I'm getting old... My parents gave me a DVD containing a selection of the news in the Netherlands in 1984, the year I was born. While inserting the DVD into my PC I suddenly realized that 1984 is already 25 years ago.. It was quite fascinating to see the huge difference in lifestyle between now and then. It was quite a different world back then..
One of the most striking differences of course if the presence of computers in our daily life. One of the news items that year was a big computer convention, showing lots of big screens with green letters on them, displaying text line by line very slowly. Apparently one of the worries at the time was that the introduction of the computer would mean that a lot of people would lose their jobs. Interesting to see how that turned out, isn't it? 1984 also saw the introduction of the first ATM in the Netherlands. From then on people could use a plastic card to get money from a machine!
There was also some commotion about nuclear weapons, which the Americans wanted to put at a Dutch military base, so that they'd be in a good position to strike against the Russians. Cold war. At least that conflict's disappeared.
One conflict that didn't disappear at all is Israel. It's almost unbelievable that people were fighting there even before I was born, and even now there's no sign that conflict will disappear from there any time soon. Human beings, they're a strange people. Or should I say fucked up?
And then there was a certain disease, only recently discovered from the 1984 perspective, which affected the immune syndrome, now knows as Aids. Officialy a pandemic nowadays, at that time almost nothing was known about it. Aids is still here too, but at least we know more about it now, and prevention measures have improved.
What will the world be like 25 years from now? Will Africa still be poor? Will we have a cure for cancer? Will China take over the world, or will Google beat them to it? 25 years. By that time I will be 50 years old. I hope that they've discovered immortality by then, cause it would suck if they invented that just after I died..