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ironside_online@reddit

Was it Barclay’s? Giving out Philips BT Cellnet phones?

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Gazebo_Warrior@reddit

Quite possibly, my memory doesn't extend that far. I thought they were ridiculous and no student needed one, so I didn't pick my bank based on the offer.

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True, but I think that (or other board games) seems more likely than football broadcasting.

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LEVI_TROUTS@reddit

It does, but the football one is more interesting.
So I'm gonna forget this interaction and continue to reference my football broadcasting example to anyone who brings the subject up in the future.

slade364@reddit

Do people still surf the web?

I feel like we mostly visited dedicated apps these days. I miss the days of using StumbleUpon to find cool websites.

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LemmysCodPiece@reddit

Yeah I do. I am constantly researching stuff. I try to fill my time with hobbies and projects stemming from that.

I am into OpenSource Computing, Linux and Home Networking. I am currently planning on building a low powered Proxmox Server.

cameras on phones

This seemed like a gimmick, like having a camera on a Game Boy.

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Airurando-jin@reddit

It was soo slow.

I can remember when Hutchinson 3G introduced video calling though . That was a massive leap .

I had quite a few deaf friends, and it caused alot of excitement .

These were the days before the Catalans we have now though , or phones connecting to wifi

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pr2thej@reddit

WAP 😁

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VFiddly@reddit

I remember seeing a poster saying that you could now use Google on your phone, and my mind was blown

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Snoo-84389@reddit

I have worked in IT for 30+ years and i remember some of the 1st Internet connected phones that came out in the UK. They were the old small, grey screen phones and they had a long n slow script that they had to run before they actually connected (if you were lucky).

Completely unusable by today's standards...

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CarpetGripperRod@reddit

I have worked in IT for 30+

You may appreciate, then, what it felt like being able to use a UNIX-like OS at home. No need to head to the uni computer lab. UNIX licences were mega expensive and it probably wouldn't have run on consumer hardware anyway.

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speedracer73@reddit

This one’s got 2.4 megapixels. No way, this one’s got 3.2 megapixels and a 3x optical zoom. Insane!!!

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mittenshape@reddit

Subtitles, chapters, SPECIAL FEATURES!? ...AWFUL GAMES!!??

It was a very cool time

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monkeymidd@reddit

My nanan still rewinds them …

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StevieMaverickG@reddit

Yep. I always remember with VHS, you could guarantee it was never rewound after you finished. So every time you wanted to watch something you’d have to rewind the tape first…

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given2fly_@reddit

The quality felt unbelievable. My first DVD was the first LOTR film and I watched it so much that year amazed by the picture quality.

Looking back...it was only 480p

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Corrie7686@reddit

Pausing live TV was indeed a good one!

I remember the EE advert where Kevin Bacon was watching a streaming show on his Mobiiil phone and he paused it, then kept watching it on his home TV.

The World Wide Web was probably the start of the 'connected computer'. Prior to that it was quite normal for a computer to be standalone and not have a network connection and function perfectly well. Yes there were file servers and databases and some applications, but accessing information remotely via the 'web was what truly transformed the personal computer into an access point to a very very big world of information, and later services.

And now it's difficult for them to even function let alone be much use without one?!

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lubbockin@reddit

seeing my friend play doom in a playstation, it looks dated now but at the time it was amazing.

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EvilTaffyapple@reddit

The jump from Doom to Quake was phenomenal

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Frothingdogscock@reddit

Actually playing a game, AGAINST OTHER HUMANS ! online. Mind blowing at the time.

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JamesAdsy@reddit

For me it was Halo 3 on Xbox 360 using Xbox live - gaming with my neighbour across the road, virtually! ... Mind blown.

I remember a friend getting a NVIDIA GeForce card about a year after Quake came out and when I first saw it being played with 3D hardware acceleration as opposed to VGA my jaw hit the floor.

I honestly thought that Graphics had peaked. I didn't see how they could possibly be improved from that.

Seems almost quaint now.

