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Novel_Towel6125@reddit

Atomic clocks and the whole NTP infrastructure.

We were vaguely on the early side of getting cable Internet access (late 1996 I think), so immediately I started playing around with the implications of this "always online" business and I came across NTP.

Kids these days (I love that sentence opener) might have trouble imagining a world when the time of day was not objective. Yeah, there was a phone number called "time" that you could call. And broadcasters (radio broadcasters in particular) would sometimes have on-the-hour signals. But sometimes even they weren't all in perfect agreement with each other. When you agreed to meet up with someone at 5 o'clock, it was always plus-or-minus a minute because you couldn't reasonably expect two different clocks to be more precise than within a few seconds of each other. (And they would only stay that way until one of them started drifting)

I fell into a rabbit hole exploring NTP. Like there were these astronomically expensive atomic clocks which could keep almost perfect time (within nanoseconds, if I remember right) for years.

But then the operators of these atomic clocks would just let other people synchronize to them, for free. And through all the chaos of the packet-switched Internet, somehow you could connect to a server halfway around the world which connected to another server halfway around the world which connected to another server halfway around the world which connected to another server halfway around the world which connected to an atomic clock and all the problems with latency disappeared and your computer's clock would be accurate within A MILLISECOND and, as long as you had an Internet connection that stayed up, you could keep your clock synchronized FOREVER.

It's just crazy to me.

And now it's just, like, part of the background of society. Like OBVIOUSLY literally every digital device on the entire planet has its clock synchronized within a millisecond of every other digital device on the entire planet. DUH. Like what could be so hard about that? Don't even think about it.

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evila_elf@reddit

I remember being in school and syncing my watch up perfectly to the school bell.

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ElectroSpore@reddit

Encyclopedia Books --> Encarta CD --> Wikipedia Internet

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evila_elf@reddit

I had a set from 1980, two years before I was born. I finally got rid of them earlier this year. Such good memories of poking around in them when I was a kid :(

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bjgrem01@reddit

When I started middle school, my grandparents gifted me a full set of World Book encyclopedias.

About a decade later, I got an entire set of encyclopedias on an SD card.

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ElectroSpore@reddit

When I started middle school, my grandparents gifted me a full set of World Book encyclopedias.

Back when you ordered them and a bonus standing SHELF was a common addon. We had a second hand set to start.

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evila_elf@reddit

When I was working at a public library, I remember when we first started carrying DVDs for check out. We cleared off a whole shelf and had 3 DVDs.

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Redbeardthe1st@reddit

Maybe it's all the sci-fi I watched and read as a kid, but I honestly can't think of any technological advancements that have surprised me.

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Interesting-Rule-175@reddit

3d printers. I recently needed a part for my motorcycle, and I just printed it. I also needed table cloth clips before a party and boom. It's some real star trek stuff.

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HalfFrozenSpeedos@reddit

Mine is a finicky pos (creality ender 5 plus) and I have a serious love/hate relationship with it, when it works it's great but then it throws a tantrum for....reasons and I mutter oaths against creality....

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bratikzs@reddit

Time for an upgrade! Creality makes some solid machines that are not talked about enough these days - mostly because bambu has come out with some INSANE reliable fast machines.

I mean, my optimised upgraded Ender estimates a 21 hour print while the bambu will do the same in 7.

Yes. The bambu’s across all their printers will be this fast. Bottles the mind. BOTTLES I tell you!

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HalfFrozenSpeedos@reddit

Yeah I'm thinking about a bambu but well other financial priorities

(Also BOGGLES the mind is the phrase ;-) )

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bratikzs@reddit

Ah. I’ll copy/pasta that for later.

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arcxjo@reddit

Have they gotten that bad? Ender 3 was like the Honda Civic of printers.

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anemptycardboardbox@reddit

I don’t have one , but I remember first hearing of them. I thought, no way it’s what it sounds like. You can’t print in 3D! Now my son has one and I’m kinda jealous

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Rockbeezy@reddit

It's easy to forget about because it sorta exists quietly in the background of every day life but Google Earth / Maps is legitimately a wonder of the modern world, and an absolutely insane undertaking. You can pull it up and drop down to a 360 street view of basically any town with a paved road, anywhere in the world, in a matter of seconds, from the palm of your hand.

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MotherofaPickle@reddit

I still take my road atlas on trips.

I planned and executed a 4000-mile road trip to a part of the country I had never been before and I can’t even fathom how my dad did it before email/internet and GPS. How did we not get lost more often?

And my dad prefers backroads that are usually poorly marked on atlases.

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serialflakes@reddit

Not sure where you are, but I’m pretty sure the answer to that was AAA Triptiks. I remember going with my dad to AAA before any major roadtrip, and picking up that little bible of directions.

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Hot_Future2914@reddit

My mom still calls any mapping program's directions a triptik

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jasonrubik@reddit

I remember back in 1999 when we were looking at grainy black and white satellite imagery on TerraServer, and it blew our minds

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eggs_erroneous@reddit

I forgot all about TerraServer! I think I first heard about it on TechTV or something. Probably The Screensavers. It was amazing for its day.

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Myfourcats1@reddit

My car tells me when to turn, when there are police or backups, when there are objects in the road etc. That’s pretty amazing. Also, I drive in southeastern Virginia a lot. I don’t need to be told there is construction or there are police ahead. That’s a given. Lol

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smokiechick@reddit

My mom fondly remembered cross-country road trips with her mom. She swore she could read a map before she could read a book. So she packed me (14) and her mom in the car and we drove from the burbs of NYC to Seattle (and back). I remember that I was reading Lonesome Dove in the backseat and Gram was talking about the time before the interstate system and I remember being cognizant that we were in the middle of nowhere South Dakota on roads younger than my grandparents. And now we could have done it without paper road maps, but the guys in my book had done it by the sun and the stars with no roads, literally one generation before my gram.

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ammodramussavannarum@reddit

From 2000 to 2004 I worked for a state-wide nonprofit, driving trucks picking up donations all across Colorado and southern Wyoming. The first hour to hour and a half of each day was spent mapping out our routes on paper maps and finding addresses. I learned a ton about how to navigate and find any address in most places, but flipping through paper maps and weird scrawled notes while looking for addresses on rural roads always felt like a recipe for disaster. We did have Mapquest and some other sites, but they were clunky to work with and the printed maps sucked.

I do spend lots of time on my computer with google maps pulled up, just learning about areas I’m visiting, or helping people find things. Google maps should just be my default home screen on my computer these days! But then I’ve always been a map nerd.

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Osprey31@reddit

I remember something like a 20/20 freakout story about being able track traffic data from people's mobile phones. I was thinking about that recently and had a chuckle as I was using Maps to avoid traffic congestion.

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Bergmiester@reddit

I like looking back in time with the older imagery on google earth to look at all the empty fields there were to explore when I was a kid.

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funnyname5674@reddit

The greatest invention since the compass itself. We'd all be lost without it

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MrRoastedbeef@reddit

Except for my street. Street view car won't come down here.

