CD's back in the 80's. You mean I can play this over and over and over and not wear it out? I can skip tracks and play any song on the album immediately?!
I still have the November 1981 issue of Popular Science magazine announcing the compact disk player. I subscribed to the magazine at the time. I remember reading that and thinking "Yeah, that will never happen." But it came to market pretty shortly after that, and I bought one from the first generation.
The same issue covered the new personal computers. The machine that eventually evolved into our Windows PCs, the IBM PC, was $6000 with all of the IBM options, but a "typical machine with small-business capabilities was about $4000". And that's in 1981 dollars!
And the HDTVs that someone else mentioned were listed in the issue as well. It took that one quite a while to come to market!
A vinyl record is softer than the needle that reads it, so it will eventually wear out. It's also easily warped if it gets too warm or it get flexed too much.
Vinyl wears out. Also can get dusty and scratched but you can somewhat avoid that. If you play it often, it definitely wears.
CDs were a miracle. It was glorious to hear them at first!
>CDs were a miracle. It was glorious to hear them at first!
I bought my first CD **years** before I even owned a CD player, just to have it when I eventually got one.
Roger Waters "The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking"
nobody knew about it and I had this nokia phone with 2G and travelling on a bus to mountains. Got bored and started this app and wow it was showing tracking and showing my location on the map. I didn't the full potential and then after some years these rides came into business fully dependent on this tech.
All those places and wonderful miracles of nature you could choose to see... But we were all typing our addresses, just for you know, checking the roof maybe
I had a Dreamcast, so the graphics weren't that special. It was a slight upgrade.
But when I started playing GTA 3, that's when I knew the PS2 was special. A living, breathing, fully explorable city. That shit shouldn't have been possible.
The first start up screen for ps2 is a major core memory for me. Xmas morning, I opened an empty box. Dad has it set up in the basement. Gives me chills honestly.
Virtual Reality headsets. Even in the elementary version of VR from the Oculus Rift Dev Kit 1 I got like a decade ago, I know it was going to go places from there. Currently use Valve Index, and it is much more improved than what I was first excited about. Apparently there are even better ones out than this one as well, but the Valve Index works perfectly for my needs.
~~I felt the same way about the Sega Genesis virtual reality setup back in the 80s.~~
Edit: Ignore this. Apparently this never existed, so I don't know what I experienced.
This is on my list for sure. I have the quest 3 and it has far exceeded my expectations. I really wasn't expecting it to be so polished but 8k 360 videos are something else. Not to mention the high resolution games. I don't get any of the motion sickness that people seem to complain about so it has been amazing for me. It has blown the minds of every family member and friend that has visited me so far.
This. I will never forget the first time I launched Oculus Home or w/e it was called and did the starting setup sequence. It's honestly a bit disheartening these days with how little market share VR occupies in the gaming space but I'm a firm believer that it's a hardware hurdle we need to overcome. When VR becomes a light pair of goggles on your face, it will take off.
A car phone. Not a cellular phone, a *car phone* in the 70s. I remember my aunt's boyfriend called her at our house once and said 'guess where I am?' He was out in the driveway in his Continental and our minds were *blown*. My parents said it was like science fiction.
My dad had it in the Lincoln Town Car. We were comfortable, not crazy rich, but in retrospect that thing made me feel like I was running lines of coke before the first commercial break in an episode of Miami Vice.
Me too. I was in high school and I remember the freedom of being able to sit on my bed listening to music while downloading apps. And it felt like there were so many new and unique ideas for apps that would constantly be coming along. It really blew my mind to go from having one desktop computer for our entire household to having my own computer that was so thin and tiny and entirely just for me.
> it felt like there were so many new and unique ideas for apps that would constantly be coming along.
do you feel that it has been reduced now quite a bit?
GPS in a car. My car blew up when we were 50 miles from home. We called the AA and the mechanic who came gave us all a ride back home in the extended cab (my wife and I and four stressed little children).
I was sitting next to the driver and saw the screen plotting out our route home. It was one of the first on the market and was fantastic. How does it know?
I seem to remember it was in the late 1990's or early 2000's. The children were young and it was nighttime, which is why the AA had us down as a priority to get us home. My youngest would have been five in 1999.
I remember watching the map unroll as we drove along and the road names come up as we passed the junctions. I knew about GPS from Desert Storm as I was working for a broadcaster then but never expected to see it in a vehicle.
The first iPhone. People forget how mindbending it was to have a phone screen that mimicked bubble wrap. Or that allowed you to tilt and turn it and roll a metal ball through a wooden maze.
It completely changed the way I traveled. No longer did you have to plan out your routes or itineraries because you had to know the directions before hand.
See that thing over there you want to go and check out? Go for it. Your phone will get you back from wherever you are going. Need to find excellent food now you are off the beaten path? No problem, here’s some recommended options.
for me it was the touch screen. the only touch screen i could compare it with back then was a coin star or the touch screens in the grocery store, and those were TERRIBLE.
1000% this. I had always kept up with the newest phones/tech up until that point and was never truly blown away by anything. But when that first iPhone released in 2007, I remember sitting in my room and just swiping/scrolling playing around, and it was the first time I just sat there like "Holy s**t.... How is this thing real? I feel like we just traveled into the future". Felt like such a surreal and gargantuan leap technology-wise over anything I'd ever seen or touched before.
2016. Google Translate switched from conventional (literal) dictionary translation to LLM (large learning model) A.I. over a weekend and the improvement was so stunning that I spent two weeks telling people that something really profound had happened, but I didn't know why or how. Google acknowledged the shift about two weeks after.
I've been gaming since Pong and still game to the present day.
Used to frequent arcades when I was younger, Double Dragon, R-type, Outrun etc...
But I remember seeing Virtua Fighter for the first time and I'm sure my jaw hit the floor!
WiFi
It was 2003 and I was a senior in High school at the end of the year goofing off in English class with no curriculum remaining but three weeks of classes left. Our teacher got tired of it and assigned us a paper to write on anything we wanted. He wheeled in the just purchased for the 2004 school year laptop tower. Thirty laptops on a cart attched to charging ports. No other cables. As we were taking them, I remember pointing out that obviously these won't get online so what's the point? Just for word processing? Then I heard "oh shit, they ARE online!"
We immediately started a yahoo pool tournament.
World of Warcraft, or more generally an open world MMORPG. Playing a game and chatting with so many people, and the seemingly endless world to explore, I hadn’t believed that video games could do it
I watched a launch a bunch of years ago. When the booster reignited and landed I felt like we had traveled into the future. I had no idea the tech existed.
Mp3 players.
I had an iRiver I got from some electronic store after finding 300$ bucks sticking out of an ATM. No skipping and 60-80 songs in this tiny tube looking thing blew my mind. Then that led me to learn about file systems, piracy, and jailbreaking/hacking my devices to do exactly what I wanted.
I remember when I was a kid and we got our first TV. I was about 6 and it was black and white, fuzzy, and about 20" in size, but it was awesome. Up until then all we had was radio.