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PigHillJimster@reddit

Some of us remember the jump from Wolfenstein 3D to Doom!

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UniqueEnigma121@reddit

I do. Had a 286 with 512Kb ram. Had to upgrade to a 386 & 1 MB ram to play Doom🤷‍♂️😂

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PigHillJimster@reddit

I had a 286 with 2 times 1Mb 30-pin SIMMs at that time. Got a 386DX motherboard and two new 1Mb 30 pin SIMMs to make 4Mb.

DOOM was the first thing I tried. Frontier Elite was the second.

Having played the original Elite on the Commodore 64, Frontier Elite was disappointing.

I couldn't find a 386SX motherboard on its own for sale somewhere where I could pick it up or receive it easily, as they were mainly used by PC manufacturers to build complete systems.

I was in hall of residence for Uni and didn't want to have the motherboard delivered there by post or delivery.

You needed all four SIMM slots occupied for the 386DX because of the bus size. The DX had a 32 bit bus compared to the 16 bit bus of the 286 and 386SX.

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dunzdeck@reddit

This guy DXes! I sympathize, I started on a 486SX... could play almost everything a DX could, but not "Normality" which was a bummer

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LopsidedLegs@reddit

Especially if you were playing on a 3Dfx Voodoo card.

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UniqueEnigma121@reddit

Mech Warrior 2 was epic

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WiFi. It likely made such an impact on me as the first time I used wi-fi was also the first time I used a broadband line at home and not in one of the computer banks at uni.

What do you mean there's no cable?!

Within a month it was as if it had always been there.

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Optimal_Collection77@reddit

Super mario 64!

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MangelTosser@reddit

I get chills thinking about it, Christmas morning, my parents got me an N64 (a huge deal since we did not have much money).

Playing that game on a wood effect Ferguson TV, all having goes on it.

God damn electrifying how fucking good that felt, my N64 still holds a proud place under my TV and gets played time to time.

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cine@reddit

Came here to say this! I remember trying a demo console in a toy shop when the Nintendo 64 had just came out, and it just blew my mind.

3D Mario was the biggest technological leap of my life.

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LordGeni@reddit

The beautiful polygons

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iPod. Minidisc was better than lugging a portable CD player around with you, but iPod was revolutionary. All the music you owned (or pirated) at your fingertips. No changing discs. No bringing extras. Amazing! Then Spotify made them pretty much useless.

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Neat_Issue8569@reddit

Phones made them useless long before Spotify, and the iPod was hardly the first HDD-based MP3 player.

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DeapVally@reddit

Phones didnt have the capacity of the big boy iPods back then, and nobody used those other MP3 players, only people who couldn't afford an iPod lol.

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phatboi23@reddit

and nobody used those other MP3 players, only people who couldn't afford an iPod lol.

We'd put a pillow over the modem to muffle the dial up tone.

One of my earliest "troubleshooting" skills was learning how to turn down the modem speaker from the software settings so it would dial without blaring the noise of the screaming robot through the house.

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RaggedToothRat@reddit

Turning down the sound was an option!? If only I could go back and tell 11 year old me.

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neverarriving@reddit

I discovered mine could have the sound turned off about a month before I got my first broadband connection, after years of waking my parents up with the screeching modem in the early hours

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InquisitorVawn@reddit

It definitely was on the internal modem that we had! I think some external modems had a volume dial, but cheaper ones might not have. So it wasn't universal, but it was definitely an option in some cases.

The hard part was remembering to turn the volume back up before I crawled into bed at 4am to snatch my 2-3 hours sleep before school the next morning.

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InquisitorVawn@reddit

For real, this was the one for me. I remember when we first got dial-up, and even static images would take several minutes to download line by line.

We were lucky enough to have a dedicated line for the internet in my house, so we didn't have the conflict between dial-up and using the phone, but it was still great to be able to get rid of that second phone line and just have t'Internet.