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c_b0t@reddit

I vividly remember the first time I dragged Google Maps and it moved. Prior to that you had to click to go to the next map square.

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xt0rt@reddit

And you can see back as far as 7-10 years in some locations on street view! I love going through some of my old haunts and then going back in time to see what it looked like back then as compared to now.

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PizzaWhole9323@reddit

Okay I'd like to play. I inherited my daughters Ford fiesta SeS hatchback when she went off to another state for a job. Now I went and I got $10 Bluetooth dongle and now boom my car has its own radio station via my phone. I love that. Such a cheap piece of tech that would have absolutely blown our minds back when we were using cassette adapters in our hoopties. :-)

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pidgeon92@reddit

The first time I saw Mapquest was an eye opener. No more paper atlases. No more folding maps.

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eat_like_snake@reddit

I remember mp3 players being a "holy shit" thing to me when they first started becoming widespread and popular because I didn't imagine us ever getting to a point where you could carry 500 songs on you without lugging around a bunch of physical media.

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Character_Bend_5824@reddit

There was a period just prior to the introduction of the iPod, when MP3 players only had maybe 100 MB. There was a micro trend of fitting your car with a PC and removable HDD with navigation from a controller ran up to the center console. This was literally my pie in the dky dream for about 2 years. Ipod Nano broke me of that wish. Another contender was minidisc, but that had DRM hurdles in hindsight and was a fairly proprietary tech, so I'm glad I didn't become beholden to a new format.

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eat_like_snake@reddit

See, that's some bougie shit for me. When I had an MP3 player, car still had a CD player. If you wanted your MP3s in the car player, you just burned some CDs.

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BrilliantTop5012@reddit

I still remember having a cord with a cassette tape thing on it to connect my Discman to the car stereo with tape deck only !

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BetterCallSlash@reddit

I remember a friend in high school telling me about these and I thought he was full of shit. I gave him a ride a few days later and he brought one with him along with his discman to prove to me this sorcery was real.

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PickledPixie83@reddit

I had one of these for YEARS, like well into 2005 until we got an iPod. A singular iPod for both my ex husband and I to use.

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BetterCallSlash@reddit

I used mine until 2003 when I finally got a car with a CD player 😂

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tjdux@reddit

Some head units can read MP3 cds. Which used regular CDr but the format remained mp3, which means you could fit over 100 songs on a cd vs 15.

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Character_Bend_5824@reddit

The first CD burner my father bought was $600 and used USB 1.1. Took me a while to understand what buffer underrun meant... So many failed burns and trashed discs

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jasonrubik@reddit

I bought a MP3 CD Diskman in 1998. During college I amassed a huge collection of MP3s by borrowing them from other computers on the campus LAN. Then I burned them all to CD and would listen to them on the go with that. I just looked it up. It was the Red Philips Expanium model: EXP313

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jstnpotthoff@reddit

Some of us just bought this

https://www.crutchfield.com/S-mlWJSbZdWYO/p_570CDCMP3/Aiwa-CDC-MP3.html

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Character_Bend_5824@reddit

Most CD players eventually supported MP3. The problem there is that navigation could become tedious. I stuck to red book burns with CD text. This still serves me well, actually. But, most of it it ripped into iTunes

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jstnpotthoff@reddit

I got that in 2000 for my first car when I was 16. It's one of the first (and may even have been the first) car stereo that played mp3 cds.

I still ended up with one of those 100+ cd cases to flip through. A cd fit something like 10 albums.

Eventually I upgraded to an insane $700 JVC with a USB and hooked up a 500 gig external hard drive that took way too long to load.

I do really miss swapping out car stereos.

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itorrey@reddit

OMG I'm not the only one?!?! I had an old PC and I ran a keyboard cable, aux, and power to the trunk and when the PC powered on it booted directly into DOSAmp and then I could navigate the tree structure using the numpad I had hooked up. No screen so if you were off by one you'd just use a couple keys and you'd be back at the root and you just go forward one. There was also a key I think to shuffle.

It was amazing. The HDD was semi-portable, in that, it was attached using an IDE cable but was easy enough to pull out and put back in when I wanted to add more songs or if leaving it out in the heat for too long.

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ADMotti@reddit

I remember a very brief time about 15 years ago when people were doing the computer/HDD thing but with just an iPad. Mildly surprised that didn’t last, tbh.

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ElectroSpore@reddit

Ya going from a big CD wallet, to 5-6 CD changers mounted in the trunk / under the seat to 1 CD or 1 device holding hundreds of songs was kind of a fast and large leap.

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RunnerHANA85@reddit

Volkswagen went even better, They offered a pre-wired trunk mount for a CD changer. But there was also a device called Phatnoise (look it up!) that was a hard drive that fit perfectly into the CD changer interface. And it could be controlled from the head unit. AWESOME!!

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silenttd@reddit

The trunk multi cd-changer is such a unique concept for the brief time period it was a valid technology. It seemed like such a status symbol and tech upgrade for your car.

Now it's such an obsolete solution to an issue I'm not sure I could adequately explain to the younger generations. Like "we wanted variety in our music, but not the inconvenience of having to swap CDs, so we picked 6 that we liked and loaded them into a box in the trunk because the technology didn't fit in the dashboard yet"...

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ElectroSpore@reddit

so we picked 6 that we liked and loaded them into a box in the trunk because the technology didn't fit in the dashboard yet"...

Theft was another reason it was in the trunk, under the passenger seat was another common mounting location. However I did have both my DECK AND my CD changer stolen out of my car when I had one mounted under the passenger seat.

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earpain2@reddit

Oh god - until now I had completely forgotten walking around with my radio face plate in my purse

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superschaap81@reddit

I remember going to bars and putting my wallet, keys, smokes and radio faceplate case on the table, regularly. LOL

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belmontpdx78@reddit

Once I was at an oil change place and my new debit card (brand new to my part of the US) declined even though I knew I had money in my account. My bank had a branch in the big outdoor strip mall/shopping center I was in so I asked them if I could just go to the ATM and be right back. They had me hand over my Pioneer faceplate as collateral 🤣

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Aggravating-Alarm-16@reddit

Don't forget the cooler sibling of the trunk multi CD changer, the in dash CD changer

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reillan@reddit

My parents had bought a car that had one, and they never used it. Eventually when I needed a new car they gave the car to me and I loved having that thing for a little while. Until my g/f at the time borrowed the car and totaled it.

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Indubitalist@reddit

It was literally a juke box in your trunk. It’s nuts thinking about how cool that was and how narrow a span of time it was at all a thing.

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No-Bet3523@reddit

Narrow span like Betamax

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BetterCallSlash@reddit

I’m still blown away that mp3 players as their own separate devices became obsolete within 10-12 years.

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-metaphased-@reddit

In 2005, I had an iPod video. It was basically a smartphone without its own internet or a phone, but it had wifi. It felt like living in the future. I had music, books, and the internet in my pocket.

So...I just realized I've been doom scrolling for 20 years. Fuck.

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Automaticman01@reddit

I remember being blown away when I started seeing the in-dash 6 CD changers.

