Question to Seniors - is the "future" today, the same, you imagined 30 years ago?
CuriousOne
Posts: 931
What we have "futuristic" today?
Recently, when doing morning walk, and passing by neighbors Nissan Leaf, which was plugged in and charging, I've asked myself, is today we have the future, how we were expecting it to see 30 years ago?
Electric cars - were available then also. Of course, not so cute and capable, but we have evolution today, no revolution.
Personal assistant with thinking ability? - Cortana and Siri do a very little bit of what we expected then.
Habitable Moon and Mars? - nothing changed since then.
Mobile phones? - were also available in these days, sure not so small and feature rich, but still, only evolution, no revolution.
Internet? - sure there was no internet, but internet provided nothing new, it's just a tool to access information, already created.
I'm not speaking of course about teleportation, telekinesis or other, physics law denying abilities.
How do you think, what we got in past 30 years that we can call "revolution" ? (I mean only technical field of course)
P.S. Yesterday I've got a new laptop, instead of one I bought 3 years ago. CPU speed and core number increased, hdd speed increased, power consumption decreased, but battery capacity (per cell) is same it was in 2011 and is same it was in 2003.
Recently, when doing morning walk, and passing by neighbors Nissan Leaf, which was plugged in and charging, I've asked myself, is today we have the future, how we were expecting it to see 30 years ago?
Electric cars - were available then also. Of course, not so cute and capable, but we have evolution today, no revolution.
Personal assistant with thinking ability? - Cortana and Siri do a very little bit of what we expected then.
Habitable Moon and Mars? - nothing changed since then.
Mobile phones? - were also available in these days, sure not so small and feature rich, but still, only evolution, no revolution.
Internet? - sure there was no internet, but internet provided nothing new, it's just a tool to access information, already created.
I'm not speaking of course about teleportation, telekinesis or other, physics law denying abilities.
How do you think, what we got in past 30 years that we can call "revolution" ? (I mean only technical field of course)
P.S. Yesterday I've got a new laptop, instead of one I bought 3 years ago. CPU speed and core number increased, hdd speed increased, power consumption decreased, but battery capacity (per cell) is same it was in 2011 and is same it was in 2003.
Comments
I have a 1989 vintage laptop (Psion MC400. NEC V30 CPU, 256KB RAM, Preemptive multitasking, Plug'n Play...) which got 20hours out of a single recharge.
(7.2V/2000mAh)
The PDAs designed around the same technology were world-beaters(Google the Psion S3 series)
Sure, the DELL 7240 I use at the office may be lighter and sleeker, and I guess MS has finally gotten proper multitasking and Plug'n Pray to work... Still can't beat the battery life or the keyboard...
I've been waiting for the 'Solid State storage revolution' since the mid-90s...
The only item I have with a decent 3D display is my Nintendo 3DS.
I'm still waiting for my Star Trek replicator.
(Having to settle for my CnC mill and hopefully soon a 3D printer)
Some of the first speed records for cars were made with electrics...
'Modern' cars is a disappointment. What happened to the 'less is more' and 'just enough' philosophy of the Isetta, the Messerschmitt and other 'bubble cars'?
Not only are they bigger than necessary, but they're also filled with unstable electronic 'junk' because most people don't care about learning to drive them properly.
The only 'revolution' there has been the last 30 years is the Home 3D printing and CnC fields. Sure, such equipment has been available for businesses for a long time, but no one really expected it to get into people's homes.
Phone had dials and were teathered to the wall. C was a new language, only a few classes offered it, the rest were traditional languages. Folks waited for time on the mainframe, and only a few folks knew how to use a PC as a tool.
Today some thing are better and some are not. We have 3D printers, we can mod our prop on FPGA and implement peripheral circuits in FPGA. I have 16 core micro super computer on my desk, that I helped bring into being through funding, although few know what to do with it. WE have robots exploring Mars. We have a robot that left the solar system.
WE also see the government as two identical parties, both controled by corporate money. We see large groups of people actively fighting science and knowledge.
I'd say things are not drastically different from what we'd reasonably expect.