Yeah, dial up to always in cable modem broadband. You had to connect your phone which took about a minute to en wait for the webpage to dribble in. I was in the trial with virgin media and was struggling to get it to work then suddenly it loaded the bbc website instantly. It was so fast, it looked as if I was loading it from my local cache.

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ScottyDug@reddit

Spectrum to Megadrive in 1990ish. Sitting in my dark bedroom playing Sonic for the first time, the colours blew my little brain away.

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Clever_Fox_81@reddit

Related, when I was a kid I used to think "wouldn't it be amazing if one day they could get all 3 Sonic games into one cartridge". Then in around a 10 year window the released the Sonic Mega collection.

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Dirk_diggler22@reddit

I remember going from mega drive to a Saturn panzer dragoon and magic carpet were mind blowing

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Laxly@reddit

When I was younger my mate and I had spectrums, he phoned me up one day to say come over and I, like normal, said "ok start loading the game, I'm leaving now", and he said "no, it's instant, no loading".

Blew my mind!

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RhubarbSalty3588@reddit

Spectrum to NES,not having to wait for a game to load was revolutionary.

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ironside_online@reddit

You’re right - that was a huge leap. I went from a Speccy to a Master System (parents didn’t have the budget for a MD). The next jump from 16 to 32bit was also massive, but after that the upgrade to graphics with new generations is much less impressive.

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GooseyDuckDuck@reddit

Accessing the internet, just wow.

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RetiredFromIT@reddit

My first GPS was a hand held unit that I fitted into a charging cradle for my car.

It had major road maps for the UK, but not enough memory to hold detailed maps of the whole country, so you uploaded a detailed sub-map of the area of your destination (and possibly your start position).

It displayed your position on the map accurately, but did not display road by road directions, merely an arrow pointing to your destination "as the crow flies". You had to work out how to get there.

At the time, I was doing a lot of work travelling, especially to unfamiar towns. The GPS seemed like an absolute wonder to me.

My next unit had detailed maps of the whole country, and the one after that had road-by-road directions, but only when uploaded from your computer, in advance. Even so, that still seemed incredible.

Now we have phone apps and car-integrated GPS that download new maps and recalculate on the fly, and we think nothing of it!

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MrFlitter@reddit

The internet.

I remember me dad took me an me brothers to the library because it was the first place to get internet access near us. I remember being shown how to type in a web address and vaguely how to search. I was maybe 11-10 the idea of being able to search for everything was so overwhelming I couldn't think of anything.

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RedPlasticDog@reddit

First used the internet in 1995. That was a pretty major jump.

The early years were great.

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PlatypusAmbitious430@reddit

I don't know what life was like before the world wide web.

It seems insane to me that people would have to go to the library to look up things and that there would be occasions where you just wouldn't know the answer to questions.

Eventually, there will be no one left on earth who knows what life was like without the world wide web, without social media etc.

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stocksy@reddit

You had to go to the library and very often they wouldn’t have the book that you wanted. You might have to wait a week or so for the book to be ordered in from a larger library or it might not be available at all. In that case, if it was an academic matter I would be able to ask my uncle who knew a few university lecturers that he could phone and ask. Else, I remember you might have to write to or phone a few companies related to the area and hope they were feeling friendly and helpful.

And this wasn’t that long ago, I’m talking early 1990s.

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PlatypusAmbitious430@reddit

And this wasn’t that long ago, I’m talking early 1990s.

iPod was wild for me. Had never seen one on TV or in magazines. Literally had no idea such technology existed.

A kid showed us his at Squash club and I was so stunned he might as well have been levitating.

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joebmc@reddit

Kids' 90's TV show ReBoot. Young me thought CGI graphics couldn't get any better.

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Beautiful_Security35@reddit

Back in the late naughties we had pretty good internet but no smartphones.

Google Maps on Desktop looked pretty similar to how it does now. If you wanted to get anywhere you could print directions from Google maps, including with street view at any particularly tricky steps. You can still do this I think. It's a pretty well implemented feature, but probably rarely used nowadays.

