What We Knew
I was born in 1964. I am not old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis or the JFK or RFK assassinations. When I came to awareness of such things the largest nuclear weapon that would ever be built had already been built and tested (by Russia -- the Tsar Bomba).
We knew physics that would have astounded our ancestors in the 19th and earlier centuries, and we had very good theories about what protons, neutrons, and electrons did and how the forces worked that held atoms together -- and sometimes didn't, in the heart of an atom bomb or exploding nova. But we had a few anomalous observations that didn't make sense, which everyone thought we'd sweep under the rug eventually completing a neat "theory of everything."
We knew that we could launch artificial satellites into orbit around the Earth, and that Men could travel and survive in outer space. We didn't have much practical use for this yet though when I was young, although there were a few experimental communication satellites.
Multiple television channels were available 24/7, if you had a good antenna and reception. You could buy the music you liked on vinyl discs and play it whenever you wanted. You could even use a tape player, some of them portable, to record music off your records or radio to play at the beach or on a road trip, although the recordings sounded kind of crappy.
We knew that life on Earth had endured several mass extinctions, but we had no idea why. There was a tantalizing line of iridium found worldwide in one geological layer but the few people who thought it might be important were widely regarded as crackpots. Then again, it hadn't been so long before I was born that the people who thought continents moved around were crackpots, and by the time I came along that was regarded as proven.
We knew that our star was part of a galaxy, that there were many galaxies which were flying away from one another, and we were pretty sure (but not completely sure) the Universe was between 10 and 20 billion years old. We knew that most of the matter in the Universe that makes up worlds like the Earth had been created in supernovae, and that our Sun is a third-generation star rich in such elements because it formed from the detritus of such explosions.
We did not know where the really heavy elements like platinum, gold, and uranium came from. Our theories of supernovae couldn't explain them.
The planets of the Solar System were little more than dots in the sky, our best astrographic pictures of the largest of them being maybe 100 pixels wide in modern terms. Nobody really knew how they were formed or whether there were planets like them around any other star in the galaxy. I had a children's book about the Solar System and every single illustration was an artist's conception.
Computers were amazing machines but so fantastically technical nobody but a highly trained expert could understand them and nothing but a large university, business, or government could afford to operate one.
What follows is a personal recollection, in order as I remember it. Most of it can easily be searched if you find it surprising. I look forward to hearing your additions and amendments in the comments.
What We Have Learned
The Moon is a real place where humans can land, walk, do stuff, and return safely home with amazing samples and images. Those samples proved that the Moon had once been molten, and would eventually confirm an origin theory that had once been wild speculation. Oh, and the Earth is shockingly tiny and vulnerable looking from the Moon.
It is possible to build an actual computer that you can take home. It won't do much but hey it's an actual computer. A little later there were kits.
There are handheld battery powered machines that can do math for you. These calculators are very expensive though and mainly used by engineers and such people.
You could get TV over cables and stuff instead of antennas, but it would cost money. At first we were promised that if you paid money for the TV you wouldn't have to watch commercials.
All the weird physics particles turned out to be explained by something called the "standard model," which made them seem like anything but fundamental to the structure of the Universe. We're still working on that one.
You could buy a dedicated computer cheap enough to take home that would be a cool gaming opponent for you.
Mars is a real place where you can land a machine that could take pictures of soil and sky and stuff and dig trenches and do chemical experiments that would be frustratingly inconclusive as to whether there was life there.
All those outer planets beyond Mars are also real places with complex weather and boatloads of moons that are all interesting in their own rights. At least all of them except Pluto, which we missed because we didn't make the launch window for it.
The biggest ancient mass extinction, the K-T event that wiped out the dinosaurs, was almost certainly caused by an asteroid collision that landed in the shallows off the Yucatan Peninsula. The original clues hidden in shocked quartz ejecta recovered thousands of miles away have been verified by direct examination of the now-underground crater by oil prospecting methods and ejecta beds that are still on land in Mexico.
The universe is about 13.6 billion years old, and was definitely created in a kind of big-bang scenario.
It is possible to buy and take home a computer that will do actual useful stuff. Well, pretty useful. OK, it doesn't just play games. You can write them yourself, or maybe a story, or sort recipes.
Mars is a real place where you can land a little remote-controlled car and drive it around taking pictures from all angles of the rocks that interest you until its mothership dies.
