The Eirlys Timeline's Tech
I am a considerably tech-interested person, so a lot of my fiction, and especially solarpunk fiction, includes tech elements. I try to make it not a centerpiece but a backbone, a supporting character rather than the protagonist, if you will. In Eirlys's world, the one that I began to depict in Peace & Violence, certain pieces of technology have found new roles. Some modern tech has been advanced in a humane direction, some of it has been cast to the wayside, and some of it is alive and kicking almost exactly how it is today.
Welcome back to Futurism! Where else are you going to get this stuff?
Yes, I am going to retcon a few minor details, but just imagine the below is all from an enthusiast trying to explain their tech to some young school-age children.
Readers
I think your parents might have called them tablets? Yeah, the purpose has kinda changed since then. Mostly, it's shifted away from short-form communication and videos and stuff, which have moved to comms, speakers, and TVs. So nowadays, they're mostly for reading and writing, but also video calls, since comms don't have cameras.
Well, we call them "readers" because before the Emissive Mode switch was invented, there were two kinds: tablets and e-readers. The "tablets" were large general-purpose devices, with bright, pixely touch screens, much like those old phones, just without the communication parts, and much bigger. E-readers ended up becoming our "readers" because that was the base of the technology. When e-readers with emissive mode started coming out, they were still distinct from "tablets" because of their approach: tablets were still capitalist devices, made to sell your attention, you know all about that though; but these e-readers were somewhat revolutionary because they didn't do that, they had basic respect for its users, and encouraged them to make it a supplement to their lives, instead of a replacement for it.
At first, a lot of people didn't get them. They cost a lot of money, which a lot of people didn't have nearly enough of. It was a limited resource, and they needed it to get other things they needed, like housing and food. I know! Some people are just greedy! Eventually, the prices of these started coming down, and then the Pacific Nuclear Crisis happened. After that, a lot more of them were getting made by a lot of different people. They could do this now without patents, but yeah you might want to ask your history teacher about patents.
As a lot of the older tablets and phones gradually stopped working, people ended up switching to the post-Pacific readers, which lasted a lot longer, and were built to work together with other things.
The early readers were some of the first devices to revert the app idea, mostly because they didn't have a lot of apps to begin with. Yeah, all the bits of software were grouped and walled off into little containers called apps, short for applications. Getting them to work together was quite difficult. But it wasn't like that forever; there was a day before apps when it already worked a lot like today's tech does!
Comms
Ohhh, did you know that if you wanted to chat with someone on one of those old flat phones, you had to get a number from them? Yeah, the tap exchange wasn't invented until about 2030, somehow! And all you needed was that number, so anyone and everyone could message you! ...That's not supposed to sound cool. I don't think you all know what spam is, do you? No, not that! It's when someone sends a bunch of unwanted messages. It's quite noi-- exactly! Imagine someone being able to do that to your comm! It would be a lot harder to find the chats you actually want, right? Most of the time, they were trying to get you to buy something, give them your money-- right! Aren't you glad we figured out the tap exchange?
Emoji, yeah, for the longest time there was only a very small set you could use. There were a few apps that allowed that-- yeah, you all would need to have the same app, they didn't cooperate. And even then, they put limits on how many you could have. Oh yeah, those effects were also stuck to a few small platforms for a while. There were a few competing standards for this, but hey, at least we got one to stick before the Crisis!
The device that had this role before was the phone. You had to keep it in your pocket, and it took up a lot of room there. Plus, because its screen was bigger, it was a lot more addictive, and capitalists, well, capitalized. People realized that smaller screens were less addictive, and so they started ditching their smart-phones, and switched to updated flip-phones, and smart-watches.
As for the name? It was sci-fi nerds, and it caught on! People started using it to refer to smart-watches being used as a communicator, as the primary device instead of a secondary one. I think some of your grandparents might still use flip-phones, but most people these days use a comm for its convenient access when it's needed, paired with earbuds for better sound.