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ElmerTheAmish@reddit

I was working at Best Buy at the turn of the Millennium. I remember lots of conversations about minidisc and .mp3 players. I swore I wouldn't own one until I could take my entire catalogue with me. Looking back, it's shocking how quickly that became a reality!

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gilligan1050@reddit

I worked there then too! I chose minidisc. I was wrong.

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BunkerBuster420@reddit

And now you don’t even have it stored anywhere and you don’t own anything.

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ElmerTheAmish@reddit

Too accurate!

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AlchemistMustang@reddit

Jesus. My moment was burning CDs that could take straight mp3 files and play in my portable CD player. Suddenly I could have 100+ songs on the go. All I had to do was buy a newer version of the Aiwa I already had for like 60 bucks.

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fenderputty@reddit

Also because even the skip free discmans sucked major ass.

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PancakeProfessor@reddit

That was one of the main reasons I got one. I had a Jeep Wrangler at the time and the CD skipped whenever I would go off road. I got the mp3 player (40GB Creative Nomad Jukebox) because it wouldn’t skip, but quickly realized I could never go back to individual albums on CD again.

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fenderputty@reddit

"rest the discman on this hoodie" lololol ...

Digital age was such a godsend

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PancakeProfessor@reddit

I like to say that I invented mp3 players in like 1992. I had the idea that “in the future” we would just carry around a chip in our watch or something that could store hundreds of CDs worth of music. Only in my idea, you had to take the chip to the record store for them to load the music on it because I didn’t know what the internet was yet.

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jreashville@reddit

I was homeschooled and one of the things I was interested in being was a radio dj, so my mom set up a meeting for me with a local dj to ask questions about the job and stuff. CDs were newish at the time and I asked whet he thought the next thing would be. He predicted mp3 players perfectly and the idea really blew my mind.

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tjeepdrv2@reddit

An mp3 player and earbuds meant that I could do motorcycle road trips without just hearing the hum of an engine for 500 miles. Game changer!

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cbih@reddit

I was on mp3s immediately. Burning custom CDs for $20 a piece was a great gig in 1999.

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silenttd@reddit

Yeah, I remember thinking portable mp3 players were going to be fucking huge. When they came out we already had portable CD players and the ability to burn our own CDs. The first ones that came out were really limited in terms of storage, but I remember wondering why we weren't just using CDs for storage.

My first one was a Creative Rio with 32 MB storage as a first mover, but even the first iPods were only 256-512 MB.

I remember being really confused as to why none of them were taking advantage of CDs simply as their long term data storage, which was like 700 MB. Why not just have a walkman with a CD reader and a small hard drive that pulled mp3s off the CD-R and into temporary storage on the mp3 player? But the tech moved so fast that it was just a moot point after a few years

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DiaDeLosMuebles@reddit

I remember when mp3s in general were a holy shit moment. Before that it was a giant wav file. Other than that the only other real options were midi and mod

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eat_like_snake@reddit

Had plenty of midis back in the day. WAVs were generally too big for my computer's HD, at least for more than just a small few.

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ElectroSpore@reddit

Before that it was a giant wav file.

Or you had to STREAM from one CD drive to a CD-RW drive directly leaving the (session open) and add more tracks then close it and hope that a music player would still read it.

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Dear-Discussion2841@reddit

I remember someone trying to explain it to us because she was the only person we knew who had one!

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Moist_Rule9623@reddit

It’s kind of a subset of cell phones in general, but specifically when I figured out that the Netxel walkie-talkie radios had essentially unlimited range on that feature, with no noticeable lag even across the country, that was wild to me. Having grown up with conventional CB radios and such

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ElleAnn42@reddit

I remember being surprised when long distance calls stopped being a thing. I can really call anyone in the entire USA without a prepaid phone card? Excellent!

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Myfourcats1@reddit

My mom and grandma would alternate who called on Saturday as a way to split the cost of long distance.

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Osprey31@reddit

Waiting till 9pm to make a long-distance phone call to avoid extra peak charges.

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Bobbie_Sacamano@reddit

My first Garmin GPS blew my mind.

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AugustiJade@reddit

I was just going to say the same thing! I was travelling quite a lot for work back then, and I was so thrilled over not having to use MapQuest any more.

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TheDoorViking@reddit

Used one of the really old ones that only reported coordinates. I was helping my father collect soil samples while documenting their location. I think that was the early nineties.

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Cool_Dark_Place@reddit

I remember watching some "future tech" show in the early 90s that featured one of the first GPS navigation prototypes. They had it on a newish Mercedes Benz, and it had a huge antenna on the roof that ran to a big box in the trunk that was essentially a large CD-ROM equipped PC that had all of the map data. Amazing how far they came in just about 10 years.

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BrilliantTop5012@reddit

My old VW or Audi had nav on it and it needed discs for updates. I never got the updates so it was out of date and I never used it.

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xt0rt@reddit

I wonder if the show you watched was "Beyond 2000"? I loved that show!

A little off-topic but, I remember them talking about how your brain doesn't register brake lights on cars very well and they were demoing this new tech where the brake lights flashed 3 times then went solid. It wasn't until the last 5 years that I saw that implemented on semis and ambulances and it feels weird that it would take that long to do.

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Cool_Dark_Place@reddit

Lol... I think it actually was "Beyond 2000." I seem to remember it coming on the SciFi channel back in its early days. Thank you, kind Reddit stranger!

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jstnpotthoff@reddit

Maybe 2003, I got a Treo Palm OS phone. Like a blackberry with a touchscreen. It was amazing. I sold insurance so I bought an external GPS with software to get to the houses. It's crazy how many roads just weren't even mapped yet.

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PrincessSarahHippo@reddit

Garmin still makes really great products. I got a Garmin watch several years ago and it was such an improvement over the fitbits I was accustomed to. I just switched to a Samsung Galaxy watch bc Garmin is not compatible with so many apps and it's newer and has a better display, but the Garmin is still by far the better product.

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username__0000@reddit

We bought one for geocaching and even though it was kinda expensive for essentially a toy. We got our moneys worth.

You had to really like geocaching back then to play at all. Printing the instructions and using an actual gps instead of a phone for it all. lol

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Bondedknight@reddit

It also blew my mind how quickly they became obsolete too! The most exciting day was taking our first interstate road trip with the new gps, but then a few years later it's just "Google maps on my smart phone" and it's been on laying on the bottom of a cabinet since then

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kinetic_cheese@reddit

GPS was my answer as well! I depend on it so much now, it's a wonder I wasn't constantly lost when I first learned to drive.

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lifeuncommon@reddit

I remember the first TV remote I got like 20 years ago that you didn’t have to point at the TV for it to work. That blew my mind.

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1127_and_Im_tired@reddit

Downloading a remote on your phone because you lost your TV remote was crazy to me

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MotherofaPickle@reddit

That’s…a thing?

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Myfourcats1@reddit

You can get one for your firestick and Roku too.