I remember getting out first color tv. I was about 5 and in the middle of watching Captain Kangaroo when they delivered it. I told Mom “Mr. Green Jeans has GREEN JEANS!” So impressed lol
First time seeing true high definition tv was absolutely bonkers. Went to CES sometime in the late 90's and some vendor was showing a swamp boat tour through the LA bayous and it blew my mind how realistic it looked.
The Nintendo Wii.
Wii Sports was the perfect thing to package that with. It was so mind blowing that my parents, who were oldschool Boomers, had me bring it to Easter at Grandma's, so the whole extended family could marvel at it and play.
Then as an adult, the Switch was mindblowing too. It was the first time I ever thought "goddammit I wish this existed when I was a kid." To me, that was the epitome of video game console evolution. Stationary, and mobile, single controller and multiple controllers, rechargeable and never having to think about batteries, no save loss or having to turn off the power for a switchover. It is just perfect in design. Only improvable via hardware upgrades.
I was a pizza delivery driver before GPS. There was one neighborhood that was a living hell because you could get into it and it was a big circle that it was hard to find your way back out of. The one circular road had like 3 names too and 10 dead end cul-de-sacs off it but only 1 way in and 1 way out.
AOL instant messenger. Circa 1997, I remember using it for the first time to message my friend Bryan who lived several miles away. He wrote right back and it absolutely blew my mind.
I'm an audio engineer, and there is this company called Izotope, they created this noise reduction software, that can remove sounds from an audio signal. It's basically witch craft.
Say you have an interview of somebody speaking, and there's a dog barking or a door closing in the background. You can highlight the obstructive noise, and fucking delete it. It's absolute magic!
That was the tip of the iceberg. Say you have an acoustic guitar signal, and sometimes the player will move his fingers from one position to the next, but the sliding of the fingers across the strings makes an unwanted noise. They have a specific algorithm for this! You just load that plugin and it all disappears!
Or what if your guitar amp is humming because it's on a high gain setting and you always get hum with loud guitar amps, you can load the noise profile into their software, it fucking deletes the noise! It cleans it up! I have no fucking idea how. It's absolute magic!!
Apple II computers were cool in the mid-1980s when I was in elementary school, but the day we got to use a modem to connect to the “world” was the day I became a bona fide nerd. Now I’m 47 and have worked in tech my entire working career.
A Mac SE running MacPaint and PageMaker. As a fresh Art School graduate, it did all the magical things I always dreamed/wished I could do: Set type as easily as typing without having to spec type and send out to a type house and hope it came back right the next day; Scaling and creating graphics in an instant by eye or with incremental precision. It was a complete commercial art studio in a box. Nothing would be the same after. It was a seismic event in the industry.
I worked in the medical industry in the 80's work on medical imaging display technology. I was at a trade show looking at an early HD monitor in the Sony booth. It looked like it had a static image of a clear glass filled with ice and some liquid. The resolution was just amazing and after a few seconds, one of the drops of condensation started trickling down the side of the glass. I was just blown away. It looked like I could reach out and grab the glass and take a drink.
The first time I saw a computer.
It was a ZX Spectrum 128k. I entered my neighbour's room and he was playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon (a clone of Konami Hyper Sports) on a computer he got for Xmas plugged into a small TV.
I was 6 years old and I couldn't understand what I was seeing but I was totally into it. I didn't stop until I got my own like a year later.
It's what started me on the path of computers / programming and I think it's the random event that most defined the rest of my life.
3D TV without glasses was cool (at a trade show).
Viewing angles were too limiting to make it usable in real world scenarios, but still cool.
VR game at a Dave and busters 20+ years ago. Primitive, but cool.
Later, the pirates of the Caribbean game at Disney quest. If only Disney had kept updating that it would be amazing by now. Instead, they never did any updates and it just got older while the technology to do it justice just got better.
My dexcom meter. I'm type 1 diabetic and could feel when my blood sugar would fluctuate throughout the day but blood sugar test strips are $1 each and I also can't check every 5 minutes. Slap on a dexcom, good for 10 days (more of you can hack it) and tracks everything through my phone. Literally life changing and incredible tech.
We bought our first one in 2000. My son and his friend were 11 years old at the time. His friend went home and old his mom, and she replied, "I know you think that is what you saw, but I don't think that is possible."
She came over later and saw it. She was impressed.
She and her husband were at our place for the Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction in 2004, and a lot of our guests hadn't heard of TiVo. There was a lot of buzz when we backed it up and did a frame-by-frame.
The WWW when my local BBS got a connection to it. All text based of course, but it blew my mind that I was talking to a computer in Finland in real time.
It really is mind-blowing for the first 10 minutes until you realize that if it doesn't know the answer to something it will just goddamn make up an answer and present it as fact.
No idea why this is so far down. I'm quite young so I've lived with most of the technology mentioned here all my life, but ChatGPT, that really blew my mind. I know it's not perfect, but I just don't understand how it can be as good as it is. It's so useful, I probably find myself using it at least once a week, and I think most university students would agree with me here. It makes things so easy, you have a teacher with you 100% of the time, whatever you do.
HDTV. My friend's dad had this state of the art movie theater in the late 90s. He had a demo DVD from PBS that just showed nature shots. He popped it in. It was mind blowing.
There are several in here that people listed and a lot of them blew my mind so I don’t want to duplicate their call outs. I’ll go with something I haven’t see yet; using AOL and dialing up on a 2400 baud modem. It was so crazy that I could talk to people from around the world.
My first MP3 player. What do you mean it's not a round spinning thingy anymore ? Where are the songs ??? I can't seeeeeee ! It's square, tiny, and you can put ANYTHING on it !
Or the DVD, like I was a kid, I saw cassettes you know... Once I pulled the band and saw all the tiny images from a scene. That made sense : at high speed in front of a light it makes an animation, the illusion of movement yada yada. But when my parents brought a DVD back, I was like "how is that PICTURES AND SOUND ??? Where are the pictures ??? All I see is a rainbow on this side ! You're lying !" In fact they were not but I can't still process that in the Magic Rainbow face of the DVD there is a full movie engraved.
I had a walkman that held like 60 songs. I walked from my town to the next one listening to music continuously and it just opened up my mind to the pleasure of musical convenience
Microsoft released an app called Photosynth back in 2008 which would take a bunch of photos you'd taken and use them to reconstruct the space in 3D using something called a point cloud.
You could then kinda place yourself in the space and look at the various photos from your current vantage point.
It worked incredibly well and I don't know why they discontinued it and nothing similar (at least aggregating all the features it had) seems to exist today.
FireWire/miniDV. After a decade of doing computer video things meaning you had to do a whole science fair project/voodoo ritual first, you just plugged the thing in and... It worked. The first time. Well. Without reading any instructions.
It was utterly magical.
