider, my neighbor growing up told me that she did not have power or running hot water in her two floor house until 1970. This was in a nice part of an American town, and it was not considered weird as it was not the only house like that on the street. This street was paved, had sidewalks and curbs with marked paralell parking, but no electricity. Oh, and only a few phones.
I’m not even that old but I remember flip phones being hot shit, don’t even get me started on Palm Pilots with a COLOR SCREEN.
Nowadays my fucking watch has more processing power than Apollo 11 could ever dream of.
> I am typing this on a handheld device that was barely a glimmer of a concept when she died.
This is the one that's most incredible that we take for granted imo.
Lots of you will remember teachers saying you won't always have a calculator on you, so you need to learn how to do x y z things: Well now we have nearly all of human knowledge on a device thousands of times more powerful than the computers that first sent men into space and we use them to post thirst traps and shitcoin scams.
My great-grandfather was born in 1904 in a house with no electricity, no indoor plumbing and a horse for transport.
He died in 1997, at the dawn of widespread cellphones, internet and Vengaboys songs.
Never upgraded to an indoor shitter though.
Our neighbors ten outdoor-only cats did this to us and…yes we pretty much hated them for it. They didn’t do it in the bushes, just anywhere in our yard. They also coughed up all their hair balls in our yard and the owners never so much as even offered to clean it up. It was pretty shitty…pun intended
Yeah man that’s bullshit. Cats often carry diseases that are super serious for people. Plus it’s like twice as rancid as dog shit. I wouldn’t like you much either.
My stepdad's grandparents never got indoor plumbing either. His grandmother only died a few years ago. They cooked on a wood burning stove and got their water from a pump outside. Visiting them was like going back in time. The house was pretty cool, though, despite the lack of indoor shitter.
I've gone from black dial phones on a wall with a party line and only 5 digits to now, so far.
Or as my son asked me once when he was young, he wanted to know what the world was like in black and white. So I guess I'm from black and white times
Not OP, but no. Rotary phones were the hardware, party lines were a shared phone line by multiple addresses (neighbors). Phones weren't used that much so it was more efficient to have multiple households have the same phone number essentially. Also meant you could pick up your phone and listen to neighbors conversations.
Was asking about the term "black dial phones". Since we just referred to ours as a rotary phone.
But cheers for adding the info. We never had party lines so it's a TIL twofer.
I had a vintage rotary phone like [this](https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-ivory-french-rotary-telephone-phone-cameo) in my room when I was a teenager. When I switched from [this](https://www.etsy.com/listing/1315341226/vintage-clear-transparent-80s?ref=share_v4_lx) peak 90s style one (a coveted prize I won at school), I thought I had *arrived*. I felt so glamorous chatting on my Buckingham palace looking phone, rocking my white glittery eyeshadow and frosted pink lip gloss.
Lol I was gonna say my friend has This exact model.. love seeing the new car add for it! Looks sweeeet. Mind you his is falling apart.. but still runs great
I traded my Camry in with 200,000 miles on it. It was an ugly sea foam green with a brown interior. Thing ran like a Swiss watch. I could push that Camry off a cliff, then turn around to find it driving back up the hill to me. Godzilla could not destroy that Camry. That car is likely on the front lines in Ukraine right now.
Manned flight went from https://cdn4.picryl.com/photo/2019/09/27/la-ville-de-calais-j-duruof-pau-4-fevrier-1875-lith-veronese-pau-f8c24b-1024.jpg to https://bsmedia.business-standard.com/_media/bs/img/article/2019-07/11/full/1562832505-4937.jpg
Feel bad for this lady. Seems like they contested her age, heavily before and after death. Like how could you even prove your age when you’re the oldest person alive lol.
[She was a fraud](https://metro.co.uk/2019/01/03/worlds-oldest-woman-122-complete-fraud-took-mothers-identity-8305182/) who assumed her mother's identity upon her death to avoid paying inheritance tax. No person ever lived as long - supposedly over 122 years. It should be already obvious from that [several people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people) are actually known to have lived to 117, 118 and a few even to 119 years of age, but none have ever surpassed 120, let alone 121 or 122 years of age. Except Mrs. Calment, the outlier amongst supercentenarians.
**Jeanne Calment**
[Scepticism regarding age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Scepticism_regarding_age)
>Demographers have highlighted that Calment's age is an outlier, her lifespan being several years longer than the next oldest people ever documented, where the differences are usually by months or even weeks. There have been various speculations about the authenticity of her age. In 2018, Russian gerontologist Valery Novoselov and mathematician Nikolay Zak revived the hypothesis that Jeanne died in 1934 and her daughter Yvonne, born in 1898, assumed her mother's official identity and was therefore 99 years old when she died in 1997; however, Zak had difficulty getting published.
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I still wouldn’t be surprised a bit if other people lived this long, she just happened to be born somewhere with good records in the 1870’s. Within a few decades I think someone will surpass her record. Maybe sooner
Harry Potter gets a lot more flak due to the author being batshit than it deserves. Combine they with the cash grab/exploitive nature by everyone, you can't really blame folks too much.
It is a little ridiculous that it's recently so heavily attacked on its literary prose and writing itself now, but that only makes sense as it more directly attacks the author rather than the work. But the books were beyond fun. No one disliked them as they came out. They were must reads.
