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. In particular, being able to instantly communicate instantly with anyone across the planet (early internet chat rooms)

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.

Wifi. I remember when my family got our first wifi capable laptop and asking my father so many times “So, we can like go anywhere and access the internet???” and just saying “Sure. As long as we’re at a Starbucks”.

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.

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.

SETI@home

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

High speed internet (as opposed to the dial-up we had), the iPod Touch

I'd say the 3DS's screen, and VR. It's mindblowing to even think those are possible and they're very cool to experience, especially for the first time.

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

Email. I was 6 when my dad typed an email to my grandma and then hit send. I asked when she would get it and he said "oh, it's on her computer right now".

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 CD's and not really ever having a portable CD player to iPod shuffle was mind-blowing

Second on MP3 players, specifically the one that was also a USB stick. What, you can plug this straight into the computer! And it fits 256MB, that’s like 5 albums!

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!?!

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

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.

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

@s804 I remember that first time that I saw a Sony Ericsson phone.
On those days most cell phones were ugly and gray. When Sony came to the phone space was like looking what a phone should be.

Their designs were clean and came in some well selected colors, walkman earphones were the best is sound quality, but what was the holy grail (IMO) were those cameras.
Cybershot branding was what put Sony cameras in the radar.

Then Xperias with Android came. Felt like using a spaceship in 2010.

TLDR: Every video game system I’ve ever owned.

My first gaming system ever was a game boy pocket, and the cut scenes that played out at the start and ending of the Zelda game took my breath away. I remember wondering if we’d ever see full cartoons on a gameboy. (They actually did for GBA.)

I eventually got an N64 and actually got made fun of by my step brother because I used to disconnect it, put it back into its packaging, and up into my closet every time I was done playing it. Even though I had worked all summer to buy it for myself, we were never financially secure and I couldn’t convince myself that I really had the right to completely enjoy it. At least not until I got used to owning it.

With GameCube, the feeling of the controller blew me away, and I adored the size of the disks. The cut scenes in Tales of Symphonia were like actual anime and I just couldn’t handle that it was coming from my video game system. I used to take it to a friends house so we could watch in awe together.

The Gameboy Advance was first time we could have anything like a SNES in our pockets, and I got the SP, which was a clamshell and oh so pocketable! But imagine what it was like to play a DS for the first time. Not only did had a port of Super Mario 64, but it had an entirely second screen, and it was a touch screen! That little guy was awesome.

I remember being in 6th grade and my friend told be they just heard about a new hard drive with 1 gigabyte... 1000 megabytes!!! Absolutely blew my mind.

At the same time, I had a weekly allowance of 1 AOL hour, which I never used because the internet seemed kinda pointless.

(Yes, we were nerds)

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

Nintendo 64. And yet, I realized not much later on that I liked the older games more, and I still do. My Game Boy and SNES got more use than the N64 ever did. Star Wars Racer was awesome though, and playing Goldeneye with my friends.

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

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.

My first Atari 800XL computer and programming in general. I got it when I was 8 and as for a few first days I had no games for it but a book on Atari Basic, I started my programming journey then.
Then audio CDs and DVDs.
Then mobile phones.
Now the research equipment I work with.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

DivX ;-) codec, making it possible for me to watch Matrix on my computer.
At least 3 times a week for that whole summer.

First time I used a (relatively) modern touchscreen, which for me was the original Nintendo DS, really felt like something from the future at the time.