Solarboy Returns! (2)

It's amazing how much we take for granted even though we've survived well enough without them before. 

Don't you remember CRT televisions and monitors? Big, heavy, blurry glass boxes. For most of a century, the television set in its electron gun form has dominated the culture war. No other instrument shaped society so completely other than the gun. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, and a moving picture is worth a million lines of speech. 

It is THE very image of conspicuous consumption. Refrigerators have some use, but televisions were the epitome of luxury goods, only recently replaced by the internet. You're not really middle class unless you had a TV inside your house. 

TVs... as much as they gave me such joy in my childhood, I also kinda blame the easy access to cartoons and entertainment for free over the airwaves for killing the local comics industry.

If you're old enough to remember watching cartoons on CRT TVs, when was the time you realized "Huh, so we're really in the future now"?

Light, flat, extremely power-efficient TVs (60W vs 120W of a typical CRT TV)), and cheap enough for everyone to own - the future of scifi that they had to fake with projectors due to the lack of large enough TV screens...

The future became commonplace so quickly.

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What I love most about modern technology is that as capable and more compact as it gets, our focus on miniaturization also means much more energy-efficient circuits.

Don't you remember a time when everything was still made of big bulky plastic?

Don't you remember a time when everything produced so much heat?

Don't you remember having to load up on batteries so often instead of rechargeable devices with USB or two-prong AC sockets?

Now even a small kit can run most TV sets, power routers for cable internet, and light up the whole home. This... this is normal now. 

And that is AWESOME.