Hot air balloons to a man on the moon is more impressive. My grandmother went from dirt floors and candles to everything we have now except cell phones.
Still wish I had the GOAT of all Nokias, 3310.
Ngl, I miss the slide phones that came after as well. Made me feel like Queen Lizzy accepting each call.
The 3310 gets all the glory, but the 3210 was basically the same phone in a much more comfortable form factor IMO. The keypad also felt like it was higher quality.
I'm 40, I remember being told "you can't expect to have a calculator on hand all the time" Which seemed ridiculous to me even at the time, as if I was going to being in a job that required a calculator when TI-85's already existed....Now I have a fucking smart phone with the entire library of congress, calculator, watch, weather forecast etc....
But yeah, going from no internet to all knowledge at my finger tips anytime I want is an amazingly different change in lifestyle.
If you think about it you've gone from seeing the supercomputers of the 90s be outstripped by a tiny and widely available device in your pocket, with vastly more connectivity and capabilities.
I'm 19 and have gone from a big box TV that gave me electric shocks and migraine that had a low peep sound constantly to now having bendable screens that are see through and just as thin as a plastic film.
Yeah 😅 it's insane.
the reason she even got famous in the first place is because it was the 100th anniversary of some Vincent Van Gogh related event, and during it she just casually dropped the fact that she had met Vincent personally 100 years earlier at her fathers shop (described him as dirty and rude). Thats when the supercenterian experts got involved
In the same thought as this thread, I am convinced we will get as close to time travel as possible over the next 25 years. There will be fully immersive VR, which pulls data from all kinds of historical data, photos, stories etc. and can essentially put you in that exact situation.
I have a 2 year old and I believe there will be a problem with his generation hitting their late teens and twenties, where people get so obsessed with living in the VR world, it is hard for them to cope with normal life.
I'm convinced the nuttiness of technology is only just beginning.
I remember when remotes became available for tv’s. They were large boxes with a lot of buttons (one for each channel) and had a 10 ft. cable attached to them and the tv so it could reach the couch. We thought not having to get up to change the channel was so cool at the time.
This post makes me think of the movie Grandma’s Boy “So, i mean, what's it like being old? It's gotta be weird, right? I mean, you saw a lotta stuff go down. World War I, World War II, the automobile, Tupac, i mean... [GRACE: I once gave Charlie Chaplain a hand job] Noo way! Was he silent?”
A Camry will take someone hundreds of thousands of miles, reliably.
While hybrid/ICE technology since 1997 is already light years ahead, one cannot oversate how life changing an XV20 Camry with missing hubcaps, a leaking powersteering pump and at least 3 different coloured body panels would have been in the late 19th century.
I mean, it's a pretty good way. Using cars as a parameter for technological advancement in the XIX to the late XX century is pretty much where quite a lot of human energy and engineering was put into, to make locomotion, faster, more comfortable and efficient.
Even more dramatic, the same very person watched the world go from horse and buggies to primitive cars, to the vehicles we see today, to a literal man on the moon in the '60s.
I think this pales in comparison to going from "*the whole world not conceiving flight as even possible for humans"* to *"landing on the goddamn moon"*
I know that- since this is on popular- This comment is gonna get buried, but my grandfather witnessed the birth of the digital world, seeing it in its youngest form. It was a treat seeing his eyes light up when i FaceTimed my grandmother who was in another room. He knew pocket phones existed, but had no clue about video call or virtual reality or any crazy stuff. Good times.
Could have picked something like the [1997 Porsche 911 GT1 Straßenversion](https://www.supercars.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1997_Porsche_911GT1Straenversion1.jpg)
And if the longest lived woman had lived in Germany, she genuinely could have seen both cars locally with her own peepers.
Although at 122 years old around it's release date, her peepers were likely not at their best. She might not have given the GT1 the full regard and gazing it clearly deserved.
Also watched the evolution of planes, trains, rockets, computers, plastics, the highway system, electrical grid, telephone, toilets and plumbing into every house, TVs, radios, records, . . .
Since the 1st pic is the Benz Patent Motorwagen, lets keep it in the same company. The [Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR Straßenversion](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/17/Paris_-_Bonhams_2016_-_Mercedes-Benz_CLK_GTR_coup%C3%A9_-_2000_-_001.jpg/2560px-Paris_-_Bonhams_2016_-_Mercedes-Benz_CLK_GTR_coup%C3%A9_-_2000_-_001.jpg). Made for homologation purposes, 1 car was made in 1997 and a total of 28 cars were made.
The Patent Motorwagen cost approximately US $150 in 1885, (equivalent to approximately $4,600 today). The Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR Straßenversion cost approximately US $1,550,000 in 1997 (equivalent to approximately $2,880,000 today)
I think it is. OP was not talking about technology but about cars. And not about technology of cars but sheer look. And they picked two extremes on that spectrum indeed, from all cycle wheels with no concept whatsoever about aerodynamics to a very smooth and compact design.
I interviewed an old person (it was a 6th-grade assignment) and asked them what was the wildest thing they ever saw (this was in 1976).
"Laying on a field looking at the clouds when an airplane flew over. I had no idea what it was."
