Technology

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.

The internet, really. Didn't get introduced to it until late highschool, so by that time I already had lots of painful experiences trying to find information for papers and projects at the local libraries. Being able to find information on a computer was kind of mind-blowing.

Videogame emulation. In early 2000s (maybe in late 90s), a friend called me to his home and said he wants to show me something. Then he said "look" and played my favorite game Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past on the PC in front of me. I thought it was a Flash video in the browser and he tried to fuck around with me. As soon as I knew what is going on, I quickly understood the power of emulation. Over 20 years later, this technology is still mind blowing to me.

The Apollo program landing people on the moon, if not the entire space exploration programs of the 60s. (I'm old!)

Speech recognition. Being able to tell your computer what to do, and it actually does it, just feels like something straight out of SciFi. It is a shame that Alexa, Google Assistant, etc. ended up being such privacy nightmares, but hopefully projects like Rhasspy can help change that.

Seat elevator on power wheelchair. I got a chair with a seat elevator in my late teens and it was a total game changer for me. I was suddenly able to access so much more of the world and operate more independently, and eventually live alone on my own. I was barely able to get it and had to fight insurance as it was very costly at the time. Now in the USA, they just became standard through CMS (Medicare/Medicaid) which typically becomes standard industry wide, meaning seat elevators in power wheelchairs are now available to everyone with insurance. That's pretty amazing to me that this type of technology will be the default now.

EVs. 25 years ago I believed EVs won't get the battery capacity they need. Like, nobody will ever take owning seriously. I was so wrong.

How the NES gun could tell where i was shooting in Duck Hunt. I could never understand how it knew, and even once I later learned the answer, I was still impressed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ADSL. Finally we could browse the web as long as we wanted without getting a high phone bill

touchscreens becoming so good so quick blew my mind. Seeing how quick it went from clunky stylus palm pilots to fluid smartphones gave me whiplash.

SETI@home

When my teacher said his computer was searching for aliens I thought surely he was joking.

Right now AI, from science fiction to reality in like 10 years.

Bluetooth headphones/earbuds. Aging myself here, but I got laughed out of a RadioShack as a kid for implying that headphones may not need cables one day. Who's laughing now!?!

Since I'm an old greybeard - BBS's. It blew my young mind that you could connect your computer to another one and communicate with people.

Email is a close second for the same reason - pre-WWW I should point out haha!

GPS. In the 80s, I learned how to navigate by taking the bearing of landmarks. It took some time and gave you only a general idea where you were.

When I got my first GPS device in the late 90s, it was breathtaking. And at that time, the accuracy was still degraded for civilians.

The idea that a navigation device can show on which side of the road you are on - in real time! -feels like magic.

The graphics jump from PS1 to PS2 shattered my 10 year old brain.

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.

Real time 3d in video games. I had so many questions on how it could possibly be working. Now I'm finishing my master's degree in computer graphics.

I remember the day a friend of mine said: Hey, have you heard of this thing called 'Google'?

Games. I remember playing Carmageddon when it was first released, and wondered how the fuck they got such a crystal clear image. I played it again recently, and was "what is this shit??" because it was pixelated lol

Seeing a Nokia Communicator phone blew Vulcan's mind (keep in mind, this was a 6-year old Vulcan)

The touchscreen.

It was crazy pants that you could have a device and not have a keyboard.

Might seem silly but QR codes and Bluetooth, I remember printing QR codes and showing them to my parents, for my 9yo self it was a way to share secret information.

Going from playing space impact on my nokia to having my next phone reproduce a gif recieved by bluetooth.
Also Wi-Fi.

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".

Usenet, I was working at AT&T in the netherlands in the 1980's and we got access to usenet using uucp and dialup modem, Usenet then was a throve of information and innovation. It was (for me) eye opening.

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