Interesting thread. Instead of Moore's Law which specifically pertains to semiconductors and computing, Buckminster Fuller's knowledge doubling curve is more accurate:
Knowledge doubling
My family has done a lot of generation stretching on both sides. My mother's father's family is well documented going back to the 1680s when the first ancestor migrated to the Massachusetts's colony (and founded Springfield, MA). I was born in the 1960s, but my parents were born in the 1920s and all my grandparents were born in the 19th century. My father had an aunt who lived to 106, she was 90 the year I was born.
My parents heard a lot of stories from their parents and grandparents generations about how much life had changed in their lives. Cars were relatively common when my father was a kid, but horse drawn delivery vehicles were fairly common. My father remembers the selling point for cars was they were pollution free, ie no horse manure on the road. Around 1900 larger cities like New York had a serious horse manure problem.
URBAN POLLUTION-Many long years ago - CARRIAGE HORSE History - Coalition for New York City Animals
Milwaukee, WI alone had to deal with 133 tons of manure a day.
Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s with the horrible smog caused by all the cars, the idea that cars were once sold as pollution free was an ironic joke.
My father was born in 1920 and I think his father had a Model T when he was small, but he said his father bought a 1929 Chevy and that was the first family car he really remembered well. It had a wood frame and canvas roof. My father was into airplanes from a young age when they were wooden frame things with doped canvas stretched over the frame. In the 1930s a revolution in aircraft began when Boeing introduced the 247 airliner, which was all aluminum and enclosed. Soon after Douglas stole their thunder with the DC-3 which became legendary.
The Museum of Flight in Seattle has a display showing how much planes changed from 1930 to 1935. It was an amazing change.
I sometimes think about the changes in my own life. There will be people voting in this year's presidential election who have never known a world without the internet. Rotary phones started going out of style when I was around 10, but there are people alive today who will never have a landline at all and will always have a phone number that is there's alone. Los Angeles had a lot of TV stations when I was a kid, about 12, but a couple hundred is a norm today and increasingly people are watching TV less and less, instead they are streaming over the internet.
When I was a kid, you could order things by mail, but you had to look up what you wanted in a paper catalog, fill out an order form, mail it in via snail mail. Then if you were lucky you got what you ordered in about 6 weeks. If you had a credit card (which weren't all that common), you could call on the phone and place an order. That would get you your stuff sooner.
My parents owned a business, so they had a number of long distance calls on the office line every month, but making a long distance call for non-business purposes was a big occasion, and expensive. Now we have free long distance with land lines and internet calling.
Anyway, I find this sort of thing fascinating...