But actually, it did happen - it just kind of sneaked up on us. From around 1987-1988 I started to travel around the world to install and update software. I had to ship the software in advance, as it was typically a stack of 10-20 CCT tapes of the largest types I could find (and with the highest density). No, the reason I had to travel wasn't because we didn't have Internet - first, there was Internet, although restricted to universities generally, and secondly, we had commercial X.25 which we used for interconnecting everything. It was just that it was limited to 19200 bps (bits per second) or so. And yes, that got me to write communation programs, compression programs, and other tools needed to eventually transfer software between countries. Something I enjoyed immensely. But back to the CCT tapes.. after some years those guys who worked with DEC computers could start showing off by replacing the stack of CCT tapes with Exabyte tapes, you could keep them in a pocket instead of shipping a box. I still had to use CCT, for some time. And after installation I had to produce a set of backups.. and ship a box back home (and storing another one on site). And all this for computers with maybe 2-4 gigs of disk space.. at this point I had already started to imagine some kind of solid state storage, maybe cube-shaped, size of a sugar cube, just like in the SF novels.
(One guy from the minicomputer manufacturer actually travelled with a full-size SCSI harddisk instead of using tapes.. that was a pretty good idea).
Some years after we had Exabyte drives everywhere, this time for data storage. One drive, for backup, in a quiet area, only writing a stream of 10240 byte records (TAR format).. it never fails. Replace that with 16 drives writing lots of short records in various sizes, and lots of file marks etc, in a noisy computer room.. you can fiddle with SCSI cables until the cows come home, but at any point in time you'll have a couple of drives failing. Then I really started to hate moving tape drives. I wanted solid state storage, no moving parts, no cables.
Later we got DLT drives.. same problem. One works fine, a whole bunch of them not so.
But look now.. we have USB sticks, and small SD cards (and too small micro SD cards). If this isn't solid state with just about everything we thought about 30 years ago, what is it then? Absurd amounts of data can be stored in no space at all. Show _that_ to my old self back in 1987 or so, and to anyone else in the business.. 128GB stored that way, even 32GB.. that would probably be more impressive than the 3TB USB disk I have here on my desk. Never mind that flash and the accompanying electronics isn't entirely reliable. Looking back, I still think this is the science fiction item we imagined. Even more than we imagined.
About that time, in partial payment for some software development (the ONLY video tape rental place in the Twin Cities using barcode technology) I got my first video recorder. A Sony Betamax portable with a pretty neat camera. VERY cumbersome, but I managed to take it to Hawaii and get some great video. Later, Sony came out with a self-contained version that was the precursor to the small video cams we have now.
Except now we have phones that do a much better job of taking pictures - go figure.
Somebody mentioned all the electronic Smile we have in our cars. It isn't there because we don't know how to use an automobile. It's there because the government - prodded incessantly by the tree huggers - forces manufacturers to put it in there. A side benefit is that we get much more efficient engines, which helps on our bottom line because of lower fuel use. Of course, you have to have specialized tools and knowledge to do a tune up that I used to do in my garage. Electric cars will only survive with massive government subsidy - they will never be practical for someone like me who commutes 55 miles each way daily. Don't get me wrong, I have a Polaris Ranger EV - I bought it because it had more torque and was quieter than the gas powered models - I love the thing. But now the battery pack is starting to show signs of getting tired. It will cost me $1300 to replace the batteries after 4 years. So, I'm thinking about trading it in on a gas model, which will last a lot longer before I need to spend that kind of money on it.
My phone was a Princess with push buttons but we had an old, black one with a dial that worked just as well.
TV quality has gotten better and TV's themselves have become much lighter, thinner and less costly.
I agree that solid state storage has grown in quantum leaps. 30 years ago I thought a 5 1/4" floppy that held 750k was a pretty good deal. It quickly evolved from there.
In the 80's I had LORAN in my airplane and some pretty sophisticated software in my integrated navigation system that allowed me to actually set "waypoints" and create my own synthetic routes and approaches. It worked pretty good but wasn't approved for IFR approaches. Later GPS came along and made all of that equipment obsolete. Now we have better navigation on our phones and in our cars than I had in that airplane.
In the 70's and 80's I was very active in Radio Control Models. I even built my own Heathkit RC TX/RX and Servos. But all we had was airplanes. Then came the Heli's. Somewhere in there somebody stuck 4 motors on sticks surrounding a central "processor" that helped to stabilize it and the quad was born. Look where we are now - things are changing very rapidly in that area, with newer autopilots coming out almost monthly. And this is just in the consumer realm. The military has been doing it for years.