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anemptycardboardbox@reddit

I’m guessing for anything that uses apps, sure. I have an older TV with a fire stick, and they have a remote control app. I’d imagine all new smart TVs would too

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Chandra_in_Swati@reddit

My remote is on my phone and sometimes I point my phone at the TV out of habit and then I remember what I’m doing, it’s so wild.

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Alternative_Plan_823@reddit

Wow. That's new to me

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Chemical_Shallot_575@reddit

E-mail. In the mid-90s, when I used it primarily to write to my high school friends. A year+ before, we’d been passing notes on lined paper.

Going to college 96-00 was a mind trip, looking back, but we just rolled with all the changes.

I registered for my first semester in-person, standing in long lines and filling out paper forms at the registrar’s office. By the next year, I felt lucky to just roll over in bed to register by phone. The following year, everything had gone online, and we never looked back.

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867-53-oh-nein@reddit

God. Standing in line to register was awful. And inevitably they wouldn’t have several classes you wanted so you had to pivot quickly on the spot.

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LuisMataPop@reddit

What surprises me is how people use technology and they don't have the slightest idea on how it works

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anemptycardboardbox@reddit

When I was growing up, I swore I’d never be an Old Person who doesn’t keep up with tech. I remember my granddaddy showing me his new digital camera and I thought it was so cool that he was keeping up. Now tech changes so fast. I try watching tutorials, etc when I need to, but I definitely sometimes resort to calling my son. I can only imagine that in 30-40 years, I will be completely hopeless

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LuisMataPop@reddit

In my personal experience young people are so used to tech just working that almost any young person I know doesn’t even know that they don’t have to pay for extra storage if they download their photos or things like that, personally I’ve always made my way on the tech details of things because I want to how they work, it’s something that I tend to se more in our generation, we’re not afraid of thech, younger generations neither but they don’t have to be because it just works now

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867-53-oh-nein@reddit

Then there is my mom who buys a new computer when her old one stops working because of a virus.

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ElectroSpore@reddit

Smart Phones replaced a lot:

Day-Timer Calendar --> PDA (dedicated device Casio/Ti etc) --> Palm Pilot (PDA + Apps)--> Smart Phones.
Cassettes/CDs --> MP3 players --> Smart Phones
Camcorders --> Small Digital Camcorders --> Smart Phones
Film cameras --> Digital Cameras --> Smart Phones

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867-53-oh-nein@reddit

Drones. Fucking insane that I can launch a tiny little quad-copter with an HD camera and get a beautiful view from a couple hundred feet above me.

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MotherofaPickle@reddit

I found both mine and my husband’s old digital cameras yesterday. Mine doesn’t work, so I gave it to my toddler. My husband’s does. Man, the pics are so grainy compared to what my phone can do.

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gimmeslack12@reddit

Palm Pilot for life yo.

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grummanae@reddit

Smartphone has really become their primary compute device as well

I run a side hustle ... and Id say 90% of the not so fun stuff ( creating designs for laser engraving setting stuff to 3d print vinyl designs ) so bookkeeping and transactions and communication with it are all done via tablet or smartphone

The design stuff ... I could either buy a high end tablet every 2 years .... or a windows laptop at half the price every 4 years ... at the rate 3d printing stuff is going I wouldn't be shocked if printers got the ability to self slice in the next 2-5 years

I think some laser engravers do this now ... but mine is a lower end older one so I still need lightburn and a PC with USB connection

But alas web design and excel are much less frustrating on a PC

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ElectroSpore@reddit

There are many tasks better suited for a desktop PC, however there are many people that have no need for a personal computer now with nearly everything being possible from their smartphone.

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HalfFrozenSpeedos@reddit

Yeah my mid range Samsung smartphone has a better camera than my 15 year old compact camera.

I still ❤️ my canon d-slr though

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Mail_Order_Lutefisk@reddit

Pretty much everything. But the thing that trips me out the most is the modern TV. The picture quality is insane and you can get a gigantic TV for $500. And it weighs almost nothing and can connect to wireless signals in the sky and gives you access to virtually any piece of media you could ever want to see. If any of us had been shown this future in 1995 we couldn’t have believed it.

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EventfulAnimal@reddit

Pretty much everything I thought we would never have, apart from flying cars. - touch screens - video watches (inspector gadget) - talking to computers (star trek) - 3D map of the entire world - self driving cars (knight rider)

I actually can’t think of much cool that I wanted to exist that doesn’t now exist.

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EventfulAnimal@reddit

Networking Quake. Holy fuck

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R0botDreamz@reddit

There were only a few times when I was truly amazed by tech in the last 30 or so years where it felt like I was living in the future.

1.) Chatting online on AOL. Here I was in the comfort of my room, randomly chatting with someone across the country about music, movies, anything. [Mid to late 90s]

2.) High Definition TV [2007]. When the Planet Earth documentary dropped, it was life changing. It's so common now to see high def everything but that documentary left me in awe.

3.) Talking to my phone and having it talk back to me [Mid 2010s?]. I remember printing out Map Quest maps and following the directions in the 2000s. Then 10 years later I could be anywhere I saw "Google, how do I get home from here?" and the directions not only pops up on my phone but it talks to me and guides me through.

4.) Watching anything (movies, sports, tv shows, documentaries, literally ANYTHING) in my warm bed via a tablet. As a kid I dreamt of having a portable TV to be able to watch stuff in my room or on the go. But here it is, right in the palm of my hand.

[-]

RogueAOV@reddit

The change in tech does. When i met my then girlfriend, she was in Texas, i was in Scotland. It cost ten bucks an hour to speak on the phone. We had to ration phone time with MSN chat time simply due to cost.

These days it costs my mum one penny for the first hour to call me in Texas (so she hangs up and calls back to reset the time). Shortly after i moved here social media had started so if you had a headset etc you could just talk thru that.

If we met a couple years later than we did, we would have saved so much cash lol.

[-]

jackfaire@reddit

When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s the idea of video phones was science fiction and something we thought was awesome. Now that it's actually something we can do most of us have no interest in doing it. That surprised me.

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KayBeeToys@reddit

My roommate, sitting next to me on the couch, once texted “this message went to space.” Whether or not that’s true, I got the gist of his idea.

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Kenway@reddit

The PS1 played music CDs!

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Reasonable-Phase-681@reddit

When you could remove a song from a minidisc I was totally blown away.

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blackhawksq@reddit

Phones with cameras. Who the hell needs a phone with a camera

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lexluthor_i_am@reddit

I remember being blown away by my first Facetime (felt so Jetsons) and the first time playing Xbox online talking with other people (it was a legit moment of pure awe and excitement).

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Lil_Brown_Bat@reddit

When I moved to Boston in '04, cell phones didn't work in the subway. That makes sense. They need satellites to work. Then several years later, somehow, they worked underground?? I still don't understand how... Or why.

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throwawayhbgtop81@reddit

Not really. I grew up on star trek. We basically have a lot of the tech depicted in that show, just not the big ones like holodecks, starships, or faster than light travel.

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LeftHandedGuitarist@reddit

Voice recognition. There were various attempts at it throughout the '90s which were terrible and never really worked, or had a super limited use.

