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.
The Matrix was an incredible DVD. Definitely drove adoption of the format.
The Matrix was the first DVD movie I purchased (and still have and still love it).
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.
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.
When I first saw a Segway (remember all the hype?) I thought a self-balancing 2-wheel elevated wheelchair would be coming shortly after.
There are some! Unfortunately they haven’t really caught on well, not easily available unless purchasing outright and they’re usually 10s of thousands (most power chairs are) and not covered by insurance. I really want to try one, this is one I’m really interested in that can climb stairs.
That Scewo design is interesting. It’s infuriating that the price is more than a car. I’ve build balance-bots with Lego, it’s not complicated tech.
What I had in mind was more like Boston Dynamics’ Handle: https://youtu.be/-7xvqQeoA8c (Which I would call “advanced” … in 2017.)
Yea unfortunately that’s the disability tax, most things designed for disability are expensive. That’s a cool design, I hadn’t seen it before. Maybe in another decade the tech will be replicated in mobility aids.
Another reason besides price for why the 2 wheel balancing chairs aren’t used more is just functionality. Many people who use power chairs aren’t able to balance well, my own is pretty poor, so there’s an even more limited market and unfortunately we live in capitalism.
Hmm. My intuition is it shouldn’t take any balancing skill on the user’s part, but the chair/bot will be fidgety – moving a little bit to maintain balance. So maybe not a good experience for activities needing stillness.
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.
Right now AI, from science fiction to reality in like 10 years.
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.
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.
This is mine as well, but it wasn’t on PC that impressed me. It was the first time I called Directory Assistance and at no point in the call a human was involved. Until then every demo of voice recognition had been a goofy parlour trick. Voice recognition software was very niche, and only marketed to secretaries for dictation. To suddenly see it in a practical application to completely replace a human interaction blew my mind.
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.
I would add Bluetooth to this as well.
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.
Oh my god, this.
It was like magic when I first used one; a real ‘the future is now’ moment.
The Apollo program landing people on the moon, if not the entire space exploration programs of the 60s. (I’m old!)
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.
My introduction to the internet was way before www. As a first year student I mentioned a topic I was interested in to a professor. He said I should email his friend at University of California, Berkeley as he would know about the topic. He gave the address and I went away to find out what this email thing is. The next morning I had a reply. For a farm boy for whom snail mail and telephone were the means of interaction beyond the neighbours this was totally mind blowing. I got advice from a professor in one of the top universities in the world just by emailing him!
Dewey Decimal System!
ADSL. Finally we could browse the web as long as we wanted without getting a high phone bill
I guess for me it was the internet (AOL and crappy slow modem…), GPS navigation, smartphones and true wireless earphones. These technologies basically changed my life and opened up new worlds and possibilities for me.
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!
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.
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.
