> Also, don't take what I wrote to be "No one could have predicted this" but rather someone teleported in time would be just amazed about these aspects of ubiquitous information retrieval.

The interesting thing is if you move that window just a couple of years forward to about 1995 and just after I'd seen Windows 95 and AOL and multimedia CD ROMs, I don't think nine year old me would have been amazed by the 28 years of difference at all. Bigger, faster, everyone uses the internet instead of brochures and often instead of TV... all of this seems obvious and this "social media" thing everyone in the future is obsessed with sounds a lot like the description of Usenet in the 1995 how to use the internet book. People use it for work, but why wouldn't they? (nine year old me didn't have a particularly sophisticated idea of work, but he was used to Dad having a home office and knew that was why he bought the new computer). The basic form was nailed early on, it just took time for the user base and infrastructure to catch up.

Smartphones are cooler, I guess. The tech's less cool without understanding the innovations in capacitive touchscreens and just seeing it as a neat hybrid of phone/console/PDA, but even with cellphones already being a thing, there are a lot of nineties plots revolving around the assumption that person A and person B wouldn't communicate whilst on the move, never mind look up information to solve their problems.

> there are a lot of nineties plots revolving around the assumption that person A and person B wouldn't communicate whilst on the move, never mind look up information to solve their problems.

Yeah, movie and TV writers have been really struggling with how to maintain dramatic tension since the smartphone. Could be a reason why we have all the junk superhero sequel movies, and all the junk serial killer TV series, where all the action is post-facto.

In my suburban California high-school circa 1990, there were multiple kids carrying "digital" pagers and a few with cell phones. They didn't seem like time travelers. Others would gossip as to whether they were rich, spoiled brats or maybe selling drugs.

It is true that pocket information was either printed material or something more specialized like an electronic dictionary. The newest information-delivery fad was multimedia CD-ROM applications. On the TV front, product infomercials were already a familiar cliche and CNN had already debuted live-streaming war coverage with the first Gulf War.

The local libraries had a mix of physical card catalogs and digital catalogs. There were still banks of microfiche readers to view archived newspapers. The digital catalogs were a mix of green-screen terminals to some centralized computer and some starting to be based on regular PCs running a library kiosk application. The libraries still had more space dedicated to the stacks of books than contemporary ones which seem to have more lounges and meeting spaces.

The equivalent of internet-based shopping was ordering from printed catalogs either by mail-order or phone-order. Most products would ship in 2-4 weeks instead of a few days unless you paid silly money for expedited service. There was still the lingering concept of cash-on-delivery, where you would give the UPS driver money or a cashier's check when they delivered your package rather than paying the sender in advance. You were more likely to buy clothes locally unless ordering from a company like Columbia or LL Bean.

The "everyone carries a smartphone that can talk to various information sources" part was an easy extrapolation of things that already existed in 1994: Motorola Envoy, a ~tablet (well, PDA using parlance from those times) with a wireless modem, was released in 1994. General Magic, a company that aimed to build such a device, was created in 1990.

I grant you that the existence of such easy to query information sources was probably less predictable.

I would argue that the smartphone is a smaller change to society than the quickly ubiquitous automobile.

You can argue about precursors to automobiles on that adoption curve, but there were many precursors to the smartphones on the go connectivity such as the first pager system launched all the way back in 1950. And of course the internet had been around for decades by 1993.

We think of the internet as a huge revolution in how people shop for example, but fundamentally it’s the same basic idea as introduced by the ubiquitous sears catalog by telephone or even mail.

>Also, don't take what I wrote to be

Again, this confuses me. I was pointing out that the current rate of change is not obviously more rapid than about 100 years ago. If you are trying to provide a counterexample I think you've failed to establish one, and if you weren't I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve, other than a generic "gee, the internet has come a long way in the last 30 years". I don't think anyone would claim it hasn't, but I don't get your point, I guess.

Star Trek communicators and tricorders come pretty close, but then again that was predicted for the 23rd century. One beef I have about The Expanse is that they have cell phones, albeit fancy holographic ones. Not sure we will still be using that paradigm, we may have moved into wearable devices or something involving direct brain communication by then. We are already on the verge of that.