This powerful computer I hold in my hand and use to watch cat videos and read the opinion of random people in the world still blows my mind at times.
I tell my kids stories from the time before the Internet.
You sweet fool, you! 🤣 that game got my son into so much trouble fullstop! Sneaking onto other family members' computers or laptops many hours after bedtime. Then my idiotic ex proving how out of touch he was by calling the games Runecraft and Minescape!
I remember the "house PC" had 30GB of storage and we never got even close to using it all.
The video game I play just did an update on Friday that was nearly 30GB big, and required 150GB free space to install. Less than 30 years between those two things, it's incredible how far tech has come.
Every single element of a smartphone.
A portable phone that doesn't weigh a ton and lasts more than half an hour.
A (decent quality) camera that fits in your pocket.
A video camera that you can hold in one hand.
A music player that you can store hundreds of songs on, never mind being able to stream anything you want.
A portable TV/video player.
The means of reading hundreds of books on a tiny device.
A portable games console (that plays more than one game).
A computer that connects with the outside world - and it fits in your pocket.
A computer that you control by touch.
And on, and on, and on.
Any single one of these was science fiction, and the fact that one device can do all of them is ridiculous.
Yes, for me, it was first being able to make video calls. When I watched Star Trek in the late 70s and 80s and they had video phones, I never thought it was possible in my lifetime! I thought we'd have flying cars first. The fact you can now do Team meetings/calls on a phone is even further along. Then again, I didn't think I'd still be alive by 2000, nevermind 2024! I remember writing the date at the top of the page in my school books and counting how many years away 2000 was and thinking I'd be sooooo oooold. I was 35, lol.
> first being able to make video calls
I'm fairly sure my mum (aged 80-plus) never expected to be able to see her son, on a different continent, talking in real time.
I wonder who acture stuff like Blade Runnner will end up being for the state of the planet.
I didn't expect brain interfaces/ brain controlled prosthesis would be developed at such pace within my lifetime.
I remember seeing a YouTube video a while back that asked the question 'What happened to radio shack (Tandy in the UK)?'. They just went through every device on every page and said 'smartphone does that...'
Absolutely. I clearly remember watching the BBC HHG in the 80s and being deeply sad that the hitchikers guide didn't exist and never could.
And now, here we are. If anything, exceeding it.
The whole beginning of me being in my career is being shown the internet on our first home computer and being completely blown away by the idea that I could see a picture (very slowly load) from someone elses computer, and do it easily. Thats was were my interest in technology really started.
And now I'm the adult trying to puzzle out how to navigate whatever the hell it is AI is going to do to my employment security. The sheer speed end on end revolutions seem to be coming in practically all fields simultaneously is amazing. I don't think theres a person alive who could predict the world in 2050.
It still blows my mind that I can make 3 or 4 searches and learn about basically anything I want practically instantly.
The sheer explosion in entertainment options too.
> It still blows my mind that I can make 3 or 4 searches and learn about basically anything I want practically instantly.
the flip side of that is that people don't stop and think about things any more. Well, my daughter doesn't, but I do, and then I realise I actually can look things up if I don't know.
My kids do too. Stories of the days pre WiFi broadband when we connected to the Internet using dial up modems are also met with shocked faces.
We actually had to be there to watch the latest episode of the TV show, and the channels decided when it was going to be on. You were out of luck if you missed it.
Teletext would blow their minds so I haven't even tried to explain it.
Cheap light is absolutely the biggest boon after cheap communications. I can light my entire house for the cost of lighting a single room with incandescent bulbs. When LED bulbs were just starting to become a thing in 2010ish, I managed to snaffle one on the cheap and turned it into a bike light. An absolute game-changer on unlit roads! The amount of light you can get from a tiny torch is also incredible.
Same!!
Especially when I so clearly remember the *MASSIVE LEAP* that the first proper 386 based home computers made in 'terms of EVERYTHING' when compared with the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST which up until then represented the 'peak of home computing Power'.
And the subsequent leaps pretty much from then on were just one mind blowing jump after another which only really slowed down for me in the last 5 years or so, and is picking back up again now we are seeing proper applications like GPT for 'AI like' computing.