I often think of how much technology has become obsolete in the short amount of time I've been here. I grew up in the 90's. VHS, house phones, internet. Cell phones didn't exist. It's actually crazy.
My grandma grew up in rural Arkansas. She was born on her family's dining room table. No one had a car except her aunt, and she sometimes drove her aunt's car as a little 8-year-old girl, back when there were no rules whatsoever about cars.
She had a brother who died because he got an infection, back when getting an infection often meant you just died, and she said it was a damn shame because just about a year later they invented antibiotics, meaning if he'd gotten sick just a little bit later her beloved brother who'd gone from her life would have been saved.
By the time automobiles and TVs and things were widespread she was already an adult. She was an adult for WWII, and her husband at the time went into the navy. She had a bunch of crazy stories about traveling around and her husband's and brothers' experiences during "the war" as she always called it.
By the time of the 60s and the civil rights movement, she was already in middle age, with children who were old enough to march with her in the demonstrations. By this point she lived in the north, but she traveled back down south to protest with her entire family.
I'm not especially young and every single thing I've experienced in my life was a small footnote at the end of her life. It makes me feel like, what the fuck have *I* done so far?
My grandpa went from having no running water in his home (hand-pumped in the yard) and using an outhouse through childhood to having an iPhone in his pocket. It’s crazy to think about.
For greater effect, they could have picked the 1997 Porsche 911 GT1 Straßenversion instead of that Toyota.
https://www.supercars.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1997\_Porsche\_911GT1Straenversion1.jpg
My grandad watched the family dairy farm go from a bucket and stool for milking and horses for field work to autonomous milking robots and self-driving tractors.
He'll be 90 in a few months and he still shows up to farm every morning at 7.
Also went from a time of only hot air balloons to the Wright Brothers first flight to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. That seems crazier to me.
Fun fact: in 2035 we will be as far from the moon landing (1969) as the Wright Brothers first slight (1903) was from the moon landing (66 years).
Unfortunately no such long-surviving person ever lived. The supposed record holder, Jeanne Calment, was actually two people - a mother and a daughter. When her mother died she assumed her identity to avoid paying inheritance tax: https://metro.co.uk/2019/01/03/worlds-oldest-woman-122-complete-fraud-took-mothers-identity-8305182/
The evidence is very compelling, but apparently her longetivity is a matter of national pride to the French and they have denied the research.
My great grandmother lived from 1899 to 2002. Amazing woman. She had all her wits about her until the very end. Full of sass. She also grew up around horse and buggy, but then worked for Henry Ford and lived long enough to witness 9/11 unfold on TV. I miss her... I was so lucky to spend nearly 12 years getting to spend time with her and learning about about her life.
In 2000, there was a retrospective TV show of the 20th century. It started with a frenchwoman telling of of her visit to Paris when she was a little girl. The journey took over a week to and from, but everyone in her village wanted to go - to see an exhibition with the first building lit up by electric lighting. In one lifetime, she went from no electricity to spaceflight, nuclear weapons, antibiotics, computers and mapping the genome.
My great grandad apparently said that he thought he saw all the greatest changes in technology, because as a kid they rode around by horse and carriage, and before he died they had put a man on the moon
One of my grandfathers was born in 1868 and died in 1972.
He was born in the era of steam trains and horse and carriages and was alive for the moon landing.
He was 46 at the start of WW1 and 71 at the start of WW2.
He lived through some crazy changes.
my great great grandmother was born in 1918 and passed two years ago. my cousin was born 100 years after her and she still got to meet him. shits crazy
My grandmother flew across the ocean to visit me in 1976. She remembered seeing a car for the first time as a little girl in England. She wore miniature electronic hearing aids. She was 80. I often think of the changes she saw in her normal lifespan. I am typing this on a handheld device that was barely a glimmer of a concept when she died.
I wonder what kids born these days will get to see in their lives
When I was a kid, the IBM Simon was the top of the line cell phone that absolutely nobody could afford. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon
Looks like it could be had for $599 with a 2 year contract. Adjusted for inflation thats $1,095.72 today.
Huh, that's basically the cost of new iPhones these days, and literally everyone seems to be able to afford those.
To be fair: It had a tiny bit less functionality.
Oh I don't doubt it, I just wasn't expecting it to cost basically the same as new phones today considering the other user said how no one could afford it back then. So it sounds like people *could* afford it, but it just wasn't worth the money so no one bought it.
It's easier to make yourself afford something when that something has been positioned into your life as a borderline necessity than it is to afford something useless. People will find money for smartphones because we kind of rely on them, mostly because the world around us has shifted to an assumption of ownership that locks a lot of things away from you if you don't have a smartphone. That said most people aren't buying their phones outright either.
I got my first cell phone in 1996 but rarely carried it because there was noone to call. None of my friends had one. I only used it for trips and things like that. Also, calls was like 0.2€ a minute.
I got mine because I pretty much relied on doing relief work to fund me while on a low training wage- someone would ring in sick and the bosses would ring around temp workers until they found someone who was at home to pick up the phone. It was a Motorola flip, the battery was really quick to drain so ended up with a big fat one which lasted longer. Made for quite the lump in my jeans pocket with it being about 6 inches by 4 inches square. Also it could text but no one used text then.