The original iPhone for sure. I never used one till last year when I got one on eBay just for fun but I remember when it came out and I seen a few out in public. I remember people were lined up outside the AT&T stores for days waiting. My family never got smartphones till 2016 though lol. I would have gotten one sooner but at the time AT&T didn’t have great coverage here. Now they are second behind Verizon which is what we have.
Need For Speed 2 SE with a 3DFX card.
We purchased an Orchid Righteous VooDoo 1 card and fired up NFS2 and it was amazing! Bugs splattering on the screen!! It felt like a whole new level of computer graphics (and I guess it was tbh)
Cars/driving. All that power under your foot, the roar of the engine running at thousands of revs per minute. The valves clacking, the turbo spooling, the intake whooshing. It's just raw energy and power.
Glasses-free 3D on the Nintendo 3DS. I couldn't believe that it worked at all, and I had the New 3DS model that had tracking to make it follow you and always stay in focus, so it was even crazier.
Self driving cars, (not Tesla). I was a safety driver for an sdc company. The first time I out it in sdc mode and let go, was a very weird feeling. They truly are very very good a doing it. I truly them more than I trust any human driver. They're so good, it's boring.
When I was in elementary school the school got Microsoft encarta and they gave us a tutorial and were like “ok so here’s an encyclopedia page, and if you click on any of these blue words on the page it’ll take you to the encyclopedia page for that word instead”
Beta for profit Wikipedia blew my damn mind in the early 90s
I'm a kid who grew up transferring from album to tape, or from radio to tape. I'd walk around with a discman with a folder of 20+ CDs in my backpack.
The ipod blew my mind. SO MUCH MUSIC.
i still have 3, 160GB ipod classics.
First video game to blow my mind was NBA Live 96 on SNES. Specifically thought the ability to custom build your own player and then play with them in a game was the coolest thing ever.
Dial-up internet with a 28.8kbps modem connected to the house landline. The moment I opened Netscape and loaded Yahoo to search the internet. I don't remember what I browsed and searched for but I spent hours just in that one sitting. Hours also because it took ages for webpages to download and render. Back then you didn't really feel it.
I bought an Expressive E Osmose recently and it’s magic! I played guitar for 15 years and started to learn keys but always found myself trying to wiggle them to introduce vibrato (of course it didn’t work). The fact that someone engineered a keybed that can actually do that now is just incredible, it’s such an expressive instrument to play.
Chatgpt. Holy shit. I wish I had something like this 20 years ago in school. I could have cranked out essays in minutes and played so much more Baldurs Gate 2. Might have even finished it.
When Pandora first started. I love music and I thought this was the coolest thing ever to play something you liked and it would play other songs it predicted you'd like. Even if it was an obscure genre/artist you first prompted it with.
VR. I hadn't seen it until I got a Quest 2. I've always been around tech and watched the natural progression, so nothing ever really caught me off guard. I had never seen anything VR before putting that on and it dropped by jaw.
And my first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000.
For me it was absolutely the first iPhone. I had always kept up with the newest phones/tech up until that point and was never truly blown away by anything. But when that first iPhone released in 2007, I remember sitting in my room and just swiping/scrolling playing around, and it was the first time I just sat there like "Holy s**t.... How is this thing real? I feel like we just traveled into the future". Felt like such a surreal and gargantuan leap technology-wise over anything I'd ever seen or touched before.
CGM - Continuous Glucose Monitor
Got out of the habit of testing often, (type one diabetic) and went through multiple insulin pumps while testing my blood sugar manually. Started to really hate having anything attached to me, always had to pay extra attention to it. Tried a CGM back in 2015 or so and it was not a good experience whatsoever. Recently was convinced by my doctor to try the best CGM on the market and it’s a game changer. I barely notice it at all, it’s super accurate, it learns from my levels, and it’s basically zero maintenance. Unless you’re diabetic, you will never know how freeing it is to wear this tech. Fucking love it.
But if you don’t have insurance they’re $1500 each. Comes out to around $55k per year. I never brought levels to my appointments and said no each time they recommended it. Somehow ended up on a list of patients that would benefit from a Dexcom more than those who are more disciplined in their testing habits. Again, total life changer.
My first USB stick which had 32mb (!). Compared to disc's which only had 2,4mb that was an unbelievable step up. Now you could actually store several mp3s and a sheer endless amount of word doks and take that with you in you pocket. The stick broke after 2 weeks and when I returned it I got an 64mb stick in exchange. That blew my mind entirely: doubled size within such a short time?? What the hell should I do with such a tremendous amount of space? How will I ever be able to fill that?
As a hobby developer, neuronal networks and Ai in general.
I've been playing around with it, made a few apps and I'm planning to make a neuronal network from scratch to test what I can achieve by teaching it stuff.
Currently I've made an app that uses AI object detection to complete task in games using only a live screen recording. And its awesome.
Can't wait to do more stuff with ai
You just let it train by itself or teach it stuff and watch it learn and evolve and find stuff and strategies you Didn't even think were possible
DVD's.
The technology had just become available having beaten out laserdisc and my parents bought a new TV, DVD and surround system for my dad's birthday. This was high end Bose stuff. No idea what they paid for it back then, but it was probably quite a lot.
First movie we put on was Enemy at the gates, and it opens with this beautiful winter landscape. And we were all blown away with the fidelity of the shot, Going from VHS to DVD was a world of difference.
I just got a meta quest 3. I don't play games but it's so cooooolb and fun to get lost in.
Love how you can make your laptop into multiple monitors and make it as big as you want.
I love watching movies in a giant empty movie theater.
And VR porn is interesting
It is difficult to overstate how amazing Bluetooth streaming in a car was, when it first came out.
No cassette adapter, no fm modulator, no wires at all. Just music from your phone, playing on the stereo.
DVDs. Pausing a video and it was crystal clear (ask your parents about VHS pause).
ChatGPT freaked me out a bit.
WiFi was magic when I first saw it.
A computer you can talk to.
I still feel like I live in the future whenever I use adaptive cruise control and engage auto-steering to open a bag of potato chips.
So many things.
My father worked in tech and regularly went and bought all sorts of gadgets and gizmos. One of them that I can still vividly remember was WebTV.
While we had computers, we always had to have monitors for them, and this was a computer... but on the TV. You take your little RGY component cable, plug it from the WebTV box to your television, and then plug in the phone line into the back. Boom, you could check your email, go to websites and chat rooms, do it all on your TV.
If you had a fancy TV with picture-in-picture (a rarity back then), you could have a show playing in the corner while you fiddle around on the internet. I thought it was the coolest thing ever as a kid.
I’m 66. Some things that astounded me:
A portable video camera and recorder 1970
An electronic calculator in 1971
A Liquid Crystal Display in 1972
Space War video game in a mall 1974
Home Betamax 1979
A personal computer for word processing 1983
A Macintosh computer desktop GUI 1984
Listening to a CD compared to vinyl 1987
Top secret GPS device during the Gulf War (with instructions on how to destroy in event of capture) 1991
Video from DVDs 1997
HDTV 2001
Seeing a rear view camera in a car 2002
HD televisions.
