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