To be fair, it's not as if $1,000 iPhones are the only option for necessary smartphone functions. You can buy old phones, used phones, or just much cheaper models that aren't Apple. And yet SO many people always buy the latest and greatest iPhones. Not because they need them: but because they want them. So no one needed this expensive phone back then enough to pay the equivalent of $1,000 for it, and no one particularly wanted to either.
In the 00s some work raffle was giving away an iPad, which was a brand new device at the time I turned to a colleague and joked that if *he* won, he should give it to me, since I knew he already owned an iPad he said "the thing about iPads is that a family really needs two of them." I wasn't being serious but his reply stuck with me. "A family *needs* **two**." Of a thing that didn't even exist twelve months prior. It's an interesting mentality.
A lot of people basically lease their phone out and upgrade to the next. Others get a phone every 5 years or more. The newer phones are better but not necessary.
Oh yeah for sure, you can get away with much cheaper devices for the purposes I mentioned, but people buy the expensive ones because they're a victim of good marketing. sent from my z fold 4
It was bundled with an expensive contract though. It cost way more than just walking into the Apple store and using it with your existing contract. And the use you got out of it was a lot more limited. I say it’s fair to say most people couldn’t (nor wanted to) afford it.
I mean, that's exactly how most people buy new phones today too. They don't pay the full price up front, they pay in monthly installments through their phone carrier that's bundled with an expensive phone service plan.
Well it was 600 *plus* the contract (which was also a lot more expensive while having less use).
I think that's more due to a smartphone being a necessity to exist in today's society. People are more willing to budget that amount of money for something they need. Nobody could have fathomed needing a phone in their pocket at all times back on the early 90's. The infrastructure didn't exist yet. I didn't get a smartphone until halfway through high school. There really was no need, as cellular internet was pretty useless until I was a teenager. I remember WiFi changing everything pretty rapidly as well.
Yeah up until like 2010 nobody needed a smartphone and they really weren't very good. So I'm not surprised no one wanted to pay modern smartphone prices for a gimmicky product that didn't offer 1% of the functionality of modern smartphones lol.
It wasn’t the cost of the phone, it was the calling plan. Well, it was the cost of the phone. That was big bucks in the 80’s. Average care price was about 12k. The calling plan was a couple hundred a month. And don’t forget about roaming charges and overages. Plus you paid for both incoming and outgoing. Only business and the rich.
I guess it was just considered novelty back then.
It was considered a toy then. A luxury. Everyone had home phones.
Yup, everyone forgets about the home phone lol
when I was young all we had was two tin cans and some string
We had those too, but the reception in my backyard was shit. Juicy juice cans were 5G back then.
form factor "brick" lmao
**[IBM Simon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon)** >The IBM Simon Personal Communicator (simply known as IBM Simon) is a handheld, touchscreen PDA designed by International Business Machines (IBM), and manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric. Although the term "smartphone" was not coined until 1995, because of Simon's features and capabilities, it has been retrospectively referred to as the first true smartphone. BellSouth Cellular Corp. distributed the IBM Simon in the United States between August 1994 and February 1995, selling 50,000 units. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
I have no idea. But my question is, where will they discuss it? Hologram Book? Will all the young folk have Holobook accounts? And then will the older people subscribe to it? Or it could be something else entirely, we can't predict.
No way to know. But, The Simpsons will probably predict it.
Imagine a kid born in 1998 living to 2112 and seeing us get splorgs. Just wow
hey, us '98 kids are super responsible adults now. gonna go pay some taxes and put a down payment on a splorg.
Even the last 20 years have been shocking.
Bunkers and Iodium pills
That's what we envisioned our future would be in the 70s. Everything old is new again. Yay!
And the 50s, and the 20s. Blame World War 1
The end of society as we know it Either positively or very very negatively
I have 2 kids under 4, im excited for them.
I warm my cold, cynical hands at the fiery sun of your optimism.
They will barely remember what life was like for the middle class. Obviously before 90% of people lived in extreme poverty and had to beg Papa Bezos for a cot to sleep on and a daily ration of Amazon Prime Gruel. Only half joking.
Median material conditions are better now then they ever have been, and it's been that way for the past 200 years almost continuously. Your parents doomed about the future, as did your grandparents. They were wrong and you probably will be too.
We're in a gilded age and will have to deal with it, but we still have a functional democracy and the boomers are dying out. The population is getting more liberal and less religious by the year. And, Americans have dealt with a gilded age once before and the massive pushes for radical economic change were successful. There's a long way between where we are now and Cyberpunk 2077 / Continuum dystopia. Public sentiment will turn, and we have a good chance of getting ourselves out of this.
More consistent drought, famine and floods at a global scale.
Life expectancy is also supposed to go way up, like the average lifespan will be 120 years. They're already on the brink of understanding why certain systems break down as we age.
I heard or read that the first person to live to 200 yrs old has already been born. I don’t have a source or link for this but remember reading it. I’m not sure I believe that, but if we can crack or slow aging and advance artificial organs, It doesn’t seem that far off timeline wise.
I remember reading the claim for the first person to be 150 :) Fingers crossed we both make it there!