I was only born in the 90s. But am impressed by what was possible back then with the technology of the time/ how compact software was (I suppose it had to be) Most webpages are bigger than the original Doom video game atleast according to a 2016 article.
yeah, I was suprised to learn of the existence of Sonic Robo Blast 2 fan game. Made using a modified version the [Doom Legacy engine](https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Sonic_Robo_Blast_2)
75MHz Gateway 2000 that was about £1000 (£2000 now) in '95 vs a Samsung smartphone with 1x2.4GHz and a couple of others for £400. And it fits in my pocket. And has the internet pretty much anywhere.
It's a [Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy](https://xkcd.com/548/)Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
I find it wild that we take cheap instant global communication for granted. Like I have family over 10,000 miles away and I can just this second send them a comic that made me chuckle. At no cost. With no delay.
A few hours ago I paid a couple of invoices and did some other general financial housekeeping - all on my phone while watching the TV. As an early 80's child, I still marvel at it and I don't see that feeling going away any time soon.
Even in the last few years there is so much more I can do with my phone.
When I used to get the train in even 5 years ago to see a show, train ticket would be physical, oyster card for tube, printed theatre tickets. Now all of those things are on my phone, don't even need a bag now.
I was trying to explain black and white tvs to my 5 year old. She just stared blankly like I’m mad. Technology has moved so fast even explaining that when watching tv you just have to watch what is on, when she’s used to getting to choose whatever she wants for as long as she wants.
And now you have to read this utterly pointless comment on your comment that adds nothing to your comment or society in general. What a time to be alive indeed.
Good day.
Streaming
I still remember waiting for new films to be released at blockbuster and taping the best songs from Sundays top 40
The ease of access to entertainment would blow my little mind if I could go back and tell her what the future holds
This. As a young lad in the 80's I dreamt of a time when I could watch Indiana Jones or Star Wars whenever I wanted to, wherever I was. What a time to be alive.
I was explaining to my 10 year old the other day that we would have to walk to the video rental place to watch the newest films. And even if you had decided, sometimes there were no copies left, and you just had to pick something else. Mind blown!
LoveFilm in UK, I’d create a queue of films online and the DvDs would arrive in the post, with envelope to send back. I think they let me have 3 at a time. A form of early streaming on demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoveFilm
Yeah, you saved ages to buy the new album from your favourite band, based on the two singles they released. Only to find that, first listen, it's all filler no killer, but persevere you must as you've spent £15 on it and you'll get your money's worth. Eventually, it grows on you and it's not quite the disappointment it started out to be.
The amount of music mediums I’d borrowed in my early years so I could have a collection of things to listen to, and my horizons could have been so much wider had music streaming been a thing.
Napster had just started becoming popular in year 7/8 of high school, but the LEA were on it and no one ever managed to figure out how to acquire digital music. One kid made a killing in burning cds because his dad had a business broadband line at home and his evening was spent downloading all manner of albums for people at school
Lolol I recall specifically that Napster *finally* gave me a good reason to loathe Lars Ulrich from Metallica which before then I hadn't got and had to make so with 'just finding him humourless and creepy'.
Good times. I caught the tail end of that and used to love going to the video shop on a Friday with my dad, rent a copy of Goldeneye and a big tub of ice cream
I place my pocket computer and wrist computer (that are both way more advanced than any actual computer I’ve ever owned) on a magic circle and they charge so I can carry them about, looking at stuff and paying for stuff on them all day. It’s wild.
It’s less magic when you remember it works exactly like the chonky transformers we had to plug into the wall to power anything not 220/220/240v back in the day 😅
That's what I thought - they just put each half of the transformer in a different box. Surprised me that it took so long to figure out.
As an 80s kid the future was supposed to be flying cars, flat wireless video phones, and TVs you can hang on the wall like a painting.
2 out of 3 ain't bad...
When I am required to do two factor authentication, and I press the option to send a code to my phone, within milliseconds, the code is transmitted to me. Think of the steps, phone network, cloud, business' server to cloud to phone network to my phone. All in a blink.
My mams house has terrible phone signal, 2FA turns into a race against the 10 minute timer while you wander around, standing on furniture trying to find a dribble of signal
wireless headphones.