Now we can just talk to computers like it's Star Trek.

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Anon_049152@reddit

Nobody misses Dragon Speak.

I think that’s what it was called.

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jpowell180@reddit

I’m still waiting for the option for Siri to sound like Majel Barrett Rodenberry, lol…

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Chandra_in_Swati@reddit

Air fryers, man. It was such a pain in the ass to fry things in oil and I never wanted to mess with it. French fries in the oven, or god forbid onion rings, were always such a let down. Now I can fry things with air and it’s always crispy and nice. Always blows my mind.

[-]

SubstantialFeed4102@reddit

Netflix

I legit wrote it off as being completely ridiculous. The original version AND the streaming version

blockbustertruther

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mrblackc@reddit

AI is the first tech that scares me.

Ask any questions, wonder if the answer is biased.

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cathode-raygun@reddit

AI translation apps have astounded me, I use them quite often for kanji.

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ObjectiveFlatworm645@reddit

In San Francisco, I remember when apple plastered ads on the muni for the IPOD. I new right there and then that books were going to die. Sure enough, hardly anyone reads these days, including me. I've never owned an IPOD but I saw the potential for endless connection. Here WE are.

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HalfFrozenSpeedos@reddit

That's more a kindle thing than an iPod? Or did you mean iPad?

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anemptycardboardbox@reddit

I think they mean that people don’t read to pass the time anymore. Lots of people used to bring books everywhere, including me. Now I have endless entertainment in my pocket, and I have to make a conscious effort to read a book

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ObjectiveFlatworm645@reddit

Here's a scientific paper on the subject https://www.cell.com/iscience/pdf/S2589-0042(25)01549-4.pdf

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BritOnTheRocks@reddit

Skype! When video chat finally worked it felt like a small miracle. I had tried various video chatting sites in the late 90s and they were all terrible. Once it was easy enough my parents could do it it opened up the world. Then FaceTime made it even easier.

Similarly, early social media was an amazing way to connect with all my old friends. Until it all turned to shit.

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anemptycardboardbox@reddit

Yes, Skype! And sending emails back and forth to set up a time to call :)

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TycoBrahe@reddit

Less sexy than most things on here, but Magic erasers.

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MotherofaPickle@reddit

All I could think of was “oh my god, this thing is dissolving into microplastics” the only time I’ve used one. It was just a couple of years ago. The other two are still under my sink because I don’t know what to do with them/how to dispose of them responsibly.

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anemptycardboardbox@reddit

I also have 2 under my sink. Never cared for them, but they’re actually great at cleaning marks off of thrifted toys. Didn’t know they created micro plastics until recently. I plan to just keep them and use them when it really is helpful, and then never buy them again.

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AdministrationAny907@reddit

I never would have thought of those as an answer to this question... But now that you mentioned it - I was pretty blown away when I first discovered them, too!

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a_solid_6@reddit

Texting. I remember my cousin explaining it to me one day at the college we attended together. I was like "wait... so i can type something here and you'll get it on your phone?" I was amazed.

That was the first day of my journey toward becoming a T9 master. When we got the ability to send fuzzy ass pictures, that was the next game changer.

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wolandjr@reddit

I didn't get why folks texted instead of calling. Seemed much less efficient at conveying information!

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anemptycardboardbox@reddit

Especially at 10¢ per text! Just call and have a conversation, no back and forth. I could probably count on two hands the number of texts I ever sent before getting unlimited texting

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a_solid_6@reddit

We mostly didn't text information that we needed to convey, just little nothing messages between 20 year olds. I distinctly remember walking on campus one night and counting my messages from that day and being like "wow, I sent TWELVE texts today." Lol It seemed like a ton because, at that time, it was normal to just call people and weird to text anything that actually required a response and not just a leisurely reply, since we weren't checking or using our phones all day. At least in my friend circles.

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SSMicrowave@reddit

There was one Christmas in the UK where suddenly mobile phones had just about become affordable for some teenagers to be given one. My Dad had one for a while, so it wasn’t alien tech. And pagers were a thing. But I’d never seen SMS before.

A kid sitting next to me said ‘check this out’ and text our other mate sitting at the other side of the classroom, and he replied.

Blew my mind. Spent the whole day imagining how it would change the world.

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Cool_Dark_Place@reddit

I actually didn't text a whole lot back in the T9 days. It was usually easier (for me, at least) to call and say in 5 seconds what would take me a couple of minutes or more to text. It was only around 2008 when I I got an LG ENVY2 phone that wasn't quite a true smartphone, but had an awesome flip out keyboard that I finally began to text a lot.

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a_solid_6@reddit

Well to be fair, back then we weren't really having long conversations over text. We just didn't really think that way in the early days of texting, since, unlike kids now, we were actually raised talking to other people lol. It was more of a novelty than a tool for really communicating. I think my first phone with a qwerty keyboard was a blackberry, if I remember correctly.

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Cool_Dark_Place@reddit

Yeah, us Xenniels weren't really doing a lot, but I remember some of the more core Millennial high-school kids of the early-mid 2000s would spend hours texting and having whole conversations with T9. Especially when the "unlimited text" cell phone plans started becoming a thing.

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Crowley-Barns@reddit

That’s kind of a regional difference.

I was from the UK but went to study in the US in 99/2000. I was amazed y’all weren’t texting. The US felt quite old-fashioned in its mobile phone tech up until about the time of the iphone. Texting was very much a late generation X thing in Europe.

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a_solid_6@reddit

Just the thought of trying to have a whole conversation with T9 is exhausting lol. I was good at it, but certainly wasn't having any actual back-and-forths.

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Iamnotyourhero@reddit

Imagine being told about vapes 25 years ago. There’s a stupid amount of tech that goes into even the disposable ones. Like why does this need to have a screen saver on it?

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superschaap81@reddit

I would never have thought that one day I would be able to watch TV or surf the web on my fridge.

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truefriend29@reddit

Same.👦🏾👋🏾🎧📲🔋🤳🏽🔈📶🛜🎵▶️

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MartialBob@reddit

When smart phones first became prominent I remember using mine to play a fun joke on a bar tender.

I was a regular at this one bar that was still pretty new. The owner had placed security cameras all around the whole restaurant. At the tail end of the night the bar tender was joking that the owner used those cameras to watch them in real time. I immediately used my phone to immediately Google that bar's number and then call them. The WTF look on that bar tenders face was priceless.

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Stevey1001@reddit

Broadband internet. You didnt have to disconnect the internet to use the phine. That blew my tiny little mind at the time, and Wifi. HOW ARE THERE NO WIRES?!?!