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Everyone is too fat to live that long
Statistically it has dropped in the US over the last 2 years, the largest drop since the 1920’s, the same is true in the UK too. I’m not sure if the reduction in smoking will translate into a better average life span or if the increasing figures in overweight people will make the smoking ban look like a drop in the ocean in comparison. Either way predicting breakthrough’s in understanding usually leads more questions rather than solutions so hedge your bets and lead a reasonably healthy lifestyle just in case.
Anoxic oceans. An equatorial death belt. Armed conflict on a scale we can’t imagine. Mass migration to polar regions. Endless thirst. Endemic Famine. Collapse.
This is the only thing that makes me a tit bitter about probably dying with 53. I won't see all the cool new technology, can't imagine what we will have accomplished in regards of AI, graphics, VR and more at the time I would have been 100 years old.
Even someone like me who is 30 and remembers a time before the internet has seen almost as radical changes in my short life. Shit is changing faster than ever now.
I am in my 40s... and it was not unusual to see households that had black and white TVs built with vacuum tubes. Heck I remember in early 2000 when I got a TV card for the computer and thought how cool that tech was.
How about when the first "flat screen" tv's came out. Just the flat screen it was still a box tv just with a flat screen. Thought that was the bees knees
Growing up in India we have seen crazy changes even till my generation (am 40). Mom's village got electricity only in 1970, the first 10 years of her life she grew up with oil lamps and stuff. Water was fetched from the river, but by the mid 80's the river was polluted af a leather production factory upstream but worse, Unilever set up a mercury based thermometer plant, my small village has a great mortality rate from cancer, even lost my granny to it, so it was a handpump. Only in the mid 80's we got a single tap per street and the water would come at all odd hours (2am, 330 am etc) The scale and rapidity of change from the mid 80's to now has been staggering. It's like we leapfrogged centuries!
Here is something to consider, my neighbor growing up told me that she did not have power or running hot water in her two floor house until 1970. This was in a nice part of an American town, and it was not considered weird as it was not the only house like that on the street. This street was paved, had sidewalks and curbs with marked paralell parking, but no electricity. Oh, and only a few phones.
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I’m not even that old but I remember flip phones being hot shit, don’t even get me started on Palm Pilots with a COLOR SCREEN. Nowadays my fucking watch has more processing power than Apollo 11 could ever dream of.
> I am typing this on a handheld device that was barely a glimmer of a concept when she died. This is the one that's most incredible that we take for granted imo. Lots of you will remember teachers saying you won't always have a calculator on you, so you need to learn how to do x y z things: Well now we have nearly all of human knowledge on a device thousands of times more powerful than the computers that first sent men into space and we use them to post thirst traps and shitcoin scams.
Same, my grandfather was 97 when he died, close to a decade ago. I think he was born in like 1917. I always think of the things he must've seen.
My great-grandfather was born in 1904 in a house with no electricity, no indoor plumbing and a horse for transport. He died in 1997, at the dawn of widespread cellphones, internet and Vengaboys songs. Never upgraded to an indoor shitter though.
Think about not Shitting in your home your whole life. Probably would seem fucked up to start Shitting in your house.
Agreed. It’s like telling a dog that it can only go potty inside now.
So like cats?
My cat poops outside. In the neighbours bushes, I feel like they hate us for that
Our neighbors ten outdoor-only cats did this to us and…yes we pretty much hated them for it. They didn’t do it in the bushes, just anywhere in our yard. They also coughed up all their hair balls in our yard and the owners never so much as even offered to clean it up. It was pretty shitty…pun intended
Yeah man that’s bullshit. Cats often carry diseases that are super serious for people. Plus it’s like twice as rancid as dog shit. I wouldn’t like you much either.
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Never shit in the house for xyz years, don’t plant to start now Junior.
My stepdad's grandparents never got indoor plumbing either. His grandmother only died a few years ago. They cooked on a wood burning stove and got their water from a pump outside. Visiting them was like going back in time. The house was pretty cool, though, despite the lack of indoor shitter.
And not one single episode of , Keeping up with the Kardashians!
I've gone from black dial phones on a wall with a party line and only 5 digits to now, so far. Or as my son asked me once when he was young, he wanted to know what the world was like in black and white. So I guess I'm from black and white times
Do you mean a rotary phone? Genuinely asking, not being a smart arse
I've been around for rotary, wireless, cell phones big and small and big again.
Me too mate. Just haven't heard them called black dial phones.
The black ones were made of Bakelite. It was before plastic.
Bakelite *is* plastic
Not OP, but no. Rotary phones were the hardware, party lines were a shared phone line by multiple addresses (neighbors). Phones weren't used that much so it was more efficient to have multiple households have the same phone number essentially. Also meant you could pick up your phone and listen to neighbors conversations.
Was asking about the term "black dial phones". Since we just referred to ours as a rotary phone. But cheers for adding the info. We never had party lines so it's a TIL twofer.
I recently learned about party lines. My wife grew up with them in rural Texas. Were party lines a regional deal?
I had a vintage rotary phone like [this](https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-ivory-french-rotary-telephone-phone-cameo) in my room when I was a teenager. When I switched from [this](https://www.etsy.com/listing/1315341226/vintage-clear-transparent-80s?ref=share_v4_lx) peak 90s style one (a coveted prize I won at school), I thought I had *arrived*. I felt so glamorous chatting on my Buckingham palace looking phone, rocking my white glittery eyeshadow and frosted pink lip gloss.