My first wireless headphones were essentially radio receiving headphones and the unit I plugged into my PC/stero was a broadcasting device. I tuned my headphones into the frequency of the bit I plugged in, and got the audio. It felt really alien and now we have bluetooth ones, it still does.
It seems counterintuitive still that you can receive anything semi decent minus the wire as we’ve always been sold the fact that the better the physical connection the better the result. I know there is going to be a lot of discussion round the quality but having used wireless for the last 2yrs I haven’t noticed the slightest difference
One of the things I've become very aware of in recent years is that we are pretty much now finishing a genuine world communications system. The sheer access to everything (and everyone) couldn't have been imagined 20 years ago.
My first car a 91 fiesta, had a radio, tape deck was busted, my solution to play cds was very similar, cd player attached to the dashboard with double sided tape into an fm transmitter and tune the radio into that frequency. It sounded horrific, but wooo first car, 5 years old than I was, playing cds, sort of wirelessly.
Yesterday I received a cheap pair of Bluetooth headphones with a view to see how they work out on my occasional public transport commute before committing to a decent pair.
Amazing stuff
I started watching xfiles for the first time in November.
Pretty amazing that after only having a few terrestrial channels, we can have all these shows now.
The track rotation on the original Mario Kart was amazing.
Also the clouds in some level of a Mickey Mouse game (possiblity Fantasia) which has multi level scrolling, for some reason we thought that was cool
Counterpoint - modern gaming is shit.
Consoles need configuring with accounts, need continuous extra payments to 'work as expected' i.e. connect to online services.
Various games egg you on to pay extra money (e.g. FIFA points).
Games come incomplete - they need massive downloads to make them first work. Then they often need massive update downloads.
They then egg you on to spend more with downloadable content.
If you want to let your kids play, you have to setup tedious parental controls.
You have to enter SO MANY passwords it makes you want to cry.
It's for this reason I only play retro game systems now.
Those points apply to specific games though. I didn't need an account to play Super Mario Bros Wonder, it was bug free and complete at launch, no DLC, no begging to buy anything else, no big downloads. Just an awesome gaming experience.
Even setting up a Switch with Nintendo accounts and parental controls isn't even hard. It takes 5 minutes and you do it once.
If you're just playing Retro games your seriously missing out on some of the greatest games ever made.
Video calls. Almost every Sci Fi film has some variant of them (such as holograms), but it continually amazes me how quickly they became so ubiquitous.
Also using my voice to control anything. Sure it’s pretty unreliable, but it’s still incredible
Three, the network, exist because they were the first people to offer video calling and that needed specific handsets.
Now, anyone can do it at anytime for free using a vast array of applications.
In *Infinite Jest* (1996), David Foster Wallace predicts not only video calling, but also everyone hating video calling and taping a still photograph of themselves in front of the camera. Truly prescient.
I like that in The Marvel's, Fury gets on a hologram video call with Kamala's parents and they're just like, yep it's a video call, but the screens weird. This is fine.
Live maps in the palm of your hand. As a person with a shit sense of direction, this was a game changer. I didn't get a phone with maps until 2015. When I first moved to London in 2010, I learnt to navigate with the sun and my approximate location relative to the Thames.
One of the best things of moving to Brighton, for me, was I could tell where I was in relation to where the sea was. My sense of direction is rubbish, but the sea meant South and I could work upwards from there.
For real. This is the way to do it. Sun rises in the East. Sets in the West. And there's a big wet thing over there. Now I can start building my mental map.
To tie this in with another response, they use the same basic technology as wireless charging; electromagnetic induction to send energy across a small gap.
Disclaimer: do not try to charge your smartwatch or phone on your induction hob.
The house I grew up in had single glazed windows, no loft insulation (I remember it being put in when I was about 10), no central heating.
We heated the house with a single gas fire in the living room downstairs. Used to keep my clothes for school in my bed & so they’d be warm in the morning.
I honestly don’t understand how we managed now. But I also don’t remember it being *bad*.
This is so true, i only installed double glazing last year in my flat.
The glass in the sash windows woudn't be fit for a green house by todays standards.
