What is a technology growing up that when you saw it, it blew your mind?

s804@kbin.social to Technology@kbin.social – 83 points –

MP3 player was a life changer. I went from a huge CD players not being able to fit in my pocket to a tiny bean that connects to pc with hundreds of songs, and i was blow away!

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Inkjet Printer - We got an Epson Stylus Color with the Compaq Presario 486 SX2 66 and we printed out a relatively low res picture from Encarta. A sopwith pup. The previous printer we had was a dot matrix on a Commodore. It was amazing. I remember my dad said it he was, "thoroughly God damn impressed"

Cell Phone Text Messaging - Had a Nokia that was the first phone that I bought and first cell phone. When I found out that I could text people it was a game changer. Don't have to try and hear what was being said, I could read it. Just friggin' wow.

ICQ - Email was impressive, but instant messaging was very impressive. Still remember my UIN but unfortunately can't login to it (not that it'd work anymore anyway)

MP3s - When I found that I could download music I had to give it a shot. I downloaded a few MP3s over dialup and this was pre Napster days. Backed up the songs on floppy and had to play them in DOS on my computer. I remember one of the first was The Distance by Cake.

Writable CDs - Was one of the first kids in my school with a CD burner (bought it for $240ish) and installed it on our aging computer. Burned a whole bunch of coasters because of the dreaded buffer overrun. Felt there were unlimited possibilities when I could burn stuff to disc.

Divx - Video compression pre-Divx was not great. Divx was the first time it made it feasible (from my perspective) to download good quality video from the internet (we had some horrible dialup).

DVD - The jump from VHS to DVD is something that'll be hard for people to understand if they started with DVD. DVD is fine, Blue-ray is obviously better but not as drastically noticed as VHS to DVD was. My brother worked at Circuit City (RIP) and he got an Apex 300A. We managed to find the secret menu to turn off Macrovision and we were recording rented DVDs onto VHS. Sounds dumb, but it felt revolutionary.

Getting a DVD player and the Matrix was incredible. It had all sorts of commentary, behind the scenes, and other stuff. I spent hours watching the movie and the extras over and over again.

The Matrix was an incredible DVD. Definitely drove adoption of the format.

The Matrix was the first DVD movie I purchased (and still have and still love it).

I think this was my first DVD too. I remember pausing it and making my parents look at how crisp the image was. It was incredible.

Or watching the credits roll, turning around, and telling your parents to go back to the beginning to watch it again because there's no more rewinding!

I drove 2.5 hours to buy that Apex DVD player. That was really one of the first reasonably priced DVD players you could buy. Loud as a freight train when it ran, but watched a lot of DVDs on that guy’ mostly from early Netflix.

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

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

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

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

Oh my god, this.
It was like magic when I first used one; a real ‘the future is now’ moment.

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

When I first saw a Segway (remember all the hype?) I thought a self-balancing 2-wheel elevated wheelchair would be coming shortly after.

There are some! Unfortunately they haven't really caught on well, not easily available unless purchasing outright and they're usually 10s of thousands (most power chairs are) and not covered by insurance. I really want to try one, this is one I'm really interested in that can climb stairs.

That Scewo design is interesting. It's infuriating that the price is more than a car. I've build balance-bots with Lego, it's not complicated tech.

What I had in mind was more like Boston Dynamics' Handle: https://youtu.be/-7xvqQeoA8c (Which I would call "advanced" ... in 2017.)

Yea unfortunately that's the disability tax, most things designed for disability are expensive. That's a cool design, I hadn't seen it before. Maybe in another decade the tech will be replicated in mobility aids.

Another reason besides price for why the 2 wheel balancing chairs aren't used more is just functionality. Many people who use power chairs aren't able to balance well, my own is pretty poor, so there's an even more limited market and unfortunately we live in capitalism.

Hmm. My intuition is it shouldn't take any balancing skill on the user's part, but the chair/bot will be fidgety -- moving a little bit to maintain balance. So maybe not a good experience for activities needing stillness.

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

Let me try and blow your mind again.

if you plug in the 2nd controller, you can control the duck.

SETI@home

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

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

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

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

Ooooh you just made me remember my first encounter with high speed internet. Was at a friends house that just upgraded. What do you mean I can enter a website and it instantly loads!

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

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

I mean for me - as a bit of technology geek, I have to say it's pretty much everything.
But the internet, that's always going to be the thing that even today still amazes me.

It's just mind blowing that as a kid, the internet wasn't a thing. We got the internet when I started college, and it was dial-up and via something called Surf Time, which meant that between 6pm and midnight on weekdays and 6pm on Friday through to midnight on Sunday, you could dial a local rate number and use the internet, but not get charged for it on your phone bill. It was slow, would disconnect every 2 hours (making Windows service pack updates absolutely impossible, you had to wait until a PC magazine put the update on a CD). During that time, I have seen the birth of Skype, which was revolutionary on dial-up. Hamachi - zero config VPN on dial-up. Social Networks, YouTube.