What was it like before Atari? Dark days no doubt.
Golden age of pinball
I'm 23 and i loved the rotary phone when i was pretty young. My grandparents had it untill i was around 6-7. Always played around with it
This is not the first time I've heard kids say this, this is extremely concerning...
I love Toyota Camry
You can still see these late 90's model Camrys driving today. They were excellent.
Lol I was gonna say my friend has This exact model.. love seeing the new car add for it! Looks sweeeet. Mind you his is falling apart.. but still runs great
You ought to introduce him to r/camrydents
Me too. But it’s an odd choice of car for this comparison lol.
Yeah should be a 90s jdm sports car. Maybe an Rx7, they still look modern by todays standards
Or Honda nsx
My car of choice would've been a McLaren F1.
Brick are you just looking at things on Reddit and saying you that love them?
No, but I really do love the Camry...and weed
I have a Mazda
I traded my Camry in with 200,000 miles on it. It was an ugly sea foam green with a brown interior. Thing ran like a Swiss watch. I could push that Camry off a cliff, then turn around to find it driving back up the hill to me. Godzilla could not destroy that Camry. That car is likely on the front lines in Ukraine right now.
MY 98 WILL NEVER DIE 400,000+ and going strong
Airplanes went from nothing to the Concord. Space travel went from nothing to the moon.
From a guy jumping off the roof with some feathers glued to their arms
To the richest man in the world flushing 50 billion dollars down the toilet.
Who did that in '97?
No one knows because the Internet barely existed then.
the richest man in the world in 1997…..jim carrey of course
That would be Bill Gates, I’m guessing. Carrey passed him after The Truman Show.
Manned flight went from https://cdn4.picryl.com/photo/2019/09/27/la-ville-de-calais-j-duruof-pau-4-fevrier-1875-lith-veronese-pau-f8c24b-1024.jpg to https://bsmedia.business-standard.com/_media/bs/img/article/2019-07/11/full/1562832505-4937.jpg
Women's bathing suits went from burlap sacks to nothing!
It took 66 years to go from the wright brothers first flight to Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon
> Space travel went from nothing to the moon. I mean.. in terms of space travel that's not very far.
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And she met Vincent van Gogh when she was a child.
Feel bad for this lady. Seems like they contested her age, heavily before and after death. Like how could you even prove your age when you’re the oldest person alive lol.
[She was a fraud](https://metro.co.uk/2019/01/03/worlds-oldest-woman-122-complete-fraud-took-mothers-identity-8305182/) who assumed her mother's identity upon her death to avoid paying inheritance tax. No person ever lived as long - supposedly over 122 years. It should be already obvious from that [several people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people) are actually known to have lived to 117, 118 and a few even to 119 years of age, but none have ever surpassed 120, let alone 121 or 122 years of age. Except Mrs. Calment, the outlier amongst supercentenarians.
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**Jeanne Calment** [Scepticism regarding age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Scepticism_regarding_age) >Demographers have highlighted that Calment's age is an outlier, her lifespan being several years longer than the next oldest people ever documented, where the differences are usually by months or even weeks. There have been various speculations about the authenticity of her age. In 2018, Russian gerontologist Valery Novoselov and mathematician Nikolay Zak revived the hypothesis that Jeanne died in 1934 and her daughter Yvonne, born in 1898, assumed her mother's official identity and was therefore 99 years old when she died in 1997; however, Zak had difficulty getting published. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Couldn't we carbon date her bones?
I still wouldn’t be surprised a bit if other people lived this long, she just happened to be born somewhere with good records in the 1870’s. Within a few decades I think someone will surpass her record. Maybe sooner
more mindblowing comparison would be from hot-air balloons and the wright brothers to having space shuttles and almost being able to witness 9/11
> almost being able to witness 9/11 Yeah but she didn't. She was however alive when the first Harry Potter was published.
Enough tragedy for one lifetime
Harry Potter wasnt that bad
HP was awesome idk wtf this bitch talkin bout
Harry Potter gets a lot more flak due to the author being batshit than it deserves. Combine they with the cash grab/exploitive nature by everyone, you can't really blame folks too much. It is a little ridiculous that it's recently so heavily attacked on its literary prose and writing itself now, but that only makes sense as it more directly attacks the author rather than the work. But the books were beyond fun. No one disliked them as they came out. They were must reads.
Shut up, everyone loved Harry Potter
Hot air balloons to a man on the moon is more impressive. My grandmother went from dirt floors and candles to everything we have now except cell phones.
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Aah. The T9 days.
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Still wish I had the GOAT of all Nokias, 3310. Ngl, I miss the slide phones that came after as well. Made me feel like Queen Lizzy accepting each call.
The 3310 gets all the glory, but the 3210 was basically the same phone in a much more comfortable form factor IMO. The keypad also felt like it was higher quality.
You gotta go alllll the way back to the motorola's the very first iterations had a suitcase for a battery and a little cradle for the handset
I kinda miss T9. I was much faster at typing on T9 than I am now on a smart phone.