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frawgster@reddit

In 1996 I didn’t even know what broadband was. I lived in a very rural area, so internet for me was dial up. Fall 1996 I moved to a large city for college and was introduced to the university’s network. 🤯

That same year I was introduced to mp3s. Sooooooo much pirating was done. 😂

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InCOBETReddit@reddit

I'm old enough to remember the first time I used dialup to AOL

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casapantalones@reddit

I’ll be honest with you, I still don’t understand it and I’m fine with that

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Monaco-Franze@reddit

I remember Bill Gates said that in the future the computers would constantly online. Yeah right

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Loop22one@reddit

Definitely WiFi - remember that clearly

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NukeTheEwoks@reddit

In college, I ran a 100' Ethernet cable through the ducts of the rental we lived in so I could connect, because I didn't have a Wi-Fi card on my pc

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OverZealousCreations@reddit

I got access to early WiFi before we had broadband, sometime right around 2000. I was lent this tiny Sony Vaio laptop with (I had to look this up) an ORiNOCO PCMCIA card. I think I had a device attached to my desktop upstairs.

I remember blowing everyone's minds by being able to dialup on my desktop, then connect completely wirelessly from this laptop on a different floor. It's funny how now that's normal, but at the time I couldn't believe it.

WiFi is the first technology that became "magic" for me. I understand technically how it works, but it still seems like magic, even to this day.

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IceSmiley@reddit

Tablets and I remember first hearing about it on Howard Stern show and it blew my mind

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HeavySkinz@reddit

I had an LG musiq phone that had an FM transmitter so I could tune my radio to my phone and listen to whatever songs I had. That was something else at the time, I loved that phone

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sgtholly@reddit

In 2001, I worked at Best Buy and sold digital camcorders. At the time, Digital 8 tape was the common storage medium but some models had SD Slots to take stills or 30 second video clips on them. Customers always asked why they couldn’t do more than 30 second clips on the SD card and I had to explain that even the largest SD card (which was 256 MB) was relatively tiny compared to the size of video and it would take an unreasonably large card of around 100 GB to hold an hour of video.

I never imagined that in my lifetime I could walk into Best Buy and pick up 1 TB or more on a card even smaller than an SD card. Moreover, a MicroSD card holding 1TB is very reasonably priced.

Adding to that, video encoding formats of today are INCREDIBLE. People take formats like h.264 for granted now, but improvements like that make the whole of digital media possible.

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Embarrassed-Sky-4567@reddit

As a child this watch was mesmerizing to me

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ennuiismymiddlename@reddit

Touch screens. I grew up watching Star Trek TNG, and I STILL think using touch screens feel like you are in a sci-fi movie.

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mack_dd@reddit

USB

Both as a resplacement for floppy discs (my first flash drive 32 MB, mindblowing at the time 🤣)

As well as being able to just plug in a mouse, keyboard, another USB, or just about anything else

Wifi

You mean I can just chill about anywhere without needing to be near an ethernet cable to get the internet

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Grundle95@reddit

Having grown up on 5.25” and 3.5” floppy disks, Apple IIe and IIc, and my family’s first PC having a 100 MB hard drive that was considered pretty big at the time, flash drives were and still are amazing to me. I can just be walking around with 100+ gigs hanging off my keychain like no big deal.

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0zzm0s1s@reddit

Zoom and FaceTime have to be high up there for me. It still seems a little like magic when I use it, because of how well it works.

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Perfect-District@reddit

I remember when blue tooth came out and flopped because it was ahead of its time and now its integrated into practicly everything.

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BananaHamPanther@reddit

In college (maybe 2002?) my friend was dating an international student from Japan, and his cell phone had a camera in it. My friend and I were like, “that’s so bizarre, why would anyone ever want a camera in their phone?”

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qlionp@reddit

Seeing is one thing but experiencing a car with doors that open at a push of a button felt like the future

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2099AD@reddit

I feel like cell phones really just pointed out how much "long distance" fees were a scam. They even tried to get us with "roaming" charges with cell phones for a while, but that shit went away pretty quick.

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Fine_Jung_Cannibal@reddit

Slide cutters on plastic wrap, holy shit you guys

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MotherofaPickle@reddit

Accidentally bought one of those the last time and I WILL NEVER GO BACK. Total (tiny) game changer.

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ThePlatypusOfDespair@reddit

Round about 2006 or 7 I realized I could plug my flip phone into my computer and use it as a wireless dial-up modem.

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Klutzy_Word_6812@reddit

My first exposure to instant messaging (or maybe it was email) was in the 4th grade. I remember all of the teachers getting new Macintosh computers and they all had some sort of messaging or email service. Everytime a teacher got a message, a sound would play. It was so crazy to me that they could all talk to each other without a phone.

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bearsdiscoverfire@reddit

I was blown away by burnable CDs and Napster.

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oatsmcgroats@reddit

Does anyone remember Zip disks? I put all of my college academic assignments on one, and now I have no way to retrieve them. 😭

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StillhasaWiiU@reddit

The image quality of HDTV/ BluRay when it first started wowed me.

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New_Stats@reddit

GPS is just absolutely amazing

You have no idea how many times I got lost or missed an exit before a little voice started to tell me "in a mile, take the right exit"

First time I used GPS I was driving from VA to NJ and went through DC during lunch rush hour, and I was so worried I'd be stuck on the beltway forever. GPS told me to cut through DC itself and I cut through that city like it was butter. 15 minutes and I had skipped all the nightmare traffic and was on my way home

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antariusz@reddit

The ubiquity of touch screens in the modern world. The iPhone 3GS blew me away, and as I sit here typing on a flat piece of glass on my 5 year old iPhone 12, I’m still super amazed by it.

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tasukiko@reddit

It's going to sound silly probably but the first time I saw an N64 boot up and play a 3D game, my brain blew open. A lot of other things seemed like new iterations of things that already were.

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Nach0Maker@reddit

Wifi. I believe I said something to the effect of "why the fuck would someone need the Internet in the bathroom?"

And here I am...

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DJ_Micoh@reddit

I’m still amazed that I, an averagely built guy, could easily lift a 70 inch television one handed. The old CRTs used to weigh about a billion tons.

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jdsmith575@reddit

Pausing live TV to take a phone call. I had to stop talking to the person on the other end of the line to take in what I had just done.

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jdw1977@reddit

That and DRV (still superior to streaming imho). Recording any show whenever it airs without an annoying vhs tape was such a game changer.

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Shadrach77@reddit

My friend showing me a video on a screen in his hand, while sitting in a Pancake House, and the screen wasn’t plugged into anything.

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qtjedigrl@reddit

When smartphones came out, it blew my mind that you could tap a phone number online, and it'd automatically call it

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ThoughtPhysical7457@reddit

I was 15 years old in the 90s when home internet started. I setup my grandparents computer and modem while they were watching the world series downstairs. When I connected, the homepage showed the final score of the game which had ended literally a minute or so earlier. My family was still cheering cuz their team won as I'm reading the score. My thoughts at the time, that I still remember to this day:

What type of sorcery is this?!?! Is there someone in the bleachers with a computer typing the score in real time? How could this box possibly know the score that fast?

[-]

misskellycupcake@reddit

The photo bomb erase thing on cell cameras stands out in my mind

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BrilliantTop5012@reddit

I’m still kinda blown away by the ability to control lights, appliances etc remotely. “Hey google, turn on kitchen lights’” Or using my phone to turn on the inside lights before I pull up in my car. Having my Pura turn on automatically on schedule, and also being able to override the schedule with a click of a “button” on my phone.