And now here we are, just 25 years (roughly) later with the ability to stand in the middle of a field, in the middle of nowhere, and stream a 7 hour Oslo to Norway train journey, in 4K just for the sake of it. It really is mind blowing how far we have come, ignoring whether it is good or bad just for a moment, and appreciating what is now possible that wasn't even 15 years ago.

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

The touchscreen.

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

Touchscreen for a phone wasn't that crazy for me (as a 90s kid), but a touchscreen for an entire laptop was REVOLUTIONARY. In fact I still haven't really gotten over it. I love it so much. I'll never buy a laptop without one. It's such a convenient input method for this kind of device.

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

You made me search a yt video on 3ds screens, I also needed to know

The 3DS has a 3D screen that is viewable without 3D glasses. You just hold it up in front of you and it's 3D. It's very weird and very cool. It blew my mind when I saw it IRL for the first time. Videos don't really do it justice.

It's really interesting how they work. I couldn't go to sleep without knowing

There were concerns it would affect proper development of eyes or vision in children but later it was shown in some small study (iirc) that some people's conditions actually improved.

oh that's interesting. but yeah at the time there was definitely concerns.

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

+1, I remember sticking to hybrid abominations with bad touchscreen and bad classic phone keyboard as I thought that "touchscreen will never work since you can feel what you are typing".
I was pretty wrong.

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

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

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

I had Commodore 64 and my friend had a ZX Spectrum, we were both in awe of the games and their graphics, which at the time seemed amazing.

Chromecast. Can't believe how easy it is to go from watching on my phone to my main TV and then switching to my bedroom TV. Still feels like magic when I think back to constantly dealing with HDMI and my laptop.

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

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

This is mine as well, but it wasn't on PC that impressed me. It was the first time I called Directory Assistance and at no point in the call a human was involved. Until then every demo of voice recognition had been a goofy parlour trick. Voice recognition software was very niche, and only marketed to secretaries for dictation. To suddenly see it in a practical application to completely replace a human interaction blew my mind.

In 2008 Reddit blew my mind. I was a teenager and I suddenly had contact with people all over the world. I learned so much and I got access to piracy and shadow libraries over there eventually. Thus, my growth went parabolic, I somehow got myself educated there to the point my future went from "likely a min wage worker" to "career in IT".

One reason my hate for what Reddit is now is so big, is mainly because I used to have an at least equally big love for it. In hindsight though, that love was to the people that were using it together with me and those people can be found in other spaces too, or so I hope.

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

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

I went through MP3 players like hot cakes, they were great. What changed the game for me was my iPod Classic - a massive amount of storage compared to the stick players and it could play video and Peggle on the go!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Yes, we were nerds)

Haha "1 hour of AOL" allowance... I used to hack AOL (before AOL4Free came out) by generating fake accounts using fake credit card numbers. I even automated the whole thing with Quickeys (kinda like AutoIt! For Macs back in the day).

Freshman year of high school I was generating loads of fake accounts and giving them out to pretty girls (haha one of my slickest moves in high school). It was genius: The accounts would only last a few weeks before AOL would discover that the credit card numbers were fake. So the girls had to keep coming back to me for new ones 😁

It wasn't something you could plan either: You would be chatting away with your friends and strangers in 23-person chat rooms (a/s/l? Haha) then suddenly you'd get disconnected and your account wouldn't work anymore. So the next day at school I'd have these girls desperately looking for me like I was their crack dealer!

One morning in the cafeteria before school started a couple girls were rushing--fighting--to get to me first (I would sit waaaay in the far corner with my pack of geeks). There was a teacher standing right next to us talking with the cafeteria workers and these two girls were smart enough not discuss illicit activities right in front of teachers so they both said at pretty much he exactly same moment:

"RISKABLE! I NEED YOUR NUMBER!"

Both the teacher and the cafeteria workers were stunned and amazed, haha. After the girls left the teacher came over to me and said, "Wow! You're a popular guy!"

For reference, I ended up marrying one of those girls 😁👍

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

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

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

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

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

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

My introduction to the internet was way before www. As a first year student I mentioned a topic I was interested in to a professor. He said I should email his friend at University of California, Berkeley as he would know about the topic. He gave the address and I went away to find out what this email thing is. The next morning I had a reply. For a farm boy for whom snail mail and telephone were the means of interaction beyond the neighbours this was totally mind blowing. I got advice from a professor in one of the top universities in the world just by emailing him!

When I first saw metal gear solid as a child, I was blown away. I was shocked at how realistic they looked in 3D unlike my 16 bit Sega games. I remember my wild imagination kept me up at night thinking about how immersive MGS was.

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

definitely VR. I have only ever used it twice but I can always vividly remember it. My buddy had a Vive in high school and the only time I visited his place I played Robo Recall and had a fucking blast

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

So you looked for it with the best search engine that you knew: Altavista.

