In 1995, I had a pocket computer. I had heard of GPS. I had used Dragon Dictate. My dad's OLD laptop was good enough to play Doom on, using the inbuilt screen. My mother had a mobile phone, my father had a mobile phone. (Not as practical as a carphone, but they had them nonetheless.)

From my perspective... 1995-2011 was hardly science fiction, though of course there's always time for (say) 1996-2012 to count ;)

Progress, yes.

"Science fiction"? Well... personally, I set the bar for that rather higher.

I was seven in 1995 so I don’t remember all that much but we had no computer†, no VCR and certainly no mobile phones. My dad got a car phone for his company car around that time. I think we also just got our first cordless phone around the time (the batteries were constantly empty and it never worked quite right) and we bought our first CD player two years earlier. I sometimes played Tetris on my aunt’s Game Boy and Super Mario Kart as well as SimCity on a friend’s SNES.

You seem like a terribly early adopter, even of technologies that in the end went nowhere. I would be surprised if you experience were in any way typical.

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† Not just at home but also at work: My dad is a construction engineer responsible for all water supply projects in a small to mid sized engineering firm and didn’t routinely use a computer for his work in 1995. I always thought that was kind of funny considering he did learn how to program (rudimentary, mostly for structural analysis) at college in the late 70s and early 80s.

- Few people had computers. It was not reasonable to meet someone and expect that they know how to operate, say, a word processor. All of my homework was done by hand, including essays and long-form writing. All research was done in libraries amongst musty shelves and microfilm viewers.

- Even amongst the few families with computers that I knew about, I was definitely the first to get a CD-ROM drive. Storing mass amounts of data on a disc was brand spanking new. The default storage media for data was 1.44MB 3.5" floppies.

- We had VCRs. Most people did at that point, but they were still expensive beasts, much more so than the $50 DVD players we can purchase today.

- Walkmen were still huge. Mixtapes were still huge.

- Cell phones? What a bigshot you are!

- Game consoles were very popular and not at all rare. It was the SNES vs. the Genesis at that point I think.

- The internet "existed" - but was not at all in a state that we are familiar with today. More people used closed networks like CompuServe and AOL than the open web as we use it today. Even then, it was not at all reasonable to expect someone to have an email address at all. People had sort of heard of this "internet" thing but most people still didn't even know what it really was.

- Answering machines had tapes.

It's true that my dad was always a bit of an early adopter. We had a VCR in 1983, and a CD player in 1986, and a home computer in 1982 - now all that WAS unusual.

But that was then. By 1995, all par for the course. Almost everybody I knew had a VCR, pretty much everybody had a CD player, and basically everybody had a computer (and it was always a PC - very different from even 2-3 years previously). I wasn't even the only person I knew to have a computer small enough to fit in my pocket (and I think my Psion was old hat by 1995 anyway).

Mobile phones weren't terribly common in 1995, but nor were they particularly rare, and people were certainly familiar with the notion. (I vaguely remember mobile phones being used in the early series of the X-Files, and that this was noted in the press at the time.) By late 1998 (if I remember correctly?) pretty much everybody had one, so even if 1995 is too early for mobile phones to truly count as common technology it is not a stretch to class them as being common "around that sort of time".

I stand by my statement: you have to start further back than 1995, if 2011 is to seem like science fiction! Even if you're going to call me on my privileged upbringing (I blame the parents...), and perhaps suggest that this was not the case for the majority of the population (you tell me...), the technologies were common enough and well-known enough, that there's not enough difference between 2011 and 1995 to count!

Go back ten more years, maybe.

(But then, maybe not. Perhaps if I had been 18 in 1985, today would seem like a smooth transition? Hard to say. But I'll stand by my statements, from my perspective, which I'm afraid is the only one I've got ;)

Think of it this way, most college aged kids today barely remember things in 1995. We just have an abstract idea of the early-mid 90's: no internet, limited scope of computers, primitive game consoles etc. Nowadays technology is a huge part of out lives so it amplifies the effect of "Holy shit we've come a long way."

I don't mean to assume your old or anything but even if my parents did have a laptop I certainly wouldn't have remembered it or even fathom the concept of GPS.

Its also interesting to see what the current generation will think of our advancements. My kid brother isn't at all impressed by an iPhone, while I still marvel at how far we've gotten in phone tech.

Just my perspective.

Anyway I have always got the distinct impression that car-buying trends in America traditionally favour larger-engined saloon cars. In the UK and Europe, on the other hand, smaller-engined hatchbacks are popular.

It was my belief that this belief was shared by most Americans too, and so to state that "Americans don't drive hatchbacks" would be relatively uncontroversial, even though as a statement it is demonstrably false.

We're merely envious...

That's not really very accurate. The Ford F-150 pickup truck has been the best selling automobile for nearly 30 years. As of the 2009 article I'm looking at, the Chevy Silverado pickup truck was the #2 seller. That's a lot of pickup trucks.

As for the rest of the market, it fluctuates tremendously with fashion and fuel prices. Cars overall have shrunk over the years, and enormous sedans, convertibles, or station wagons have come and gone as status symbols. The most recent notable trend was the SUV. Hatchbacks come and go, but we tend to associate them with the cheap compacts following the 70's oil embargo. Also, why buy a hatchback when you can buy an SUV (which is also technically a hatchback, but 'cooler') for not much more?

If the U.K. had the buying power and parking space, their automotive purchasing trends would likely look much more like the U.S. Then again, the depreciation rate on vehicles in the U.K. is extremely high, so perhaps that would limit adoption.

Even in situations where you have deep snow etc. a lot of modern SUVs aren't actually that good because of huge low profile tyres. For most people in urban environments, SUVs are silly.

As for snow, I credit the tread design and composition entirely. A good mud/snow tire, with non-continuous tread blocks and plenty of siping, makes an amazing difference. Any car with high-performance street tires will suck in the snow.

Cars in America have shrunk over the years, which isn't difficult if you're starting with the monstrosities of 1950s and 1960s. Cars in Europe stayed mostly constant, although they seem to be trending slightly larger.

I would posit that, given the number of cars in America, historically, my initial statement is still accurate. :-)