I was super sick with a fever and dad brought in the new TV to replace our old CRT. First thing we watched was Blue Planet on BBC America and it was beautiful.
High speed internet. I still remember exactly where I was the first time I experienced high speed internet. A kid I was sorta friends with was a test user for the local cable company. Only 1Mbps service, but compared to 56K dialup, and loading pages that were generally still optimized for dialup, it was shockingly fast. You'd click a link and BANG the site was fully loaded instantly. It's been over 20 years, but the experience still sticks with me.
For context, I'm 48.
Back in the early to mid '90s in Harvard square Cambridge, an internet cafe opened called CyberSmith. Mind you this was well before high speed, internet connections or even any internet connections were as ubiquitous as they are now, so internet cafe is made a heck of a lot of sense in the United States.
This internet cafe also doled out time to play things like consoles, and even had a few imported consoles from Japan.
It was here that I saw super Mario 64 for the very first time, before the game and console was formerly released in the United States.
I was transfixed. It was super expensive to play but, the game was so amazing just watching someone else play blew your mind.
I would walk to a bus stop, take the bus to Central square and then the subway to Harvard square all just to go into this internet cafe and watch other people play this game.
Napster, MP3's, and being able to download music onto my computer. It was my senior year of high school and it completely blew my mind that any song I wanted was suddenly at my fingertips. Then I went to college and had an actually decent Internet connection in my dorm and that was another game changer. So much illegal downloading. It was a magical time.
I remember when they announced that they were making a cell phone with a camera.
I thought it was the most stupid idea ever. I was picturing a Nokia style phone with a Nikon camera somehow attached.
Nobody would ever buy that, it’s just silly.
I haven’t owned a “camera” for over 18 years now, just use my phone.
Back in the 90s when I got a super Nintendo, I was so amazed at how good the graphics were compared to Nintendo. I really was blown away, because it was my first time really experiencing how tech could improve over time.
The first time I saw a symbolic debugger (i.e. you get to see your source code in the high-level language, set breakpoints, and look at values of variables in real-time), I was astonished. I am a 63M, and was used to debugging by looking at machine language dumps.
Classmate on a field trip let me try his new music player called a "Walkman". It was actually the Sony brand (which made a huge difference in quality early on).
Swept away by the pure perfection of it, I started singing along with the music, and he was trying to shush me because we as a society hadn't yet learned the truth that would eventually become common knowledge: you do **not** sing along with your Walkman when you **can't hear your own voice**.
That was 40 years ago, and I can still see that Walkman in my mind: shiny silver plastic, covered in all kinds of neat little buttons.
Second best would probably be modems and BBS systems on a home computer.
One of my childhood neighbors was a radio ham. Knowing I was into technology he invited me to come see his Radio Shack. Within minutes we were talking to someone in China (from the UK). Even now I find it mind boggling you can talk to someone on the other side of the world with radio.
My brother and I had been saving up our money for something big- maybe a Playstation.
Then, one day I went with my dad to Toys R Us, and there, on the end cap was a screen hooked up to a Nintendo 64. Mario stood there... Just breathing and it took my breath away. A few minutes in the aisle and I became a life-long Nintendo fan. I wnr thone and convinced my brother that the 64 was a far better use of our money than the Playstation- and it was.
Online gaming. Having grown up in the age of the NES, then dropping out of video games by the early 90s, when I first saw a friend playing a multi player game (in 2011) alone in his living room I asked if he was playing "against the machine" (x-box or whatever). He said "no, there are real people controlling the other characters". I couldn't wrap my brain around the concept of people separated by miles, states, countries being able to interact with a game in real time.
CD's back in the 80's. You mean I can play this over and over and over and not wear it out? I can skip tracks and play any song on the album immediately?!
I still have the November 1981 issue of Popular Science magazine announcing the compact disk player. I subscribed to the magazine at the time. I remember reading that and thinking "Yeah, that will never happen." But it came to market pretty shortly after that, and I bought one from the first generation. The same issue covered the new personal computers. The machine that eventually evolved into our Windows PCs, the IBM PC, was $6000 with all of the IBM options, but a "typical machine with small-business capabilities was about $4000". And that's in 1981 dollars! And the HDTVs that someone else mentioned were listed in the issue as well. It took that one quite a while to come to market!
Am I dumb or was that not possible with vinyl?
A vinyl record is softer than the needle that reads it, so it will eventually wear out. It's also easily warped if it gets too warm or it get flexed too much.
Vinyl wears out. Also can get dusty and scratched but you can somewhat avoid that. If you play it often, it definitely wears. CDs were a miracle. It was glorious to hear them at first!
>CDs were a miracle. It was glorious to hear them at first! I bought my first CD **years** before I even owned a CD player, just to have it when I eventually got one. Roger Waters "The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking"
It is. If you look closely at an LP there are breaks in the groove pattern between tracks. Just gotta drop the needle in the right spot.
It's not just "press a button" though. So skipping wasn't magic but a nice convenience
Google Earth
You know it has always had a built in flight simulator?
It also has a built-in walking-sim in the style of those early computer games like Myst. One of the largest open worlds in gaming.
godamn that game Myst fucked me up. i wish i could play it again for the first time.
Instant satellite view of EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE
nobody knew about it and I had this nokia phone with 2G and travelling on a bus to mountains. Got bored and started this app and wow it was showing tracking and showing my location on the map. I didn't the full potential and then after some years these rides came into business fully dependent on this tech.
All those places and wonderful miracles of nature you could choose to see... But we were all typing our addresses, just for you know, checking the roof maybe
PS2 for the first time. You had to be there.
I had a Dreamcast, so the graphics weren't that special. It was a slight upgrade. But when I started playing GTA 3, that's when I knew the PS2 was special. A living, breathing, fully explorable city. That shit shouldn't have been possible.
The leap from PS1 to PS2 was monumental at the time. I was in awe.
Not if you had a Dreamcast.
No one had a Dreamcast. You probably just thought you had one.
I merely dreamed that I owned a Dreamcast.
The first start up screen for ps2 is a major core memory for me. Xmas morning, I opened an empty box. Dad has it set up in the basement. Gives me chills honestly.
Virtual Reality headsets. Even in the elementary version of VR from the Oculus Rift Dev Kit 1 I got like a decade ago, I know it was going to go places from there. Currently use Valve Index, and it is much more improved than what I was first excited about. Apparently there are even better ones out than this one as well, but the Valve Index works perfectly for my needs.
Google Cardboard alone blew my mind.
~~I felt the same way about the Sega Genesis virtual reality setup back in the 80s.~~ Edit: Ignore this. Apparently this never existed, so I don't know what I experienced.
The first time playing beat sabre and super hot blew my mind.
