rfc1394's Journal: It was 20 years ago today

It was 20 years ago today, May 20, 1984, that The Terminator arrived from the future. It is interesting to consider how much of the world has changed in twenty years.

Warning: Plot Spoilers

For those who have never seen the movie, here is a summary: In the story, there has been a nuclear war, caused by machine intelligence seeing all humanity as a threat and triggering WW3 as a means to destroy that threat. The machines then operate death camps on a 24/7 basis to complete the extermination. A man named John Connor is able to lead the masses in an uprising to smash the machines and stop man's extinction. The Terminator is then sent back in time by the machines in an attempt to change its present by altering its past, specifically by killing Connor's mother before he is even conceived.

Having watched that movie many times in the past few weeks I am thinking how many things have changed in our world.

• Ubiquious reachability: while pagers were available then, they were relatively expensive and they weren't two-way. Today virtually anyone can afford a cell phone and anyone can get e-mail, even if you don't have a computer.
• Computers were very expensive then; today they are affordable by almost anyone, and the usability of them is tremendously better than it was when the DOS command line was king. Also today's desktop computers rival the power and capacity of mainframes then.
• Microwave ovens allow anyone instant hot tea or coffee or popcorn
• The legalizing of home taping spurred the acquisition of VCRs, which encouraged movies to be released on tape, which encouraged the development of DVDs
• The development of inexpensive fax machines has basically eliminated the need to mail short documents. In 1984, most newspaper help wanted ads for technical people had an address to mail resumes. By 1994, almost all ads used a fax number. Today, almost no place which is hiring anyone above a low-level peon job (and even some of those) lists a street address and either uses fax or e-mail.
• Unsolicited advertisements were basically received in the (postal) mail, which costs money. Today, spam represents 90% of the e-mail I get.
• Real-time communications across any but short distance was exorbitantly expensive. The Internet was unheard of and accessibility for ordinary people would be about a decade away. Today the Internet has collapsed space and distance for many people, has made many forms of long-distance communication either cheap or nearly free, and is a destructive threat to many organizations that collect rents for their middleman activities.
• Oh yes, a certain Austrian-born body builder was ripping people's hearts out of their chest in a popular movie. Today that same man is now the Governor of California.

So, what's your thoughts about how things have changed?