Bought a plug in camera for my Sony Ericsson from a lad at school for a fiver. It was shit!

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ProlapseProvider@reddit

That's the one I used, what a waste of space that was.

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CityOfNorden@reddit

Absolutely drained the battery too. Haha.

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Foddley@reddit

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eggmayonnaise@reddit

Oddly specific, but I remember seeing that you could open the first PlayStation's disc cover and actually remove the disc while the game was still playing.

As long as it didn't need to load any new data it would continue to work. I didn't understand this technicality at the time so it just seemed like pure magic.

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BobbyP27@reddit

Broadband internet. The idea that the internet was just always available any time you wanted. You didn't have to get your modem to dial up to your ISP, connect, use the internet, then disconnect again. And you could use the internet and the phone at the same time. Mindblowing.

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unclean0ne@reddit

Wireless networking.

People take it for granted and without it we wouldn't have half of the tech we do but once upon a time everything needed to be wired to a network.

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syrupdash@reddit

DVDs are still magic to me. An entire box set of a 12 episode series can fit in the size of the VHS case WITH deleted scenes and bonus features if the company makes an effort and uses the dual layer DVD. Also no more rewinding the tape to the beginning.

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amBrollachan@reddit

Video calling. I don't think it was particularly mind blowing for me, though it was definitely cool. But I remember setting up a Skype call for my dad with his friends in Italy around 2005 (?) and he was absolutely astonished. It was a reaction like you'd expect from someone who'd been in a coma and woken up in the future.

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Airurando-jin@reddit

It’s funny , I don’t mind teams meetings . Though not many of them .

Video call me unannounced and unplanned on my phone though .. and anxiety kicks in.

It’s an expensive phone for sending text messages on, with voice calls less often

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Airurando-jin@reddit

Same day bacs paymerd . Instead of having to wait 3 days , it went instantly , same with receiving

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b_rodriguez@reddit

Containers in software development.

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Scarred_fish@reddit

Floppy disks. So FAST!!

My first PC had a feature where you could select an option on it & the cd tray would come out.

Using a computer to move something in the physical world blew my mind for some reason.

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Airurando-jin@reddit

Reminds me of the Coca Cola holder exe file thet floated around for a bit .

And then the confusion in your mind when the technology changed snd you could watch one channel and be recording another! How? Is it really going to work??

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ItsIllak@reddit

Capacitive touch screen. It's basically why Apple was successful with the iPhone. Changed touchscreen from being a frustrating experience of trying to get it to detect being punched to what felt like a physical interaction with pixels on the screen.

I'd love to know the history of the licensing of the technology. Apple had a quite a long time before other phones (and devices) started using it. But they didn't invent it.

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SuperSaiyajin7@reddit

The introduction of smartphones and getting popularised in the late 2000s. The transition from using Nokia's to just using Apple and Samsung.

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bluebellwould@reddit

Walkman. They were so cool.

TV remote.

I had a black and white TV with a dial for channel selection in my room when I was 15 and I felt so cool having my own TV separate to my parents and being able to watch top of the pops

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Foreign_Plate_4372@reddit

Home Video

Genuinely groundbreaking

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lloydofthedance@reddit

Having grown up with the 8 and 16 bit consoles I rented Virtua Fighter and racing and looked upon 3d graphics and thought this is it, we have peaked. Lol

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chrisgilesphoto@reddit

When we went from 56k dial up to ADSL.

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Sea_Appointment8408@reddit

Choosing your TV channel via interactive menu, rather than hopping from channel to channel.

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dxg999@reddit

Chip and pin.

When I were a lad and worked in a petrol station, we used to have to run credit cards through that roller machine thing with the carbon paper. Nightmare to get the card and the paper aligned and the roller run across with enough pressure when there's a queue out the door...

WordsMort47@reddit

Lol!