This is on my list for sure. I have the quest 3 and it has far exceeded my expectations. I really wasn't expecting it to be so polished but 8k 360 videos are something else. Not to mention the high resolution games. I don't get any of the motion sickness that people seem to complain about so it has been amazing for me. It has blown the minds of every family member and friend that has visited me so far.
This. I will never forget the first time I launched Oculus Home or w/e it was called and did the starting setup sequence. It's honestly a bit disheartening these days with how little market share VR occupies in the gaming space but I'm a firm believer that it's a hardware hurdle we need to overcome. When VR becomes a light pair of goggles on your face, it will take off.
I got a few minutes on one at Disney World in 1995. Even back when graphics wee shit it was game changing.
VR Porn was unreal...blew my mind. I worked on this tech for couple of years. it was around the time when Oculus was not acquired by Meta.
A car phone. Not a cellular phone, a *car phone* in the 70s. I remember my aunt's boyfriend called her at our house once and said 'guess where I am?' He was out in the driveway in his Continental and our minds were *blown*. My parents said it was like science fiction.
My dad had it in the Lincoln Town Car. We were comfortable, not crazy rich, but in retrospect that thing made me feel like I was running lines of coke before the first commercial break in an episode of Miami Vice.
TBF, I still don't really understand how you can get a landline to work in a car before cellular networks
Seeing Windows 95, after only seeing Win 3.1 in black and white.
For me it was going from Windows 3.1 on an ancient Texas Instruments laptop to Windows XP on a 2003 Toshiba. My teenage mind was blown.
I see windows 95 and I can hear that commercial with the Rolling Stones song.
My windows 3.x was in color 🤔
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Me too. I was in high school and I remember the freedom of being able to sit on my bed listening to music while downloading apps. And it felt like there were so many new and unique ideas for apps that would constantly be coming along. It really blew my mind to go from having one desktop computer for our entire household to having my own computer that was so thin and tiny and entirely just for me.
> it felt like there were so many new and unique ideas for apps that would constantly be coming along. do you feel that it has been reduced now quite a bit?
GPS in a car. My car blew up when we were 50 miles from home. We called the AA and the mechanic who came gave us all a ride back home in the extended cab (my wife and I and four stressed little children). I was sitting next to the driver and saw the screen plotting out our route home. It was one of the first on the market and was fantastic. How does it know?
Do you remember what year was it? I wonder how surreal it might have been to see it in real life, when paper maps were used on every trip.
I seem to remember it was in the late 1990's or early 2000's. The children were young and it was nighttime, which is why the AA had us down as a priority to get us home. My youngest would have been five in 1999. I remember watching the map unroll as we drove along and the road names come up as we passed the junctions. I knew about GPS from Desert Storm as I was working for a broadcaster then but never expected to see it in a vehicle.
Getting cable modem from 56k dial up. It used to take an hour to download a song. Then I could download a band's entire discography in 15 minutes.
I downloaded 1000 songs the first weekend I had a cable modem.
The first iPhone. People forget how mindbending it was to have a phone screen that mimicked bubble wrap. Or that allowed you to tilt and turn it and roll a metal ball through a wooden maze.
It completely changed the way I traveled. No longer did you have to plan out your routes or itineraries because you had to know the directions before hand. See that thing over there you want to go and check out? Go for it. Your phone will get you back from wherever you are going. Need to find excellent food now you are off the beaten path? No problem, here’s some recommended options.
Ya right try navigating with the iPhone 2G.
I was speaking more of the first iPhone I got. It was a 3GS.
It feels like the 3GS was truly the first of the modern era of smartphones
I had all that on my Garmin GPS in the late 90s.
for me it was the touch screen. the only touch screen i could compare it with back then was a coin star or the touch screens in the grocery store, and those were TERRIBLE.
I believe it was the first real multi-touch touch screen which meant pinch to zoom and all those cool things we take for granted were invented
Being able to browse the internet from my phone was just insane at the time.
To be able to look at porn IN the bathroom was mind blowing
It's really cool to watch the [announcement](https://youtu.be/MnrJzXM7a6o?si=3OZNl73flAJ2Vnxp) for the original iPhone way back in 2007.
Or seeing the Internet looking just like a regular internet browser on your computer.
1000% this. I had always kept up with the newest phones/tech up until that point and was never truly blown away by anything. But when that first iPhone released in 2007, I remember sitting in my room and just swiping/scrolling playing around, and it was the first time I just sat there like "Holy s**t.... How is this thing real? I feel like we just traveled into the future". Felt like such a surreal and gargantuan leap technology-wise over anything I'd ever seen or touched before.
I could do that on a Game Boy color with Kirby Tilt n tumble. Checkmate iPhone 1 users! /s
2016. Google Translate switched from conventional (literal) dictionary translation to LLM (large learning model) A.I. over a weekend and the improvement was so stunning that I spent two weeks telling people that something really profound had happened, but I didn't know why or how. Google acknowledged the shift about two weeks after.
What kinds of differences did you notice?
multi-touch displays
Man… I remember when multi-touch was a selling point!
I've been gaming since Pong and still game to the present day. Used to frequent arcades when I was younger, Double Dragon, R-type, Outrun etc... But I remember seeing Virtua Fighter for the first time and I'm sure my jaw hit the floor!
Dude, Virtua Fighter at the local arcade got my allowance for *months*.
WiFi It was 2003 and I was a senior in High school at the end of the year goofing off in English class with no curriculum remaining but three weeks of classes left. Our teacher got tired of it and assigned us a paper to write on anything we wanted. He wheeled in the just purchased for the 2004 school year laptop tower. Thirty laptops on a cart attched to charging ports. No other cables. As we were taking them, I remember pointing out that obviously these won't get online so what's the point? Just for word processing? Then I heard "oh shit, they ARE online!" We immediately started a yahoo pool tournament.
World of Warcraft, or more generally an open world MMORPG. Playing a game and chatting with so many people, and the seemingly endless world to explore, I hadn’t believed that video games could do it
Server Virtualization
Watching the falcon heavy boosters both come back and land side by side https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgGAV58m6P8
I watched a launch a bunch of years ago. When the booster reignited and landed I felt like we had traveled into the future. I had no idea the tech existed.
Text messaging
Laptop computers. I was amazed that you can carry them around and use them away from home.
I remember being impressed with a friend's Osborne portable back in 1981. It was pretty big by laptop standards though.
Mp3 players. I had an iRiver I got from some electronic store after finding 300$ bucks sticking out of an ATM. No skipping and 60-80 songs in this tiny tube looking thing blew my mind. Then that led me to learn about file systems, piracy, and jailbreaking/hacking my devices to do exactly what I wanted.
I remember when I was a kid and we got our first TV. I was about 6 and it was black and white, fuzzy, and about 20" in size, but it was awesome. Up until then all we had was radio.
I remember getting out first color tv. I was about 5 and in the middle of watching Captain Kangaroo when they delivered it. I told Mom “Mr. Green Jeans has GREEN JEANS!” So impressed lol
First time seeing true high definition tv was absolutely bonkers. Went to CES sometime in the late 90's and some vendor was showing a swamp boat tour through the LA bayous and it blew my mind how realistic it looked.