So, yes, I guess you could say that most of this stuff is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but it depends on how you look at it.
Personally I had a Timex Sinclair 1000 and 2068 and was involved in the Capitol Area Timex Sinclair user group until I moved back to Pennsylvania later in 1985.
Edit:
My view of the future was that pocket computers would be the "in thing" but the Radio Shack pocket computer was anything but a pocket computer
In the end, we have to ask ourselves, "are we living more enriching lives because of technology?" Surveys and polls suggest that overall, the answer many give is no. We live faster, more hectic lives, and there's evidence we're personally interacting less with each other than ever before. This might be an issue of perception. Some people feel they can't live without their smart phone. But is that because it's positively impacted their way of life, or are they now hopelessly chained to it and can't escape? I imagine for most of us it's both.
Someone else may have corrected the statement about no Internet in 1985. There was an Internet, though mostly limited to email and Usenet (and gopher and other things no one uses any more), and that among mostly education and US government agencies/contractors. For forums and sharing ideas, we had things like CompuServe, which by 1985 I was already spending too much time on!
Electric cars have been available for more than a century, and the cars that are available now are far superior to earlier vehicles. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the power source. While batteries have improved the change has been far less than the advances in other areas. Where are the fuel cells that would have increased range and efficiency while reducing emissions to water and CO2?
Personal assistant with thinking ability? I'd settle for speech recognition that could tell the difference between Ken and Ann on my in car bluetooth.
Habitable Moon and Mars? Space exploration has been a disappointment so far. After the moon landing I was expecting we would see more advancement. Orbital power satellites beaming power to earth, mining the asteroids for minerals, using the sun for smelting and refining, manufacturing that takes advantage of zero gravity and high vacuum to name just a few.
Mobile phones? They have been one of the major advancements. Much more than just a phone, and even more than the portable computer pad of Isaac Asimov's story. They are now pretty much the do it all personal assistant. Phone, camera, alarm clock, appointment book, information storage, entertainment, internet access, and more.
Internet? I think you grossly underestimate the value of the internet. It has made a huge difference in how much information a person can access, saved a lot of natural resources, and made communications much simpler.
The biggest advances of all have been in the area of computers and electronics. From the Altair 8800, introduced in 1975 that more or less kick started personal computers through the IBM PC and it's clones, to what we have today the change has been revolutionary. Processor, memory, and storage have increased in both size and speed by more than five orders of magnitude.
On the whole the advances are about what I expected, just not even, or in the areas expected.
Yes, advances in computer and electronics are amazing, but did they did a revolution, as for example steam machines did in industry?
Instead of space exploration and science advancement, we're posting likes on facebook and playing farm games. If asked, I'd prefer life on mars to existence of internet at all
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar
There are a few of us!
This is the year of the flying car, hoverboard, and instant pizza. We can definitely say Marty McFly's future has not yet happened.
I would say there was a larger revolutionary change between 1975 and 1985 regarding personal computing, than between 1985 and 2015. PCs during that era permanently altered the way of doing business globally. Life pre-PC was extensively different than after. Since then, it's been about speed and capacity and graphics, but the core benefits brought about during the first decade is more or less the same. Even the Internet, IMO, has not had the same level of impact. It merely extended what we already had.
John Abshier
We did get some revolutionary advances - Dick Tracy's wrist radio came and was then supplanted by cell phones, satellite phones and navigation, personal 'appliance' computers that fit in a brief case or pocket.
However, by the mid-1980's it became clear that most future developments were just going to be evolutionary (except maybe in the entertainment industry, which seems to be the only industry with funds enough to do so.) In the 1960's the cold war and its associated paranoia / one-ups-man ship between apparently high tech adversaries was the driving force for new technology. In the late 1980's a lot of the cold war paranoia was dying down. Once the Wall fell there was no longer that driving force. Today's adversaries are not high tech so there's no drive there, and our current leaders (all parties) don't seem to have an imagination or be interested in bold advances. So evolution will continue until there is a crisis or the rapidly developing nations get advanced enough to raise some concerns (although I think that the US at least will be willing to sit on the sidelines and watch (its a lot cheaper).
Tom
Our PCB design station, 8 layer, was $50K, and ran on a HP computer. It put out RS-274 data, (Why do you think they call it Gerber Data)
Today the design software is free and can do 16 layers plus.