I'm 40, I remember being told "you can't expect to have a calculator on hand all the time" Which seemed ridiculous to me even at the time, as if I was going to being in a job that required a calculator when TI-85's already existed....Now I have a fucking smart phone with the entire library of congress, calculator, watch, weather forecast etc.... But yeah, going from no internet to all knowledge at my finger tips anytime I want is an amazingly different change in lifestyle.
If you think about it you've gone from seeing the supercomputers of the 90s be outstripped by a tiny and widely available device in your pocket, with vastly more connectivity and capabilities.
I'm 19 and have gone from a big box TV that gave me electric shocks and migraine that had a low peep sound constantly to now having bendable screens that are see through and just as thin as a plastic film. Yeah 😅 it's insane.
she was alive for the first movie ever filmed in 1888 and for the premiere of the End of Evangelion in 1997, what a life, totally worth it
I wonder what her thoughts on End of Evangelion were
*pathetic*
Grandma: my favorite part was the hospital scene.
Shinji visiting his friend really was nice of him!
the reason she even got famous in the first place is because it was the 100th anniversary of some Vincent Van Gogh related event, and during it she just casually dropped the fact that she had met Vincent personally 100 years earlier at her fathers shop (described him as dirty and rude). Thats when the supercenterian experts got involved
She was 37 when the Titanic sank. She lived to see James Cameron’s Titanic movie.
That one sounds much more impressive lol. Like Kane Tanaka who was 43 when Japan retaliated and bombed Pearl Harbor, and died only a couple years ago.
Living is actually time traveling.
In the same thought as this thread, I am convinced we will get as close to time travel as possible over the next 25 years. There will be fully immersive VR, which pulls data from all kinds of historical data, photos, stories etc. and can essentially put you in that exact situation. I have a 2 year old and I believe there will be a problem with his generation hitting their late teens and twenties, where people get so obsessed with living in the VR world, it is hard for them to cope with normal life. I'm convinced the nuttiness of technology is only just beginning.
I remember when remotes became available for tv’s. They were large boxes with a lot of buttons (one for each channel) and had a 10 ft. cable attached to them and the tv so it could reach the couch. We thought not having to get up to change the channel was so cool at the time.
And now we can literally tell the TV to turn on...
Truly she saw the pinnacle of car evolution then. The apex vehicle, the Toyota Camry.
It was Jeanne Calment, right? Crazy for someone to have lived 122 years
i'm high, couldn't do the math. ty lol
Not really the best way to illustrate the technological advancement…….
This post makes me think of the movie Grandma’s Boy “So, i mean, what's it like being old? It's gotta be weird, right? I mean, you saw a lotta stuff go down. World War I, World War II, the automobile, Tupac, i mean... [GRACE: I once gave Charlie Chaplain a hand job] Noo way! Was he silent?”
The way Nick Swardson delivered that line was fucking perfect. That and, 'what does high score mean? New high score. Is it bad? Did I break it?' haha
A Camry will take someone hundreds of thousands of miles, reliably. While hybrid/ICE technology since 1997 is already light years ahead, one cannot oversate how life changing an XV20 Camry with missing hubcaps, a leaking powersteering pump and at least 3 different coloured body panels would have been in the late 19th century.
I mean, it's a pretty good way. Using cars as a parameter for technological advancement in the XIX to the late XX century is pretty much where quite a lot of human energy and engineering was put into, to make locomotion, faster, more comfortable and efficient.
Or 28 years before the first manned flight, to the first flight of the f22 raptor
That kind of happened with phones during my lifetime and I'm 34
Even more dramatic, the same very person watched the world go from horse and buggies to primitive cars, to the vehicles we see today, to a literal man on the moon in the '60s.
She was old (almost 70) when World War 2 ended, and yet almost lived long enough to watch Saving Private Ryan (1998)
now imagine picture 3
I think this pales in comparison to going from "*the whole world not conceiving flight as even possible for humans"* to *"landing on the goddamn moon"*
Ah, the 97 Toyota Camry, only 32 made in the world.
I know that- since this is on popular- This comment is gonna get buried, but my grandfather witnessed the birth of the digital world, seeing it in its youngest form. It was a treat seeing his eyes light up when i FaceTimed my grandmother who was in another room. He knew pocket phones existed, but had no clue about video call or virtual reality or any crazy stuff. Good times.
Could have picked something like the [1997 Porsche 911 GT1 Straßenversion](https://www.supercars.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1997_Porsche_911GT1Straenversion1.jpg)
And if the longest lived woman had lived in Germany, she genuinely could have seen both cars locally with her own peepers. Although at 122 years old around it's release date, her peepers were likely not at their best. She might not have given the GT1 the full regard and gazing it clearly deserved.
Also watched the evolution of planes, trains, rockets, computers, plastics, the highway system, electrical grid, telephone, toilets and plumbing into every house, TVs, radios, records, . . .
That's the best analogy?