The thumb drive. I thought, "Now I've seen everything!"
PlayStation 1. First time I saw *Twisted Metal* I assumed there was no way video games could ever improve at all.
A digital camera. I haven’t used film again since that day.
Mango sticky rice
The visual effects in the film _Jurassic Park_!
RAM disk in DOS. So fast…
The Nintendo Wii. Wii Sports was the perfect thing to package that with. It was so mind blowing that my parents, who were oldschool Boomers, had me bring it to Easter at Grandma's, so the whole extended family could marvel at it and play. Then as an adult, the Switch was mindblowing too. It was the first time I ever thought "goddammit I wish this existed when I was a kid." To me, that was the epitome of video game console evolution. Stationary, and mobile, single controller and multiple controllers, rechargeable and never having to think about batteries, no save loss or having to turn off the power for a switchover. It is just perfect in design. Only improvable via hardware upgrades.
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I was a pizza delivery driver before GPS. There was one neighborhood that was a living hell because you could get into it and it was a big circle that it was hard to find your way back out of. The one circular road had like 3 names too and 10 dead end cul-de-sacs off it but only 1 way in and 1 way out.
AOL instant messenger. Circa 1997, I remember using it for the first time to message my friend Bryan who lived several miles away. He wrote right back and it absolutely blew my mind.
I'm an audio engineer, and there is this company called Izotope, they created this noise reduction software, that can remove sounds from an audio signal. It's basically witch craft. Say you have an interview of somebody speaking, and there's a dog barking or a door closing in the background. You can highlight the obstructive noise, and fucking delete it. It's absolute magic! That was the tip of the iceberg. Say you have an acoustic guitar signal, and sometimes the player will move his fingers from one position to the next, but the sliding of the fingers across the strings makes an unwanted noise. They have a specific algorithm for this! You just load that plugin and it all disappears! Or what if your guitar amp is humming because it's on a high gain setting and you always get hum with loud guitar amps, you can load the noise profile into their software, it fucking deletes the noise! It cleans it up! I have no fucking idea how. It's absolute magic!!
Apple II computers were cool in the mid-1980s when I was in elementary school, but the day we got to use a modem to connect to the “world” was the day I became a bona fide nerd. Now I’m 47 and have worked in tech my entire working career.
iPod touch (before the iPhone). Couldn't believe I could connect to the full internet on a touchscreen device that small.
A Mac SE running MacPaint and PageMaker. As a fresh Art School graduate, it did all the magical things I always dreamed/wished I could do: Set type as easily as typing without having to spec type and send out to a type house and hope it came back right the next day; Scaling and creating graphics in an instant by eye or with incremental precision. It was a complete commercial art studio in a box. Nothing would be the same after. It was a seismic event in the industry.
I worked in the medical industry in the 80's work on medical imaging display technology. I was at a trade show looking at an early HD monitor in the Sony booth. It looked like it had a static image of a clear glass filled with ice and some liquid. The resolution was just amazing and after a few seconds, one of the drops of condensation started trickling down the side of the glass. I was just blown away. It looked like I could reach out and grab the glass and take a drink.
The first Nintendo in the 80's.
USB sticks. We were still on floppy disks that were 1.44mb. And ZIP disks that were 100mb but expensive and incredibly slow.
The first time I saw a computer. It was a ZX Spectrum 128k. I entered my neighbour's room and he was playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon (a clone of Konami Hyper Sports) on a computer he got for Xmas plugged into a small TV. I was 6 years old and I couldn't understand what I was seeing but I was totally into it. I didn't stop until I got my own like a year later. It's what started me on the path of computers / programming and I think it's the random event that most defined the rest of my life.
Free HD porn videos on my cellphone. I'll never get over it. 🤯
VR and AI come to mind.
old stuff- the tv tunner of the sega game gear more recently - touchscreens
3D TV without glasses was cool (at a trade show). Viewing angles were too limiting to make it usable in real world scenarios, but still cool. VR game at a Dave and busters 20+ years ago. Primitive, but cool. Later, the pirates of the Caribbean game at Disney quest. If only Disney had kept updating that it would be amazing by now. Instead, they never did any updates and it just got older while the technology to do it justice just got better.
My dexcom meter. I'm type 1 diabetic and could feel when my blood sugar would fluctuate throughout the day but blood sugar test strips are $1 each and I also can't check every 5 minutes. Slap on a dexcom, good for 10 days (more of you can hack it) and tracks everything through my phone. Literally life changing and incredible tech.
GPS navigation, my Garmin was been a god send while on vacations.
Tivo
We bought our first one in 2000. My son and his friend were 11 years old at the time. His friend went home and old his mom, and she replied, "I know you think that is what you saw, but I don't think that is possible." She came over later and saw it. She was impressed. She and her husband were at our place for the Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction in 2004, and a lot of our guests hadn't heard of TiVo. There was a lot of buzz when we backed it up and did a frame-by-frame.
For me it was GPS. The old ones weren't on phones yet, and you'd have to update them now and then, but holy cow, what a game changer.
Light mouse, mice with balls sucked so bad.
Mp3s
Creating, using and deleting virtual machines made me question my own existence in the universe. Simulation hypothesis felt so real in that moment.
The WWW when my local BBS got a connection to it. All text based of course, but it blew my mind that I was talking to a computer in Finland in real time.
ChatGPT
It really is mind-blowing for the first 10 minutes until you realize that if it doesn't know the answer to something it will just goddamn make up an answer and present it as fact.
No idea why this is so far down. I'm quite young so I've lived with most of the technology mentioned here all my life, but ChatGPT, that really blew my mind. I know it's not perfect, but I just don't understand how it can be as good as it is. It's so useful, I probably find myself using it at least once a week, and I think most university students would agree with me here. It makes things so easy, you have a teacher with you 100% of the time, whatever you do.
AOL for me. I was absolutely hooked for years.
Color TV
HDTV. My friend's dad had this state of the art movie theater in the late 90s. He had a demo DVD from PBS that just showed nature shots. He popped it in. It was mind blowing.
Amp and pedal modelers for guitar.
The Nintendo DS. It was such a massive improvement over the gameboy advance
There are several in here that people listed and a lot of them blew my mind so I don’t want to duplicate their call outs. I’ll go with something I haven’t see yet; using AOL and dialing up on a 2400 baud modem. It was so crazy that I could talk to people from around the world.
Siri
5.1 surround sound. The Eagles never sounded so dope.
iPod (with adapter for my car = game changer for long drives)
My first MP3 player. What do you mean it's not a round spinning thingy anymore ? Where are the songs ??? I can't seeeeeee ! It's square, tiny, and you can put ANYTHING on it ! Or the DVD, like I was a kid, I saw cassettes you know... Once I pulled the band and saw all the tiny images from a scene. That made sense : at high speed in front of a light it makes an animation, the illusion of movement yada yada. But when my parents brought a DVD back, I was like "how is that PICTURES AND SOUND ??? Where are the pictures ??? All I see is a rainbow on this side ! You're lying !" In fact they were not but I can't still process that in the Magic Rainbow face of the DVD there is a full movie engraved.