Calculators are allowed in school math classes now because nobody really expects you to memorize how to multiply two three digit numbers any more, but only certain calculators because a little too much calculator is cheating. Texas Instruments still has a monopoly on education with stuff from this era because of these regulations.
Humans are still going to space but we kind of gave up on going to places like the Moon and beyond, at least for now.
You can buy music on little silver discs that are read by a laser and it sounds awesome.
Calculators are cheap but you can't use them at school, because you're supposed to do the math yourself.
When you get TV over cable it still has commercials. This is why I have never subscribed to cable TV. But it's a cool thing to be available.
It is possible to buy and take home a machine that can actually record and play back video. Not long after the first models come out they have timers so you can set them up to record shows you're not in a position to watch in real time. This seriously pisses off some of the movie people but this "time-shifting" use prevails when challenged in court.
It is possible to buy and take home a computer that you can actually use as a writer, if you can afford a letter quality printer instead of a dot-matrix ones that editors will automatically reject. It actually supports upper and lowercase characters, and enough storage to hold a short story. Maybe, if you're really in the money, a floppy disc drive so it can hold an entire novel in one piece.
It is possible to buy and take home a dedicated gaming console computer that looks almost as good as the machines in arcades.
Shops are popping up all over which will rent you videos to watch on your video player. This revolutionizes the porn industry.
It is possible to install a "modem" in your computer and use it to communicate over the phone line with other computers. At first this is used mainly to remote login to things like university and business mainframes, but soon there are "bulletin board services" which have discussion groups, virtual electronic mail, and other cool features.
There has been a hobby of dedicated people using homemade satellite dishes to intercept satellite TV signals, but as this is shut down by new encryption schemes a new industry emerges to bypass the notably unliked and crappy cable TV monopolies by beaming TV directly to cheaper small dishes they designed for the purpose. For awhile these satellite services exert a useful competitive pressure until most of them turn out to be crappy too.
It is possible to play a game on your computer which represents a 3D inhabited world through the eyes of a player avatar. This has been seen in arcades a couple of times but never in the home. It involved a lot of fancy machine language programming to make it work at all but after Wolfenstein 3D there will be Doom and Quake, and then a rolling snowball of first person shooters.
It's not sexy to advertise that something has a computer in it any more. In fact, it's becoming a liability, because computers are turning out to be unreliable in surprising ways.
You can buy and rent movies on little silver discs now. They look a lot better than the old tapes, and the studios like that you can't record them yourself.
It turns out a computer can play and edit music. At this time this usually involves loading a few songs, doing whatever with them, and deleting them after writing to the new recordable CD's because the computer's hard drive can't accommodate much more.
There is a new compression method called MP3, but while it can be played in real time by most new computers, the recording/compression step can take 5 to 10 times as long as playing.
The Sun's corona is a totally cool living thing. Oh and every once in awhile it shoots a massive fireball at us. Hasn't happened in a super bad way since the 19th century, but still...
There are probably other planets around other stars. Evidence is still not solid, but very suggestive.
There is this new Internet thing which is way cooler than BBS. And you can use it to download music.
Two human made spacecraft are still operating, in communication with us, and approaching the heliopause which represents that transition to truly interstellar space. Keeping these ancient spacecraft, which were built when I was a child, operating is a really weird specialty.
You can use the internet thing to download porn. Also get into loud arguments with people you'll never meet in real life.
There are at first recordable music discs, then recordable video discs. Only the studios are surprised.
Portable battery-powered devices can make .mp3 recordings in real time. Fourier transforms aren't such a big deal for this generation of microprocessors.
There are gravity waves. When two black holes spiral in to merge, for a quarter of a second they are the brightest phenomenon in the Universe, emitting more energy than everything else put together by many orders of magnitude -- but in the form of gravity waves, so not visible.
You can use the internet thing to download movies. Also fuck with politics.
There are lots of other planets around other stars. Mostly not like Earth because Earth would be very hard to detect with the methods we're using but there are SO many and HEY THAT ONE IS IN THE HABITABLE ZONE....
We finally got pictures of Pluto, even though it's not a planet any more. That's OK, we've got pictures of Ceres too, which isn't a planet for the same reason, and they both look a lot like oh well fuck it.
You can get a car that can mostly drive itself, for values of "mostly" that include occasionally slamming you into an obstacle fatally.
The weather is all fucked up and doing stuff nobody has ever seen, probably because of stuff we've been doing to the environment. Hey, we can admit that now?
Well, my glass of wine is empty. I'm going to see if anyone else has any fillers.