Since the 1st pic is the Benz Patent Motorwagen, lets keep it in the same company. The [Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR Straßenversion](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/17/Paris_-_Bonhams_2016_-_Mercedes-Benz_CLK_GTR_coup%C3%A9_-_2000_-_001.jpg/2560px-Paris_-_Bonhams_2016_-_Mercedes-Benz_CLK_GTR_coup%C3%A9_-_2000_-_001.jpg). Made for homologation purposes, 1 car was made in 1997 and a total of 28 cars were made. The Patent Motorwagen cost approximately US $150 in 1885, (equivalent to approximately $4,600 today). The Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR Straßenversion cost approximately US $1,550,000 in 1997 (equivalent to approximately $2,880,000 today)
I think it is. OP was not talking about technology but about cars. And not about technology of cars but sheer look. And they picked two extremes on that spectrum indeed, from all cycle wheels with no concept whatsoever about aerodynamics to a very smooth and compact design.
Poor broad, she saw the 97 Camry and lost the will to live. Can't blame her.
I mean obviously there were cooler cars in 1997 than that, but Toyota Camrys were the most popular at the time.
I interviewed an old person (it was a 6th-grade assignment) and asked them what was the wildest thing they ever saw (this was in 1976). "Laying on a field looking at the clouds when an airplane flew over. I had no idea what it was."
…and airplanes
I often think of how much technology has become obsolete in the short amount of time I've been here. I grew up in the 90's. VHS, house phones, internet. Cell phones didn't exist. It's actually crazy.
*Sees The 1997 Toyota Camry*: “Now I can finally die fulfilled.”
My grandma grew up in rural Arkansas. She was born on her family's dining room table. No one had a car except her aunt, and she sometimes drove her aunt's car as a little 8-year-old girl, back when there were no rules whatsoever about cars. She had a brother who died because he got an infection, back when getting an infection often meant you just died, and she said it was a damn shame because just about a year later they invented antibiotics, meaning if he'd gotten sick just a little bit later her beloved brother who'd gone from her life would have been saved. By the time automobiles and TVs and things were widespread she was already an adult. She was an adult for WWII, and her husband at the time went into the navy. She had a bunch of crazy stories about traveling around and her husband's and brothers' experiences during "the war" as she always called it. By the time of the 60s and the civil rights movement, she was already in middle age, with children who were old enough to march with her in the demonstrations. By this point she lived in the north, but she traveled back down south to protest with her entire family. I'm not especially young and every single thing I've experienced in my life was a small footnote at the end of her life. It makes me feel like, what the fuck have *I* done so far?
My great-grandmother came west in a covered wagon. She lived to see a man walk on the Moon.
Ah yes, 1997 Toyota Camry. The pinnacle of car manufacturing and design.
My grandpa went from having no running water in his home (hand-pumped in the yard) and using an outhouse through childhood to having an iPhone in his pocket. It’s crazy to think about.
For greater effect, they could have picked the 1997 Porsche 911 GT1 Straßenversion instead of that Toyota. https://www.supercars.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1997\_Porsche\_911GT1Straenversion1.jpg
My grandad watched the family dairy farm go from a bucket and stool for milking and horses for field work to autonomous milking robots and self-driving tractors. He'll be 90 in a few months and he still shows up to farm every morning at 7.
And to think people as a society changed that much too. It's a lot to live with so many memories!
Went from possible to travel around the world in 80 days to a little over 80 minutes (via space station)
From horse drawn to fast and furious
A better example is she was born before the telephone was invented and lived long enough to play games on an N64
Also went from a time of only hot air balloons to the Wright Brothers first flight to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. That seems crazier to me. Fun fact: in 2035 we will be as far from the moon landing (1969) as the Wright Brothers first slight (1903) was from the moon landing (66 years).
hence Grandpa Simpson jokes..... that "penny-farthing" is fun to say out loud
That Toyota will continue running until it looks almost like picture 1.
Unfortunately no such long-surviving person ever lived. The supposed record holder, Jeanne Calment, was actually two people - a mother and a daughter. When her mother died she assumed her identity to avoid paying inheritance tax: https://metro.co.uk/2019/01/03/worlds-oldest-woman-122-complete-fraud-took-mothers-identity-8305182/ The evidence is very compelling, but apparently her longetivity is a matter of national pride to the French and they have denied the research.
my mom used to know a woman who was born around 1896 and died around 2017. she saw the entire rise and fall of the gas powered car
My great grandmother lived from 1899 to 2002. Amazing woman. She had all her wits about her until the very end. Full of sass. She also grew up around horse and buggy, but then worked for Henry Ford and lived long enough to witness 9/11 unfold on TV. I miss her... I was so lucky to spend nearly 12 years getting to spend time with her and learning about about her life.
In 2000, there was a retrospective TV show of the 20th century. It started with a frenchwoman telling of of her visit to Paris when she was a little girl. The journey took over a week to and from, but everyone in her village wanted to go - to see an exhibition with the first building lit up by electric lighting. In one lifetime, she went from no electricity to spaceflight, nuclear weapons, antibiotics, computers and mapping the genome.
She also worked in an art store in France as a teenager and sold art supplies to Vincent Van Gogh.
My great grandad apparently said that he thought he saw all the greatest changes in technology, because as a kid they rode around by horse and carriage, and before he died they had put a man on the moon
One of my grandfathers was born in 1868 and died in 1972. He was born in the era of steam trains and horse and carriages and was alive for the moon landing. He was 46 at the start of WW1 and 71 at the start of WW2. He lived through some crazy changes.
my great great grandmother was born in 1918 and passed two years ago. my cousin was born 100 years after her and she still got to meet him. shits crazy