On Reading Issues of Wired from 1993 to 1995
&gt; In “Scenarios,” a special edition from 1995, the guest editor Douglas Coupland took it upon himself to compile a “reverse time capsule,” which he deemed “not a capsule directed to the future, but rather to the citizens of 1975.” What artifacts, he asked, “might surprise them most about the direction taken by the next 20 years?” Included in the capsule—alongside non-tech items such as a chunk of the Berlin Wall, Prozac, and a Japanese luxury sedan—were a laptop (“more power in your lap than MIT’s biggest mainframe”), an Apple MessagePad (“hand-held devices are replacing secretaries”), and a cellular phone. Scanning my apartment, I can spot progeny of all three. One suspects that, were we to engineer our own reverse time capsule today and ship it back to the citizens of 1995, they might not be all that surprised by the direction we’ve taken.<p>I remember 1995 pretty well; I think 2016 has a lot more in common with it than 1995 has in common with 1974.  Honestly, I don&#x27;t think life has changed all that much in the last twenty years.  Sure, everyone has a smartphone, and back then almost no-one had a _cell_phone, and the Internet is faster, and computers can do more and are more reliable, but things really aren&#x27;t fundamentally different.<p>We had the Web then, and we have it now.  We had internet communities than, and we have them now.  We listened to music then, and we listen to it now.  Computers have been integrated far better into our lives, but they&#x27;re doing essentially the same things (I still remember watching a QuickTime video of The Spirit of Christmas back in 1996; that&#x27;s no different in kind than Hulu or Netflix, just in degree).