What is a technology growing up that when you saw it, it blew your mind?
MP3 player was a life changer. I went from a huge CD players not being able to fit in my pocket to a tiny bean that connects to pc with hundreds of songs, and i was blow away!
Inkjet Printer - We got an Epson Stylus Color with the Compaq Presario 486 SX2 66 and we printed out a relatively low res picture from Encarta. A sopwith pup. The previous printer we had was a dot matrix on a Commodore. It was amazing. I remember my dad said it he was, "thoroughly God damn impressed"
Cell Phone Text Messaging - Had a Nokia that was the first phone that I bought and first cell phone. When I found out that I could text people it was a game changer. Don't have to try and hear what was being said, I could read it. Just friggin' wow.
ICQ - Email was impressive, but instant messaging was very impressive. Still remember my UIN but unfortunately can't login to it (not that it'd work anymore anyway)
MP3s - When I found that I could download music I had to give it a shot. I downloaded a few MP3s over dialup and this was pre Napster days. Backed up the songs on floppy and had to play them in DOS on my computer. I remember one of the first was The Distance by Cake.
Writable CDs - Was one of the first kids in my school with a CD burner (bought it for $240ish) and installed it on our aging computer. Burned a whole bunch of coasters because of the dreaded buffer overrun. Felt there were unlimited possibilities when I could burn stuff to disc.
Divx - Video compression pre-Divx was not great. Divx was the first time it made it feasible (from my perspective) to download good quality video from the internet (we had some horrible dialup).
DVD - The jump from VHS to DVD is something that'll be hard for people to understand if they started with DVD. DVD is fine, Blue-ray is obviously better but not as drastically noticed as VHS to DVD was. My brother worked at Circuit City (RIP) and he got an Apex 300A. We managed to find the secret menu to turn off Macrovision and we were recording rented DVDs onto VHS. Sounds dumb, but it felt revolutionary.
Getting a DVD player and the Matrix was incredible. It had all sorts of commentary, behind the scenes, and other stuff. I spent hours watching the movie and the extras over and over again.
Or watching the credits roll, turning around, and telling your parents to go back to the beginning to watch it again because there's no more rewinding!
I drove 2.5 hours to buy that Apex DVD player. That was really one of the first reasonably priced DVD players you could buy. Loud as a freight train when it ran, but watched a lot of DVDs on that guy’ mostly from early Netflix.
I mean for me - as a bit of technology geek, I have to say it's pretty much everything.
But the internet, that's always going to be the thing that even today still amazes me.
It's just mind blowing that as a kid, the internet wasn't a thing. We got the internet when I started college, and it was dial-up and via something called Surf Time, which meant that between 6pm and midnight on weekdays and 6pm on Friday through to midnight on Sunday, you could dial a local rate number and use the internet, but not get charged for it on your phone bill. It was slow, would disconnect every 2 hours (making Windows service pack updates absolutely impossible, you had to wait until a PC magazine put the update on a CD). During that time, I have seen the birth of Skype, which was revolutionary on dial-up. Hamachi - zero config VPN on dial-up. Social Networks, YouTube.
And now here we are, just 25 years (roughly) later with the ability to stand in the middle of a field, in the middle of nowhere, and stream a 7 hour Oslo to Norway train journey, in 4K just for the sake of it. It really is mind blowing how far we have come, ignoring whether it is good or bad just for a moment, and appreciating what is now possible that wasn't even 15 years ago.
When I first saw metal gear solid as a child, I was blown away. I was shocked at how realistic they looked in 3D unlike my 16 bit Sega games. I remember my wild imagination kept me up at night thinking about how immersive MGS was.
Chromecast. Can't believe how easy it is to go from watching on my phone to my main TV and then switching to my bedroom TV. Still feels like magic when I think back to constantly dealing with HDMI and my laptop.
In 2008 Reddit blew my mind. I was a teenager and I suddenly had contact with people all over the world. I learned so much and I got access to piracy and shadow libraries over there eventually. Thus, my growth went parabolic, I somehow got myself educated there to the point my future went from "likely a min wage worker" to "career in IT".
