Things sure have changed a lot in a lifetime

I recall granny making soap using lye and hog fat. She heated the smelly concoction over a fire in a black cast iron cauldron hung from a tripod. Old time witch's brew sort of thing it was. Granny actually used a bit of technology like this wall phone. 

She had what used to be called a "party line" where other people on the same line could listen in to other people's conversations. It was great for small town gossips. Party lines went extinct, but we still have telephones. That is exactly what granny's phone looked like. I even got to make a call on it once. She had to hold me up to be able to reach it to turn the hand crank. That advanced technology of the day looked like this on the inside.

Other technology around that time looked like this, outside and inside.

Zenith 12S-471 radio

Very nice wood, now

mostly extinct on radios

Inside of the 12S-471

Fast forward to 2025: My son just bought a new gaming machine. It's transparent so the outside doesn't obscure the inside, except for the white triangular power switch at the top right.

In blue festive mode

It's festive. It even cycles through color changes once every ~12 seconds, except for the power switch, which is always lit-up white when the machine is powered on.

In red-orange festive mode

~12 seconds after blue mode

The festive gaming PC has a silent water pump (lit circle center-left) to cool the central processor of the GPU (graphics board) and 7 very quiet air fans to cool the entire interior (larger lit circles, 3 bottom horizontal to cool the CPU or motherboard), 3 right vertical, one far left vertical) and an 850 W power supply. That machine is one tier down (~$2,000 to $4,500 less) from current cutting edge consumer gaming computers -- it's, as granny would say, purt near cutting edge. Of course, that assumes that she knew what "cutting edge" meant in the context of technology.

I remember my first IBM computer, the PC XT. It had a hard drive with a gigantic 10 Mb storage capacity and a 64 W power supply. It was a cutting edge consumer product in 1985. Of course, nowadays, 10 Mb storage capacity is so small as to be mostly or completely useless. 

The PC XT - now an obsolete curiosity

By wall telephone with a crank standards, the PC XT was a miracle of unimaginable advanced technology. By today's standards compared to the festive gaming PC, the PC XT looks like a clunky dinosaur with primitive technology.

Technology has changed a lot in one lifetime. Human society as a whole? Arguably not so much. One might even say that cultural and social technology has slipped from a forward gear to neutral or even reverse. Is that probably true?

By Germaine: In nostalgia-introspection mode