Our entry level Photo Plotter was 20: x 16" and cost $50K. It took 6-8 hours to plot a complex board. Now you can print off a printer in 2 minutes. 2000 DPI cost $$$ back then. Now it's normal.
I think we have come a long way in the PCB fab realm.
I was referring to the Laser Printers the PC fab houses use. I guess that sounded like I was referring to a personal printer.
Another big disappointment was NASA's manned space program. By the end of 1985 NASA had flown 23 orbital shuttle missions. I was really excited about the space program at that time, and was looking forward to the development of the Freedom space station that President Reagan had announced the year before. But then the Challenger disaster happened in January of 1986, and the facts came out about how the military involvement in the shuttle program pressured NASA into an unsafe launch schedule. Mismanagement of the shuttle program from the very beginning turned a small space transport for ferrying astronauts and supplies into an overblown flying semi-truck. The international space station is another bloated boondoggle that started out as a proposal for a smaller station with just a few modules.
So over the past 30 years NASA has wasted their funds on two bloated manned space flight projects when they could have spent much less on smaller versions of the shuttle and space station. This would have given them the resources to continue development of Apollo style rockets, which is where we find ourselves today. With more advanced Apollo style rockets we could have a colony on the moon by now.
By 2015 I thought we would have landed men on Mars. However, now that I know more about the logistics of such a venture I don't think that will happen for another 30 years.
I am happy with the unmanned exploration of the solar system. This has kept up with my expectations. I'm looking forward to what we discover on Ceres and Pluto later this year.
I had seen the beginning of the Internet and LAN connectivity prior to 1985. When I consulted with NASA in the early 80s one of my co-workers who graduated from the University of Illinois would communicate back to the university using ARPANET. Around 1982 we drove over to Stanford to visit a professor who had developed a disk-less graphics workstation that communicated to a file server over a 3 mbps Ethernet connection. Stanford called this network the Stanford University Network, or SUN for short. The professor left Stanford and started SUN Microsystems a couple of years later. I thought that the networks would grow to interconnect more computers, but very few people would have predicted the Internet that we have today.
I think another thing that was foreseen 30 years ago are the flat screen displays of today. It took a little longer to happen than what some people thought, but the transformation from CRT TVs to flat-screens has been amazing. Along with that is the progression from SD to HD to 4K video. I thought that this would happen, but I thought that transmission and recording would still be analog. Back in 1985 I never thought we would be able to do all of this digitally.
You're right, this did take longer than expected. I think it came down to production scale and affordability. The technology was there, but it wasn't practical for a consumer product. In a 1981 magazine article for Video Magazine (the issue was all about future tech, and included a lead-in from Asimov), I wrote about the coming flat screen hang-on-the-wall sets. I think I said something like within 5-10 years, which obviously was quite unrealistic.
Oh, and wow! Someone on eBay is selling this very issue:
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Vintage-1981-January-Video-Magazine-1-Magazine-of-Home-Video-/281312630168
50 years ago my job in the Air Force got replaced by computers. :-)
Grew up in a small down with few means. This actually took me to some older vacuum tech as that was available and I enjoyed it immensely. During my childhood, I could be found with an 8 bit computer connected to a well tuned and tweaked tube television as a display. Now you know where my love of composite NTSC video comes from. I just like the overall feel, and with the tech of today, we can squeeze an awful lot out of that old signal, and it for the most part will still render correctly on ancient televisions. How cool is that?
To me, we are in a nice mix of very futuristic things and some rather mundane things.
Generalities:
Society has advanced some. People are allowed more personal expression and freedom. Overall, it's a good thing. I remember seeing "Star Trek" as a kid, and to me it seemed unremarkable. There were people there doing stuff. I recall hearing lots of comments, shocking comments, from older people who really didn't see people as people in the same way I did. Back then, an interracial kiss, multiple races from seemingly different nationalities all working together seemed ordinary. And women! They were there too, on the bridge. Cool. We still have obstacles, but I see my generation seemed to go down this road, and the up and comers right now are moving rapidly onto other things.
To me, that's all futuristic given where I came from.
In terms of infrastructure?
The US isn't futuristic at all. We've not made the kinds of big investments we could and should have and that's kind of sad. I think it will cost us too, but the data on that won't be in for a while. There is time. I would absolutely love to see us tear it up and build new. Lots of value there. Other nations are ahead of us.