One reason my hate for what Reddit is now is so big, is mainly because I used to have an at least equally big love for it. In hindsight though, that love was to the people that were using it together with me and those people can be found in other spaces too, or so I hope.
definitely VR. I have only ever used it twice but I can always vividly remember it. My buddy had a Vive in high school and the only time I visited his place I played Robo Recall and had a fucking blast
Word-processing. I fancied myself a bit of a writer when I was young. First my Dad gave me an electronic typewriter and that was a game-changer for organising ideas, sentences, paragraphs ... incredible, but my PC with Word, and Publisher, Wow! No more rewrites in countless exercise books, or liquid paper, or erasers. Amazing!
Ahhh yes, I remember the transition from the discman to the mp3 players - it was amazing! No more disc skipping when listening in the car! You suddenly had winamp in your pocket, it was so great. I had one of the cheaper ones, couldn't afford the ipod but it was still so great.
I remember storage sizes getting bigger and bigger, and how 100s of songs on one mp3 player was mindblowing.
I also remember cameras going digital - those blew my mind. You could take as many pictures as you wanted?? And it did take up a valuable spot in your limited roll of film? And you could see it??? Holy shit, man. Then also watching the megapixels start getting better and better.
I remember being blown away by no disc skipping and you can store about 3-5 CDs on it! Then I'd have to choose a few albumbs I wanted to listen to and then delete the disk and copy the song I wanted.
Diskettes The computer I had loaded programs off tapes, and that was a pretty "involved" process taking anywhere from 5-20 minutes. Then we got an Atari 800XL with a disk drive, and not only did loading only take a little while, but you could also save to the disk without special workarounds.
Flat panel displays The first computer LCD screens were small, not very impressive display quality wise, but they were SO THIN! They were making an image without the large back of a "traditional monitor". I'd vowed to own one one day. (turns out that CRT screens still beat them in some areas to this day...)
Home broadband before about 2000, i had to sneak around a long telephone extension cord to be able to get online for at most a couple of hours. Then one day we got a message that they were rolling out this "broadband cable" thing, and my whole world just shifted. My machine was ALWAYS ONLINE. The internet was ALWAYS THERE. I could download things that used to take me minutes in just seconds. It blows my mind even today still.
MP3/XVID/DIVX Suddenly my harddrive could fit whole songs and later whole movies...that coupled with the whole broadband thing opened up a whole new world of possibilities.
SSD It'd used to be normal for a computer to take a couple of minutes to start up. Even when it was, doing more than a couple of intensive drive bandwith things could really bog it down to the point of being unusable. Then SSD's came along. They started as pretty small things (still have my 30gb OCZ drive somewhere), but they were so incredibly fast. Systems now started in seconds. Games in a fraction of the time. And everything just felt snappy all the time.
It feels incredible to live through these times, where we take for granted that everything will always get better/smaller/faster during our lifetimes (hell, every year even) where that has never been the case at any point in history.
And technology wise it'll never get any worse than it is right now. That's pretty goddamn neat.
I will always remember that dial-up sound, how long it took to connect (if it did at all), and waiting for like 5 minutes watching a picture loading inch by inch on the screen. I was like 7-8 around that time I think? So my sister and I just loved searching for unicorn pictures lol
I remember the first iphone I ever saw. I was at the airport waiting in the security line, some lady a few people up was checking the weather at her destination. There was a dozen of us having our minds blown huddled around her. Smart phones, blessing and a curse.
The parkour/climb on anything first demo for Assassin's Creed was mind blowing.
This was at a time when a lot of games didn't even have jump buttons, and often blocked your path with a foot high wall or fence you couldn't jump over. Along comes this game, where the entire premise is "you see it, you can climb it". It was mind boggling.
Also, bluetooth headphones. No wires!? Shit was crazy.
I grew up with and into the internet, most things came naturally and where not that mind blowing. I've been looking forward to ML/AI and its currently blowing my mind that it actually works so well as a programming "assist".
My father brought home an electronic game box with Pong and hooked it up to our black and white tv set in the seventies. That was something else for someone only used to regular table top and card games. Heck yeah, I'm old.
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