I guess for me it was the internet (AOL and crappy slow modem…), GPS navigation, smartphones and true wireless earphones. These technologies basically changed my life and opened up new worlds and possibilities for me.

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

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

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

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

Ahhh yes, I remember the transition from the discman to the mp3 players - it was amazing! No more disc skipping when listening in the car! You suddenly had winamp in your pocket, it was so great. I had one of the cheaper ones, couldn't afford the ipod but it was still so great.

I remember storage sizes getting bigger and bigger, and how 100s of songs on one mp3 player was mindblowing.

I also remember cameras going digital - those blew my mind. You could take as many pictures as you wanted?? And it did take up a valuable spot in your limited roll of film? And you could see it??? Holy shit, man. Then also watching the megapixels start getting better and better.

I remember being blown away by no disc skipping and you can store about 3-5 CDs on it! Then I'd have to choose a few albumbs I wanted to listen to and then delete the disk and copy the song I wanted.

My father brought home an electronic game box with Pong and hooked it up to our black and white tv set in the seventies. That was something else for someone only used to regular table top and card games. Heck yeah, I'm old.

Sidekick phone. Complete gimmick, but it was the coolest thing ever.

i used to have a phone with an extending antenna, and you could get tv signals. i was watching tv in the classroom hahaha the phone was disgusting though, couldnt do anything with it.

I had an LG like that, little brick of a candy bar, had a few preloaded apps but not quite a smart phone. The TV was a special digital broadcast, IIRC, and you had to be signed up for the phone to descramble it, but it was not 2G data from the cell towers so it was crystal clear and no load time. Just not enough caramels to be worth the price.

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

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

Diskettes The computer I had loaded programs off tapes, and that was a pretty "involved" process taking anywhere from 5-20 minutes. Then we got an Atari 800XL with a disk drive, and not only did loading only take a little while, but you could also save to the disk without special workarounds.

Flat panel displays The first computer LCD screens were small, not very impressive display quality wise, but they were SO THIN! They were making an image without the large back of a "traditional monitor". I'd vowed to own one one day. (turns out that CRT screens still beat them in some areas to this day...)

Home broadband before about 2000, i had to sneak around a long telephone extension cord to be able to get online for at most a couple of hours. Then one day we got a message that they were rolling out this "broadband cable" thing, and my whole world just shifted. My machine was ALWAYS ONLINE. The internet was ALWAYS THERE. I could download things that used to take me minutes in just seconds. It blows my mind even today still.

MP3/XVID/DIVX Suddenly my harddrive could fit whole songs and later whole movies...that coupled with the whole broadband thing opened up a whole new world of possibilities.

SSD It'd used to be normal for a computer to take a couple of minutes to start up. Even when it was, doing more than a couple of intensive drive bandwith things could really bog it down to the point of being unusable. Then SSD's came along. They started as pretty small things (still have my 30gb OCZ drive somewhere), but they were so incredibly fast. Systems now started in seconds. Games in a fraction of the time. And everything just felt snappy all the time.

It feels incredible to live through these times, where we take for granted that everything will always get better/smaller/faster during our lifetimes (hell, every year even) where that has never been the case at any point in history.
And technology wise it'll never get any worse than it is right now. That's pretty goddamn neat.

I will always remember that dial-up sound, how long it took to connect (if it did at all), and waiting for like 5 minutes watching a picture loading inch by inch on the screen. I was like 7-8 around that time I think? So my sister and I just loved searching for unicorn pictures lol

When I first booted up an Xbox it felt like something futuristic. I would also include having a mini disc player was pretty awesome because of how portable it was compared to a cd player.

I was so amazed by GTA3 compared to GTA2, the cars had individually destructible pieces!

other than the internet? hmm... cellphones. I grew up in a world where telephones were bulky devices stuck to the wall, or on a short cord, and to call anyone outside of your local area you'd be charged a per-minute fee.

now - cellphones are basically supercomputers in our pockets where you could theoretically call anyone on the planet, if only you knew their number - and everyone has one.

next up is IoT, where everything is connected to everything else, in near real time.

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

Compact disc was crazy for me

650 MEGABYTE on some shiny plastic disk, when your harddrive was a whopping 40MB?
Yeah that was pretty damn magical.

Then a while later we could make our own, if the buffer underruns didn't turn your $10 empty into a coaster.

So, a bunch of years back, I stumbled upon a little-known application called Synergy that was fledgling at the time. The idea of a virtual KVM using a client/server architecture completely changed how I was able to interact between my various PCs/Mac/Work PC and it was great.

I grew up with and into the internet, most things came naturally and where not that mind blowing. I've been looking forward to ML/AI and its currently blowing my mind that it actually works so well as a programming "assist".

Word-processing. I fancied myself a bit of a writer when I was young. First my Dad gave me an electronic typewriter and that was a game-changer for organising ideas, sentences, paragraphs ... incredible, but my PC with Word, and Publisher, Wow! No more rewrites in countless exercise books, or liquid paper, or erasers. Amazing!