I resisted this tech for so long and now I want allllll my things hooked up to it!

[-]

bendybiznatch@reddit

They’re developing an AI that can listen to text and determine if someone is in or will be in psychosis with alarming accuracy.

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TooTallBrawl1919@reddit

Wireless headphones. Blew my mind.

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treemoustache@reddit

Technically they've been a thing for over a hundred years.

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ConflagWex@reddit

For me it wasn't when wireless headphones first came out, it was when I got trash tier Bluetooth earbuds for $15 and they still had excellent battery life and actually stayed connected (sound quality was average, they were cheap after all). Having garbage impulse items being more advanced than anything we had just a few years ago was absolutely mind shattering.

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Happy_Confection90@reddit

Back in the early 90s, there were AT&T ads about video phones. Everyone's attitude about them was basically 'yeah, sure' as years and years passed without them manifesting. But... 15+ years later, WebEx became a common workplace tool instead of niche. And GoToMeeting. Then, by 2015 Zoom and FaceTime. After 2020 isolated people, everyone knew about video calling and virtual meetings.

It turned out that those ads were pretty prescient after all, and thr ads only really missed the mark by suggesting that it would be a. For personal calls rather than meetings with participants across the globe, too, and b. Would require a dedicated, plug-in-the-wall videophone device instead of using computers (which were already relatively commonplace and running Windows 3.1 in late 1993) or mobile phones, which granted were simplistic at the time.

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-bobsnotmyuncle-@reddit

We grew up with this tech as it kept coming out, so not too much. However, seeing someone pay with a watch for the first time gave me a good "what in the Dick Tracy ass magic was that?!!"

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cacecil1@reddit

Mobile phones definitely were the most surprising tech I've experienced. To be able to call someone at home while I'm walking around a store or driving was mind blowing to me.

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treemoustache@reddit

GPS navigation for cars seemed like way too early. And now it just comes free with your phone.

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DonnyBoyCane@reddit

The first time I plugged in a Sega Genesis and popped in Sonic.

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Alternative_Plan_823@reddit

Pit Fighter was a very early Genesis game, going for the photo realism thing like MK later, and it felt like the future to me

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jpowell180@reddit

I remember that, for me was the early spring of 1992, I saw a commercial for the Sega on TV, which was promoting sonic the hedgehog, and I just had to have it! So I take it home and plug it into the TV, start playing, and Marvel, how those trees in the first zone look like they came from something generated froma super computer!

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I_AM_DEATH-INCARNATE@reddit

Similarly the first time I played Twisted metal. Sega tried the 3D world with some of their stuff but when my buddy got a Playstation and we tried games like TM, Resident Evil, FFVII, Coolboarders 2, and later on Syphon Filter and MGS... THAT was the future manifesting in front of my eyes.

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hooplehead69@reddit

Touch screens. Seeing my friend touch on-screen “buttons” on his iPhone when it first came out blew my mind. Same thing with the iPad.

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hotwheelz56@reddit

Same!

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StevieV61080@reddit

I have typically stayed pretty up-to-date with technology throughout my life, so not much has surprised me in terms of what has been released. However, the ubiquity of certain types of tech and how it has been used HAS surprised me. This is especially true of social media and generative AI. I now personally detest both as I see how they have been utilized, despite some potential promise for the public good.

What is more surprising to me has been what has NOT already occurred. Quantum computing, U.S. domestic high-speed passenger rail, and personally implantable health tracking/treating devices (outside of stuff like glucose monitors/insulin pumps) seemed like they should have already been widely adopted. While QC is coming, it has weirdly been supplanted by the far less useful (and far more inefficient) ubiquity of generative AI. That's...not a good choice for humanity.

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hotwheelz56@reddit

The first time I picked up a touch screen, I was helping my mom find a new phone, and all I could think was "whoa, this is wild". I think they were around for a few years, but picking it up and holding it in my hand was a totally different story.

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Embarrassed-Sky-4567@reddit

I recently sustained an injury and went in for a shoulder xray. Instead of taking me back to the xray room they wheeled in a portable Xray machine and did it right there in the regular exam room.

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Golden_Enby@reddit

STEM cell research and the amazing things it has done for people. I'm still reeling over it.

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xt0rt@reddit

I think this fits so... Back in 1998 I was working at CompUSA with some buds and one of them came in one day talking about this crazy jew game where you just run around, shoot people, steal cars, and then run people over all while avoiding the cops.

I was like "this MF is just bullshitting, they'd never make a game so crazy". That night several of us went to his place after work and he showed us GTA in all of its top-down glory. It might not seem like much, but my mind was officially blown.

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pantheroux@reddit

I remember being a teenager in Canada having an online conversation with someone in Spain about Radiohead lyrics. I kept jumping up to my CD player to play the song we were discussing. It suddenly occurred to me how amazing that whole scenario was.

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Tough_Friendship9469@reddit

The amazing photos you can get from a freaking pocket phone!! I remember coveting the Apple QuickTake 100, at 640x480, .3 megapixels!! I forced myself to not buy a digital camera before I could get 5 megapixels for under $1,000. I got the first one Sony Cybershot F707. It was amazing and is a freaking plaything compared to current phones.

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pregnantandsober@reddit

Probably fast internet. After several years of slow AOL dial-up, I started college in 1996 with T1 internet in our dorms and I thought "holy shit, this can't be true "

Also, talking through my smart watch like Maxwell Smart.

[-]

lunaflect@reddit

I’m obsessed with the passwords folder on my phone, and using Face ID to login, as well as my webcam on the laptop for logins. Atp, everything requires an account and it was getting real hairy remembering all those passwords.

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foozebox@reddit

14.4kbps from 2400 modem.

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Character_Bend_5824@reddit

Not any one tech specifically, but the way society goes full bandwagon South Park style. Not only do we go full bandwagon, but the trends are typically not passing. They are monopolistic and displace tradional methods. Institutions like libraries seem to serve close to zero purpose in contrast to the '90s. A lot of important music and movies are streamed on exactly one service. Google Maps is so relied upon that municipalities don't replace road signs. If you haven't adopted smart phones by now, you could really be out of step with society. It didn't used to be this important to adopt trends.

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rotorocker@reddit

Libraries most definitely still serve a purpose. They offer lots of services.

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Character_Bend_5824@reddit

Yes, but I have not legitimately needed one for books since college

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ElleAnn42@reddit

I check out 30-50 books per month... almost exclusively picture books for my youngest but also a few audiobooks/ YA chapter books for my older child. I don't like digital picture books... and I would slowly go crazy re-reading the picture book version of Frozen, Pinkalicious, and Dragons Love Tacos without a few other books to add into the rotation.

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mrossm@reddit

In 2004 or 5 i met a dude that had a palm pilot with an sim card slot and he could make calls on it. As just a normal palm pilot user I thought that was the wildest thing, then just a few years later we had smartphones.

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omvargas@reddit

Watching Roger Waters reunited with Pink Floyd at Live8 in 2005, from my PC, streamed live. It was amazing to watch (what I thought it was) a historic event without depending on local or regional TV broadcasters.