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UmaUmaNeigh@reddit

Touchscreen, specifically smartphones and tablets. We had the Nintendo DS but it felt very etch-a-sketchy with the pixels. I remember going to The Big Bang - a STEM con - around 2006 and they had a prototype touchscreen table for classroom use, and they said the technology was coming along. I don't know if they knew what Apple had coming out.

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Pumbaasliferaft@reddit

VHS tapes

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originalname104@reddit

I had the exact same thought about pausing TV just recently. A really amazing technology. Nowadays my kids are impressed by TV channels that just play TV shows all day.

Lived in Thailand for a few years and the ISPs kept increasing the Internet speed for free every few months, it seemed. Ended up with 1 Gbps up and down.

Add that to no-consequence piracy and you have at least 30 simultaneous torrent downloads 24/7. Could probably have had more.

I remember the BBC showing a close-up of new "BT" (this was before Openreach) technology which allowed you to be online and use the phone simultaneously.

Seem to remember seeing a wall box that had a funny blue sci-fi glow to it.

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heimdallofasgard@reddit

Google Earth.

Someone introduced me to it in 2005 at my first week in uni, and I loved looking at atlases and maps before that. My mind was completely blown and wasted a week just looking at the satellite imagery of different places.

Even before street view it was incredible. I remember a year or two earlier trying to find a friend's house in a rural area using a map and with directions they'd scrawled on a piece of note paper.

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Moppo_@reddit

I used to spend hours on Google Earth exploring foreign cities. When I first used Street View I remember "driving" around Hong Kong for some time.

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AutomaticInitiative@reddit

My first racing game game was Nigel Mansell on the SNES, and every generation blew my head off up with advancements in racing games up to about 2010. After that, it's just chasing more pixels, but going from Nigel Mansell to Colin McRae 2.0 to Burnout 3 to PGR 3. Beautiful, mind-blowing. I miss feeling like that. Forza Motorsport looks prettier than ever but it feels so empty.

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Moppo_@reddit

Probably a lot more recent than you're intending, but today my Dad couldn't remember the name of a plant we saw. I remembered my new phone had an option to draw around something on the screen and use AI to identify it from images online, and it worked. I also used it to identify moths.

Colour TV. Mind blowing. Like a window into another world

I remember my dad using Teletext on the TV to see if someone's flight was on time....and I was IN AWE.

Yesterday I looked up a flight in 10 seconds on my phone and thought nothing of it.

The whole pausing TV thing was wild. The thing everyone forgets is that BBC iplayer absolutely pushed it out to the masses.

For something recent - AI.

Wireless sharing/interconnectivity for me. For years it was a slow unreliable mess (IR sharing between phones) or networking over wifi or with a LAN cable you'd be fucking about with network settings for ages and it'd still fail half the time. Doing anything remotely was a pipedream.

redhotpunk@reddit

Oh jeez, your last paragraph made me remember why I hated spending anytime at an exes parents. The mother would invariably be watching some talking heads ‘remembering the 80’s/90’s whatever’ and it would take at least 2 hours to watch because every comment would lend itself to a pause so she could comment and start a discussion about whatever bullshit it was about

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ANYWAY, that glorious day when broadband was switched on felt like Christmas (including the night before where I couldn't sleep from excitement).

Once the equipment arrived I set everything up, turned the computer on, and sat in my chair and watched magic happen - the Norton antivirus notification appeared saying an update was needed, I clicked ok, and in the space of 30 seconds a 2 megabyte virus update was downloaded.

2 megabytes in 30 seconds. It sounds terrible today but it was witchcraft then.

YouTube was only just starting at that point and I didn't know about it yet, so instead I went to the Apple QuickTime website and downloaded (in high quality) every film trailer I was interested in watching but hadn't been able to until then.

Damn I'm getting all nostalgic now 😅

The only thing that comes close to that memory of new technology was getting my first digital TV set top box in early 2007.

Dozens of channels instead of 5, better picture quality and in widescreen, and being a tennis fan I could I could now choose which match I wanted to watch.

It all sounds so quaint when I write it out like that, but both of those examples felt like I was being thrust into the future.

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