Manufacturing?
The future is sort of here globally, but I'm not seeing it yet in the US to the degree I would like to. Robotics, automation, new processes, etc... are happening, but I see a lot of the work cited outside the US, and that means we could do more flat out.
3D printing / additive manufacturing, etc... are futuristic things to me. Seeing the early tech rapidly adopted is fantastic, and it's the stuff of sci-fi books I read as a kid.
Phones / Communications / Internet. This is the future. We live in an amazing, well connected, so much computer power it's difficult to imagine time. A real combination of humans plus limited, well bounded artificial intelligence type software was just released as a service. x.io is the service, and it's for arranging meetings. These guys believe they can literally solve the arranging meeting problem space. Two person hold'em limit poker was recently solved, and we are capable of actually looking at problem spaces with an eye toward resolving them
Simply fantastic, and we are just getting started!
I use my phone in ways I read about in sci-fi as a kid, and am generally pleased with advancements we've seen. Good times.
Space got stunted. Politics, war, economic issues, priorities. Let's just say we could very easily have done much more, should have, and will regret it all going as it did. That said, we are seeing some efforts to advance this important aspect of our world, and Space X seems futuristic to me. The vision is there, and the engineering seems to be top notch.
Materials?
We are in a wonderful time for materials science. It's sexy now, and the physics we understand, coupled with advanced manufacturing means we are getting simply amazing materials. Tip of the iceberg, if you ask me. Much more is yet to come.
Bio-Tech / life sciences.
Humans are scary good at electro mechanical. We are just now beginning to understand biological processes, and the promise there is huge as are the risks. I think we are beginning to see the future, and it's going to be very big. More life changing than electro-mechanical ever will.
All in all, we got a lot of good stuff. The summary I would give is the world looks much the same as it did when I was a kid, but there are these shiny things in it. And that's a good thing. Not as much as the promise visions of the 60's and 70's put out there, but damn spiffy if you ask me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyinD6ZDqeg
It was Bill who brought us the vi editor in 1976. Still in use every day, by me at least, nearly 40 years later. Although normally in it's reincarnation as vim.
About that disk-less work station. It was John Gage of Sun who said "The network is the computer."
It was only during last year or so that my workstations started going disk-less. It's taken nearly 40 years!
Well of course there are two ways to interpret "disk-less".
One is that I'm now using SSDs rather than spinning disks. Which is nice. So there is still local storage and file systems. But hey, we are going to need software somewhere to get the thing booted up to a runnable state.
The other is is the more profound shift in my view. That is that my work, or pretty much anything I do, is no longer dependent on that local storage. Rather it's all in github, or dropbox, or our cloud servers at Google, Azure and elsewhere. You can pretty much burn down any machine I use without me flinching. I'll just get or move to another one and continue.
This major change in how I work with computers is not down to being disk-less with SSD's but rather the relatively recent arrival of hithub, dropbox, cheap cloud servers and so on that makes me independent of any workstation.
This has all been a long time coming. About 40 years as I say.
What surprised me about the modern television is not so much that the screens are now huge and flat, which is pretty amazing, rather it's that television as we have known it since forever is seems to be disappearing. A good proportion of my acquaintances don't own an actual television any more. Why have broadcast or cable TV when you have an internet? It's redundant and wasteful.
On a general note, 30 years is not very long. Back in the mid 1970's us kids were playing with LEDs and TTL chips and a bit later itching to get hold of the first of the new fangled microprocessors that were on the horizon. We already knew of Moore's Law so it was clear how things were going to go in our lifetimes.
More generally: As a kid back in 1970 we were busy drawing graphs of functions in maths class. You know parabola, exponential etc. That exponential thing really struck me. Immediately I saw the human population growing to incredible numbers, resources like oil, water and food or even just space, becoming depleted rapidly. That moment I could see that it's likely all over for the human race, or at least civilization, in my life span. We are not quite there yet but that seems to be panning out as predicted as well.
Even more generally: The social consequences of all this technological progress are a huge topic which has held surprises. But that is another topic I guess.
A couple of months back I attended a meet up of node.js developers. https://twitter.com/helnode. You can spot my grey locks in the banner picture there. This is basically a meeting of nearly a hundred web developers, front end and back end, with a sprinkling of actual software engineers from the world of real-time embedded systems.
That gathering was almost all young, male and white. There were two girls there.