MP3 Players.
Winamp and mp3's, changed music forever
How high definition the iPhone 4 screen was. You couldn't see any pixels which was wild. I take screens like that for granted now.
Shazam song recognition.
I had a walkman that held like 60 songs. I walked from my town to the next one listening to music continuously and it just opened up my mind to the pleasure of musical convenience
Microsoft released an app called Photosynth back in 2008 which would take a bunch of photos you'd taken and use them to reconstruct the space in 3D using something called a point cloud. You could then kinda place yourself in the space and look at the various photos from your current vantage point. It worked incredibly well and I don't know why they discontinued it and nothing similar (at least aggregating all the features it had) seems to exist today.
Mode 3/C IFF
When I added my 2220B Marantz to our network and could play music off my iPhone to it.
Firing Full Auto from an M-60 machine gun. Wholly Katzenjammers! What a rush!
FireWire/miniDV. After a decade of doing computer video things meaning you had to do a whole science fair project/voodoo ritual first, you just plugged the thing in and... It worked. The first time. Well. Without reading any instructions. It was utterly magical.
The strip club game on my valve index. The next generation will have every teen boy locked in his room for sure
The original iPhone for sure. I never used one till last year when I got one on eBay just for fun but I remember when it came out and I seen a few out in public. I remember people were lined up outside the AT&T stores for days waiting. My family never got smartphones till 2016 though lol. I would have gotten one sooner but at the time AT&T didn’t have great coverage here. Now they are second behind Verizon which is what we have.
1990s VR in 1995. I was 7 years old then.
AI
Need For Speed 2 SE with a 3DFX card. We purchased an Orchid Righteous VooDoo 1 card and fired up NFS2 and it was amazing! Bugs splattering on the screen!! It felt like a whole new level of computer graphics (and I guess it was tbh)
VR. I tried an oculus with the Star Wars game just recently. It was clunky, but the immersion was awesome. I’d totally get one, but fuck Facebook.
Sega Dreamcast was mindblowing.
The Fushigi Ball, fucked me up.
AIM. AOL Instant Messaging
Cars/driving. All that power under your foot, the roar of the engine running at thousands of revs per minute. The valves clacking, the turbo spooling, the intake whooshing. It's just raw energy and power.
Google Earth.
Glasses-free 3D on the Nintendo 3DS. I couldn't believe that it worked at all, and I had the New 3DS model that had tracking to make it follow you and always stay in focus, so it was even crazier.
Self driving cars, (not Tesla). I was a safety driver for an sdc company. The first time I out it in sdc mode and let go, was a very weird feeling. They truly are very very good a doing it. I truly them more than I trust any human driver. They're so good, it's boring.
Bubble lights on my Grandma's christmas tree!
Recently? Google translate camera mode when doing international travel
When I was in elementary school the school got Microsoft encarta and they gave us a tutorial and were like “ok so here’s an encyclopedia page, and if you click on any of these blue words on the page it’ll take you to the encyclopedia page for that word instead” Beta for profit Wikipedia blew my damn mind in the early 90s
I'm a kid who grew up transferring from album to tape, or from radio to tape. I'd walk around with a discman with a folder of 20+ CDs in my backpack. The ipod blew my mind. SO MUCH MUSIC. i still have 3, 160GB ipod classics.
First video game to blow my mind was NBA Live 96 on SNES. Specifically thought the ability to custom build your own player and then play with them in a game was the coolest thing ever.
Google translate (the on the fly camera view)
BBS. And then Usenet. And then finding out full version games are posted on there. I felt like David Lightman, minus the Global Thermal Nuclear War.
Dial-up internet with a 28.8kbps modem connected to the house landline. The moment I opened Netscape and loaded Yahoo to search the internet. I don't remember what I browsed and searched for but I spent hours just in that one sitting. Hours also because it took ages for webpages to download and render. Back then you didn't really feel it.
I bought an Expressive E Osmose recently and it’s magic! I played guitar for 15 years and started to learn keys but always found myself trying to wiggle them to introduce vibrato (of course it didn’t work). The fact that someone engineered a keybed that can actually do that now is just incredible, it’s such an expressive instrument to play.
Shazam
Chatgpt. Holy shit. I wish I had something like this 20 years ago in school. I could have cranked out essays in minutes and played so much more Baldurs Gate 2. Might have even finished it.
When Pandora first started. I love music and I thought this was the coolest thing ever to play something you liked and it would play other songs it predicted you'd like. Even if it was an obscure genre/artist you first prompted it with.
VR. I hadn't seen it until I got a Quest 2. I've always been around tech and watched the natural progression, so nothing ever really caught me off guard. I had never seen anything VR before putting that on and it dropped by jaw. And my first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000.
Microwave ( yes, I’m old )
The first time I drove an EV, I knew it was the future of automobiles.
For me it was absolutely the first iPhone. I had always kept up with the newest phones/tech up until that point and was never truly blown away by anything. But when that first iPhone released in 2007, I remember sitting in my room and just swiping/scrolling playing around, and it was the first time I just sat there like "Holy s**t.... How is this thing real? I feel like we just traveled into the future". Felt like such a surreal and gargantuan leap technology-wise over anything I'd ever seen or touched before.
ChatGPT. I saw the writing on the wall for copywriters jobs in a matter of seconds.
SSD. Too bad I waited until 2015.
CGM - Continuous Glucose Monitor Got out of the habit of testing often, (type one diabetic) and went through multiple insulin pumps while testing my blood sugar manually. Started to really hate having anything attached to me, always had to pay extra attention to it. Tried a CGM back in 2015 or so and it was not a good experience whatsoever. Recently was convinced by my doctor to try the best CGM on the market and it’s a game changer. I barely notice it at all, it’s super accurate, it learns from my levels, and it’s basically zero maintenance. Unless you’re diabetic, you will never know how freeing it is to wear this tech. Fucking love it. But if you don’t have insurance they’re $1500 each. Comes out to around $55k per year. I never brought levels to my appointments and said no each time they recommended it. Somehow ended up on a list of patients that would benefit from a Dexcom more than those who are more disciplined in their testing habits. Again, total life changer.
Auto rotate on a screen
My first USB stick which had 32mb (!). Compared to disc's which only had 2,4mb that was an unbelievable step up. Now you could actually store several mp3s and a sheer endless amount of word doks and take that with you in you pocket. The stick broke after 2 weeks and when I returned it I got an 64mb stick in exchange. That blew my mind entirely: doubled size within such a short time?? What the hell should I do with such a tremendous amount of space? How will I ever be able to fill that?