Before that, I didn't have broadband, and I wouldn't have used dial-up Internet for watching such a long concert because my phone line use was metered by the minute and the bandwidth would have sucked anyway.

Yes, broadband always-on Internet was a godsend. Before that, even if you had dial-up service, you would have to connect to the Internet to do something online or search for specific information. With a permanent connection, if you need to look-up something quickly, you just do, you don't have to stop what you're doing to get the dictionary or connect to the Internet.

And now, you even have it in your own pocket, always with you!

[-]

Caslon@reddit

I used my Nokia cell phone for ages, that thing was a tank. Then one day I was on the bus and saw a guy playing solitaire on his phone. With full color graphics and everything! I could play games on my phone when I was bored, what a marvel. I was enthralled, and things haven't been the same since. R.I.P. my attention span.

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Positively_Eric@reddit

It had to have been in 2008 that my tech friend had a Roku Soundbridge in his living room playing music through his surround sound set up. The device connected to his upstairs computer through the wifi and played his MP3's through it. It was so cool that I bought one!

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xxMalVeauXxx@reddit

Smart phones were the biggest change for me. I was always doing stuff with tech in the 80's and 90's. But the smart phone was the biggest leap in non-DIY tech that you could have as a mere mortal.

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a_seventh_knot@reddit

I remember being on a road trip on I40 in Oklahoma / Texas in the middle of nowhere and watching the 2014 world cup final live on my phone.

Blew my mind.

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LittlePlasticStar@reddit

I remember when jump drives entered the game - I was in grad school and it was a HUGE deal for me. Also those suckers were EXPENSIVE with very limited memory compared to now.

I also remember the first time I saw clear “unpixelated” video on the PC. It was the windows 95 buddy holly video. I watched that over and over.

And the advent of AOL chat rooms. lol. I was hooked.

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wolandjr@reddit

I remember thinking that there was no fucking way that they could make touch screens work. Couldn't match the detail, response, quality. Was convinced the tech would fail.

And look at me now, typing this comment from a touch screen.

[-]

elkniodaphs@reddit

Video games, just in general. Doesn't matter if it's Atari or Playstation, the fact that I can control action on the tv will always impress me.

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Dollars-And-Cents@reddit

When I bought the first I pod touch and realized I had the whole Internet in my pocket as long as I had Wi-Fi. The Internet was not optimized for handheld yet so we struggled but it was still mind-blowing for me.

[-]

YogurtclosetDull2380@reddit

The one that listens to my conversations and tries to sell me stuff based on my interactions.

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Ok-Potato-4774@reddit

The introduction of the iPhone, and the fact that you could watch talk to people face to face, and it was basically a computer in your pocket, convinced me that we were now in the future. The iPad was just the icing on the cake for this.

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lazyrainydaze@reddit

I remember when I first discovered the texting feature on my Nokia! 😭 I also remember the people I text being blown away and asking how the heck I even did that!! Was early 2000s, around 2003ish maybe 04?

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Neftun@reddit

Class D amplifiers are pretty cool. Hundred of watts without the bulk.

Airplay blew my mind at some point. Or more specifically, Remote. Controlling an entire library with my ipod touch was brilliant.

led torches. Those beams reaching so damn long from such small thingies.

led alone are also dope. some of these things can blink up in the millions of hertz. cannot wrap my head around that.

cpu’s in general are pretty much witchcraft to me. How does the idea of millions of transistors in a tiny space make any kind of sense? And they calculate stuff? so I can type on a virtual keyboard and see letters pop up on screen?

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ArcticTrek@reddit

I remember as a kid thinking that touch screens were something that could never happen and weren't possible in real life, so that kind of blew my mind when it became a thing.

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EricRShelton@reddit

I would add on here, specifically, capacitive touch screens. The old resistive touch screens were awful, but capacitive touch is amazing.

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cellrdoor2@reddit

The first time I drafted something in 3d and then used viewports to create the shop drawings without have to draft it all over again from several different views on another sheet of vellum. It was so cool! Uploading files rather than having to copy and mail them was a big deal too.

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Quinalla@reddit

Smartphones for sure. It’s a computer with phone/camera/GPS/calculator/etc that we put in our pockets! Still amazes me 😀

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BreakfastBeerz@reddit

Email. The fact that you could send a letter to someone on the other side of the world, instantly, without any additional cost was pretty mind blowing.

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Traditional_Entry183@reddit

Bluetooth. I was already working selling tech in an office supply store for a few years when it became a thing. The ability to connect a printer or headphones or whatever else with no cable made me call BS the first time it was explained to me.

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like_shae_buttah@reddit

Right now AI is really cool to me. ChatGPT really is slick.

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lumbrefrio@reddit

I'm a programmer, so very little really "blows my mind" in terms of technology. The first time I got on the Internet at the end of my freshman year in high school was a pretty cool experience. It was a bunch of us huddled together in a teacher's office, so it was fairly cool for all of us to experience that together for the first time.

Outside of that, I thought social media was pretty cool, before I realized how destructive it could be and eventually became. I still feel it's the number one reason things are the way they are now.

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randfunction@reddit

I don'tknow if you mean to restrict it to things in a certain era, e.g. the 1990s, but the first time I put on an Oculus VR headset about 10 years ago (when they were still a small company and only selling developer kits) blew me away like no other tech I've experienced. I mention it, becuase despite all the tech advancements in our lifetimes, few ever felt truly revolutionary to me. Mobile phones? They'd kind of always been there in one form. IPhone? Same thing, it felt iterative.

When I put that Oculus headset on, though, it felt like the culmination of what I dreamed about as a kid. I remember the shitty 1990s move Lawnmower man and despiteit not being a great movie, that idea similar to things like flying cars, had sort of defined what the future was, so it really was mind boggling.

I was using a Mac at 6-7 and had early exposure to computers, so not much else ever impressed me. The first Full Motion Video games were the only other thing that really impressed me, esp the TurboGrafx-!6 CDROM which I think came ou in 1990. That was before computers were really using them much IIRC.

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HicJacetMelilla@reddit

My first iPod (2nd version, before the click wheel) freshman year of college was a revelation. Especially since I’m a singles person and less of an album person. Just getting on iTunes and buying whatever songs I wanted for 99¢, making a playlist and adding it to my iPod in the half hour before I needed to walk to class. Glorious.

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_ism_@reddit

all the stuff that led to fitness trackers/wearables. i had the basic features on my smartphones but never really tried them out. now i've gotten a smart watch and i'm like WOW my phone could do all this the whole time. idk it impressed me albeit a decade too late.

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hurricane7719@reddit

I travel a fair bit for work. When I first started travelling, we had a couple shared group laptops for travel purposes. To connect to the company network was by dialup only.

Not that many years later I was sitting in a taxi on the way to the airport rebooking a flight on a Blackberry 'app'.

Now travelling for work is nearly no different than working in the office. The access and availability of information is virtually exactly the same. Only difference for me is I no longer have the big monitors while travelling.