After the meetup a few of us went across the road for a couple of beers. I was somewhat amazed when the discussion turned from the normal geeky stuff to a debate about: Where are the women in engineering? How come we only have two here? (They did not join us for a beer), How do we encourage more females to join in? What is it that us guys do to drive them away?
It suddenly hit me. I had not seen a female in engineering at any work place I have been involved with for nearly twenty years. What happened? There were girls studying maths, physics, engineering, computer science with us back in the 1970s. There were a smattering of girls in engineering in my work places after that. They kind of disappeared without me noticing.
Then I become aware of the ongoing debate about the gender and ethnic imbalance in the high tech workplaces of the USA.
That Start Trek utopia suddenly seems further away now that it was a few decades ago.
Competition and unrelenting technological advancement have created a utopia of sorts! I'm stunned that I can buy 32GB of electronic storage for $15, and that it fits in a plastic wafer the size of my thumbnail! That's way past Star Trek technology.
I'm not as concerned about resources as Heater. There are clever solutions to practically every problem. We don't implement many of them yet simply because the need isn't yet acute.
The only fear I have for the future revolves around collective bad choices we might make. Ben Franklin opined that a society that would trade freedom for safety deserves neither. We are drowning in laws, regulations, and unneeded fixes, imho.
After much fiddling around I determine that it's not my newish Samsung monitor that's dead but rather the similarly newish Nvidia graphics card in my PC.
The monitor thought has lost 16 rows of pixels along the bottom.
Both are going back for repair/replacement today.
Today seems ridiculous now. Makes those old tube radios and TV's of my childhood seem quite dependable. I don't recall anyone ever messing with replacing tubes and never saw a tube tester until years later at a HAM radio swap fest.
Transistor radios were terrible for a very long time. But we still had portable tube radios, with 90 volt batteries, that were much better in sound quality.
The crappy TV reception was an education for a ten year old. We were far enough from any roads not to suffer from car ignition interference often. But a passing aircraft would cause the signal to fade in and out. Right there was a lesson in the wave nature of radio and multipath interference as the direct signal and the reflection from the plane slipped in and out of phase. Fascinating. We had a radar in the house!
Things like the 32GB SD card are stunning. As I said we were aware of Moore's law decades ago so logically I could have told you pretty much where we should be at any time. But then there are always surprises, having not been paying attention for a few iterations and finding things are suddenly 10 times bigger(smaller) that they were last time you checked:)
Sadly, for me at least, I'm not so optimistic about the resources thing. When the oil expires we lose energy and materials, agriculture declines, food get's scarce the Third World War becomes more likely...
Speaking of which... one of the most remarkable feats of the last 7 decades is holding off on a third world war for such a long time. We have had generations going by who were totally insulated from such horrors. This seems almost unprecedented in the history of the human race.
There are still lots of dark spots. I know about those. We all do. But, there are more bright spots than there were before. To me, this is encouraging.
90 volt battery radios sounding better.
Yes they did, particularly if you were listening to AM radio, though the older FM ones do sound great. Modern FM radios can exceed the quality of an older tube radio. Modern AM radios mostly suck.
The tube ones had a few attributes that brought that great quality. One of them is mass. Your average table or console type radio was a wood box, steel chassis, internal coil antenna with trimmer, and or long wire with same. Some even included powered speakers. An electromagnet provided the flux density needed. The speakers were solidly connected to that mass, and the response curve of the receiver was different than we often see today. Many tube radios went to 10Khz of bandwidth, as did many AM stations. Older audio gear had response curve differences too, and those are related to how AM works, and it works best with a loud signal, compressed, and response biased to bring out the mid range and bass. DC coupling on tube radios often went down to 10Hz or so, which meant real bass, not this 30 to sometimes 50Hz Smile seen in many radios today. (somebody somewhere should get a flogging for those gaffes)
I've seen the speaker move on warped vinyl over AM broadcast in the past. No solid state device I've owned ever reproduced that, though I did have a hi-fi VCR that would reproduce it from a warped vinyl recording. Those things had an insane good S/N + Bandwidth combination. One could record a CD directly, and the only real change was +2 to 4db noise.
Anyway, the older radios also included circuits that contained big inductors. I've noticed differences over the years as we moved away from inductors in radio receivers. FM seems to transition nicely. AM? Not so much.