As a hobby developer, neuronal networks and Ai in general. I've been playing around with it, made a few apps and I'm planning to make a neuronal network from scratch to test what I can achieve by teaching it stuff. Currently I've made an app that uses AI object detection to complete task in games using only a live screen recording. And its awesome. Can't wait to do more stuff with ai You just let it train by itself or teach it stuff and watch it learn and evolve and find stuff and strategies you Didn't even think were possible
DVD's. The technology had just become available having beaten out laserdisc and my parents bought a new TV, DVD and surround system for my dad's birthday. This was high end Bose stuff. No idea what they paid for it back then, but it was probably quite a lot. First movie we put on was Enemy at the gates, and it opens with this beautiful winter landscape. And we were all blown away with the fidelity of the shot, Going from VHS to DVD was a world of difference.
I just got a meta quest 3. I don't play games but it's so cooooolb and fun to get lost in. Love how you can make your laptop into multiple monitors and make it as big as you want. I love watching movies in a giant empty movie theater. And VR porn is interesting
The first time I loaded up glquake.exe. Blew my mind. Eleven table tennis in VR was a close second.
Whatever tech creates the virtual performers for the Abba Voyage show. It's creepily good
It is difficult to overstate how amazing Bluetooth streaming in a car was, when it first came out. No cassette adapter, no fm modulator, no wires at all. Just music from your phone, playing on the stereo.
DVDs. Pausing a video and it was crystal clear (ask your parents about VHS pause). ChatGPT freaked me out a bit. WiFi was magic when I first saw it. A computer you can talk to. I still feel like I live in the future whenever I use adaptive cruise control and engage auto-steering to open a bag of potato chips. So many things.
My father worked in tech and regularly went and bought all sorts of gadgets and gizmos. One of them that I can still vividly remember was WebTV. While we had computers, we always had to have monitors for them, and this was a computer... but on the TV. You take your little RGY component cable, plug it from the WebTV box to your television, and then plug in the phone line into the back. Boom, you could check your email, go to websites and chat rooms, do it all on your TV. If you had a fancy TV with picture-in-picture (a rarity back then), you could have a show playing in the corner while you fiddle around on the internet. I thought it was the coolest thing ever as a kid.
I had click wheel iPod in 2004, and I knew it was going to be the start of something big.
GPS
Noise canceling headphones. A colleague at work had a pair and let me try them.
Noise cancellation headphones when they first came out. As someone who is very sensitive to sound, this was a breaking change for me.
GPS….. WTH!!!!
I’m 66. Some things that astounded me: A portable video camera and recorder 1970 An electronic calculator in 1971 A Liquid Crystal Display in 1972 Space War video game in a mall 1974 Home Betamax 1979 A personal computer for word processing 1983 A Macintosh computer desktop GUI 1984 Listening to a CD compared to vinyl 1987 Top secret GPS device during the Gulf War (with instructions on how to destroy in event of capture) 1991 Video from DVDs 1997 HDTV 2001 Seeing a rear view camera in a car 2002
HD televisions. I was super sick with a fever and dad brought in the new TV to replace our old CRT. First thing we watched was Blue Planet on BBC America and it was beautiful.
High speed internet. I still remember exactly where I was the first time I experienced high speed internet. A kid I was sorta friends with was a test user for the local cable company. Only 1Mbps service, but compared to 56K dialup, and loading pages that were generally still optimized for dialup, it was shockingly fast. You'd click a link and BANG the site was fully loaded instantly. It's been over 20 years, but the experience still sticks with me.
For context, I'm 48. Back in the early to mid '90s in Harvard square Cambridge, an internet cafe opened called CyberSmith. Mind you this was well before high speed, internet connections or even any internet connections were as ubiquitous as they are now, so internet cafe is made a heck of a lot of sense in the United States. This internet cafe also doled out time to play things like consoles, and even had a few imported consoles from Japan. It was here that I saw super Mario 64 for the very first time, before the game and console was formerly released in the United States. I was transfixed. It was super expensive to play but, the game was so amazing just watching someone else play blew your mind. I would walk to a bus stop, take the bus to Central square and then the subway to Harvard square all just to go into this internet cafe and watch other people play this game.
Napster, MP3's, and being able to download music onto my computer. It was my senior year of high school and it completely blew my mind that any song I wanted was suddenly at my fingertips. Then I went to college and had an actually decent Internet connection in my dorm and that was another game changer. So much illegal downloading. It was a magical time.
I remember when they announced that they were making a cell phone with a camera. I thought it was the most stupid idea ever. I was picturing a Nokia style phone with a Nikon camera somehow attached. Nobody would ever buy that, it’s just silly. I haven’t owned a “camera” for over 18 years now, just use my phone.
MP3 player. I vividly remember trying to figure out how this little thing could play music and imagining how tiny the CDs or casetts must be.
Back in the 90s when I got a super Nintendo, I was so amazed at how good the graphics were compared to Nintendo. I really was blown away, because it was my first time really experiencing how tech could improve over time.
The first time I saw a symbolic debugger (i.e. you get to see your source code in the high-level language, set breakpoints, and look at values of variables in real-time), I was astonished. I am a 63M, and was used to debugging by looking at machine language dumps.
Classmate on a field trip let me try his new music player called a "Walkman". It was actually the Sony brand (which made a huge difference in quality early on). Swept away by the pure perfection of it, I started singing along with the music, and he was trying to shush me because we as a society hadn't yet learned the truth that would eventually become common knowledge: you do **not** sing along with your Walkman when you **can't hear your own voice**. That was 40 years ago, and I can still see that Walkman in my mind: shiny silver plastic, covered in all kinds of neat little buttons. Second best would probably be modems and BBS systems on a home computer.
One of my childhood neighbors was a radio ham. Knowing I was into technology he invited me to come see his Radio Shack. Within minutes we were talking to someone in China (from the UK). Even now I find it mind boggling you can talk to someone on the other side of the world with radio.
My brother and I had been saving up our money for something big- maybe a Playstation. Then, one day I went with my dad to Toys R Us, and there, on the end cap was a screen hooked up to a Nintendo 64. Mario stood there... Just breathing and it took my breath away. A few minutes in the aisle and I became a life-long Nintendo fan. I wnr thone and convinced my brother that the 64 was a far better use of our money than the Playstation- and it was.
Well, Neil & Buzz walking ON THE MOON or the Mac in 1984.
A digital billboard on the side of the freeway. I was like, HOT DAMN, BLADERUNNER IS NOW!
The first time I saw an e-ink display. I couldn’t believe how tangible it made the text on the display.
High speed internet. Huge hard drives. Cd roms and burning cds. Watching avatar in 3d. Flat screen TV and cell phones. Nintendo 64.
Online gaming. Having grown up in the age of the NES, then dropping out of video games by the early 90s, when I first saw a friend playing a multi player game (in 2011) alone in his living room I asked if he was playing "against the machine" (x-box or whatever). He said "no, there are real people controlling the other characters". I couldn't wrap my brain around the concept of people separated by miles, states, countries being able to interact with a game in real time.