VR Sets
Oh these. Lots of people use them to play video games now. You know, they used to be big, bulky, heavy, and they had huge, thick wand-like controllers, instead of the glove controllers we have now. Oh, and the field of view used to be as low as 50 degrees, so you could only see a tiny rectangle in front of you! It went up to 110 and sat there for a while, so you had tunnelvision when you were in VR. Now it's a lot better, you can see a lot more in the virtual or augmented worlds.
Oh and the worlds... they used to be segmented between different apps, too! Your avatar might not be the same from world to world, and you might have to create a new account for each app you wanted to visit a world from. And could you imagine how low-poly it got?
One of the first popular MR games after the Pacific was a game where you could catch Pokémon in MR. You still play that one?! Super cool! I've got some cool catches to show you later.
It was pretty convenient to use the lens to play older games too, people still play Doom with that, on a virtual 2D screen, through a 3D screen, and immersive. And a lot of other games, too!
The shared sets at the arcade are still the best out there.
(note: I took a break to play VR Cobblemon with my brother just before writing this section. So yeah that's where this came from. Still just the coolest thing, if only it didn't keep stuttering.)
TVs
The hardware actually hasn't changed much in the last, oh I don't know how many years. The biggest work was in the software, the complete removal of apps to find and watch things. Instead, you just turn it on and search for what you want to watch. Oh, did you know, they used to defer voice searches to a server somewhere else, owned by a corporation? Of course they used it to spy on people! They wanted to serve them advertisements with what they heard. At one point they even trained computer voices on voices from voice search! No, it's because they didn't agree to it. Or at least, not knowingly. You probably don't want to ask your history teacher about Terms of Service.
A long, long time ago, there was a TV service called cable, or actually a set of competing services but never mind that. Cable started out as a way to get a bunch of TV channels -- this part was before on-demand -- in one place so you could watch whatever, and a lot more than antenna TV could have. Yeah, most places don't really use antenna these days, but it's nice to have, and fun to play with if you're careful. Eventually, you needed to buy different packages, on top of your existing cable service, yes this is with money, to watch certain kinds of things, or certain channels.
Then along came Netflix. This app had everything you could want to watch, in one place, for a low price. As more and more people got fed up with cable, they dropped cable and switched to Netflix, they called this cord-cutting. Then other companies wanted to do what Netflix was doing, so they stood up their own app and took all their things off of Netflix -- yeah, they could do that! Isn't it crazy? Anyway, after that, people had to pay a lot more to watch the same stuff.
So they just stopped paying, and torrenting went mainstream. Yeah, torrenting is actually the backbone of our modern on-demand TV system, we mostly just put an index and a good search on top of it.
Vehicles
Bicycles have been around forever, and not too much has changed since they were first invented. The biggest change was that, now some of them have batteries and throttles that can help you go faster than you normally could, and with less effort. E-bikes became a big thing in the mid to late 20s.
Did you know that there used to be cars, everywhere?! Yeah and a lot of them were big, and lifted, and super heavy. That got worse during the early EV push in the 20s. I know all of our vans and trucks now are electric, but they weren't always. When cars were popular and stuffed the streets everywhere, they burned gasoline. You got it, that comes from petroleum oil! At first, that gasoline had lead in it, and you all know what lead does to your brain. It took far too much convincing to get them to take lead out of it. Well, at that point, global warming wasn't widely accepted. Science was a little backwards back then.
There's not enough space to drive cars around now. It should have always been like this. The damn Corporations ruined it, as they always have.
Coal-fired steam engine trains were the first kind that got into good use. Lots of different things were tried, but a lot of the world except the United States --yeah, Appalachia was part of it-- all started switching to electric trains, high speed and light rail! The only innovation since then has really been to put on-board batteries on them for controlled stops, and solar panels. And eventually, yeah they stopped charging money for it, which let a lot more people use it.
And a lot of our towns have trolleys now, so getting around is a lot easier than it used to be! Some places had them, but when cars got popular they went backwards and took them down instead to make way for cars. I know, how stupid was that?!
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