Finally, those table / console radios were made to fill rooms with nice sound. Some of them contained passive equalization, and some of those adjustable, to optimize the quality of the sound and it's presence in a room. Our old Zenith console had a baffle behind the speaker, with a knob one could pull or push in and general instructions on how to locate the radio, and "tune" it's response to the room it's in. Very cool stuff. We do that with a DSP today, or very coarse presets, which are not the same thing.
The first modern radio / audio systems I really liked over the great gear of the 60's / 70's are the ones with the smart DSP. You put a mic in the room, maybe a couple mics, and then run the little program that optimizes the response of the unit for the room / speaker placement. Those rock hard. Recommended. Otherwise, old tube gear is also recommended.
And to be clear, tube radios don't always produce perfect sound. Semi-conductors are far more accurate in most cases. They do produce great sound. Same goes for vinyl. Both are just well aligned with the kinds of sounds humans tend to enjoy and crave. Notably, this is still true for young people who have never had those influences.
Some of them I know are collecting and using vinyl. They crave the same sounds I did. Interesting. All they had to do was hear it. As for the table / AM radio, all it took was one sports play by play filling the room for the impact of that older tech to become clear. And that's one of the very best old radio experiences still available today. Get an older table or console radio. Cap it, tune it up, etc... Then place it, turn it up, get the TV interference sorted, and watch the event with the sound down, radio on. Most people will absolutely love this. And it's mono, in a corner, on a table, etc... and it will just fill the room nicely without being overbearing. People can still talk comfortably.
The subtle difference is limited bandwidth. The tube radio will respond very well up through about 8Khz, rolling off after that. It's response curve will be highly differentiated from every other thing, including people, in that room. Those two attributes allow our human brains to differentiate our sounds and natural sounds from those made by the radio.
Notice how many retail audio systems have limited bandwidth, etc...? It's for the same reasons. The sound is there to fill the space, but it's not there to inhibit human interactions.
I'm not optimistic on the resources either. There is way too much money and power associated with them. Phasing in alternatives makes perfect sense, except for that money and power.
I very strongly agree about crappy TV being an education. I learned about antennas and built several highly optimized ones as a kid. It was about getting "Star Trek" to display properly.
Re: Composite
Here in the US they are everywhere. No worries yet. There will be someday. But that's not today.
As for dependable... Some tube gear was. Some of it was not. I made large amounts of date money recalibrating and tweaking tube TV sets. There were a lot of them still in use, and there were also a lot of mixed units too. Those contained all three things, tubes, transistors and IC's. (Zenith made a few of these that were actually fantastic TV's, even by the standards for SD TV today.) Once I mastered my Atari computer well enough to produce all the patterns and color / grey scales I needed, I went through the TV sets I had found, fixed and used as displays. Got those just pristine! And that took a long time actually. But there was an education all the way through.
Then, repeat for other people. When they saw the difference, they paid me what they thought that difference was worth. Often, it was worth a lot.
And that's one thing I don't like about this future. We are moving away from tech that people can get access to. One thing about tubes was the human scale. One could see all the parts, go do some reading, and really understand it all. It was human scale. Same for early computers. Human scale.
The devices today are fantastic, but they are not human scale, and that means some of the humans hiding things they don't want the other humans to know about. And we all know that has resulted in this cat 'n mouse game of tech we all experience today. A few of the smarter humans are fighting against teams of some of the other smarter humans, both with conflicting goals. The info most humans need falls out of that mess. Not pretty.
But, my past doing something, say hiking in unknown territory looks very different. Back then, I would seek maps, make my own, and depend on my own mind to fill in and manage the details. Today, I can get all of that, pack it onto a portable phone, and still use my mind to manage the details, but it's augmented with this GPS and computer tech in fantastic ways! I can get more data, share with people, return to an exact spot much easier, etc... Wonderful. Even better, I can still share what's in my mind with some fidelity. Takes me a while, and that takes some skills to do. Not everybody has those skills, or is inclined to realize them.
The tech of today enables most of us to do that with relative ease. This too is fantastic. I'm making sketches on my Note 4 phone, which is actually a quite respectable computer complete with 2560x1440 pixel display. (insane) I can fling those to my peers, refine ideas, make jokes, do art, and it's all painless and where warranted, very highly productive. This is pure sci-fi to me. Love it. Just wish it were not so closed and painful at times.