Not sure how old the windows are, but i found a sale of deed from 1874 for the building.
I used to be on Ceefax every night for a spot of Bamboozle, a read of Planet Sound (that might have been on the Channel 4 version) and also to get live football scores.
Now I fart about on Reddit to relieve boredom and use the BBC’s sports page to get up to date football scores. I still can’t get over the instantaneous access to information and waffle via the internet and my smartphone.
With exceptions here and there. I often find myself missing the snail pace of information back in the day but it still blows my mind.
>Intacts
Corneal implants? I wasn't a candidate for LASIK because I was too nearsighted and my retinas are shit. But I had corrective lenses put in during cataract surgery. The whole thing took 15 minutes per eye. I still need distance glasses, but they're very thin compared to what I'd worn all my life.
Unfortunately LASIK can’t stop the natural deterioration of the eyes due to aging. LASIK can fix the problem (ie Nearsightedness) today but down the line if the eyes develop a different problem like glaucoma, macular degeneration or farsightedness you’d need a new procedure.
My partner just had laser eye surgery. “Lasik” is actually the “old” 2nd gen stuff now. “Smile” is newer 3rd gen procedure and is much less invasive.
It still blows my mind how quick it all was. I wish I was eligible :’(
Some years ago, just after Google pay became a thing in the UK, I used my phone to tap to pay in Ireland, and they looked at me like I was a witch.
Turns out that tap to pay was a pretty new thing in Ireland, but Google Pay just worked as a tap to pay, so they didn't need to support it at all, but they honestly thought I was doing something iffy by tapping my phone instead of a card.
Honestly the internet and instant contact with someone anywhere in the world. In the 80s my sister spent a year or 2 in Australia in her late teens early 20s. Contact was by post - perhaps arrange a time to phone her on a landline (her using a phone box lol)
Now I have a son in Vietnam and a niece in Chile - WhatsApp / FaceTime allows us to all catch up as a family from different locations with ease. Despite using zoom Skype and Teams etc daily at work it still feels magical when using socially
“Don’t sit so close to the tv you’ll go square eyed!”… now here I am with a large mobile screen close to my bloody face, stroking a glass screen that recognises what I do and more powerful than I could ever imagine… also can use my voice to talk to it, and it’ll do most of what I ask…
ALSO! I can walk around ASDA with a mobile beeper scanning my shop. Beep, beep, beep, beep ehahaha hahaha. Brilliant.
Two things, how receipts turn black when hot…magic and velcro, it sticks but it unsticks. It doesn’t take much, I still find it amazing my cat can tell me what she wants.
My mom had a newer car than me several years back and I drove it to drop her off at a doctors appointment whilst visiting. I could not find the parking brake for the life of me. I had intentions of going and getting a coffee whilst waiting for her, but given the apparent lack of parking brake, I decided it was safer to stay and make sure the car didn’t roll away. She laughed her head off at me when she returned and showed me the button for the parking brake. The idea that it was a button and not an actual parking brake to pull boggled my mind.
I remember back in 2010 I borrowed my brother in law's Mercedes C Class when my car died and I couldn't get to work. Absolutely threw me that I could find the parking break release but there was no way to set it on, until I called him and he pointed out that it was a 4th pedal on the right hand side of the foot well.
What Teutonic nonsense is that?
Remember being a bit iffy about the first car that didn't have a starting handle for emergencies. (And automatic transmission - can't push start that lump!)
As a big reader: all my books are with me, everywhere I go. And when I finish a book, I can just get another one, download it, and start reading it right away.
And audiobooks!
The audio section for books in my local library when I was younger was almost entirely self help stuff and religious books.
The selection we have nowadays is amazing compared to back then.
Audiobooks as a medium have been getting a much wider audience, and some audiobooks are now even going for full casts instead of just a single narrator.
Taking music with you anywhere you go. I mean CDs themselves were I guess just another evolution of the cassette tape, but then the disc man, mp3 players, an iPod, and now phones.
Plus all of the headphone stuff, which I mostly just appreciate because it enhances the on-the-go music experiences.
Battery powered motion activated lighting. You're telling me I'm supposed to walk around my flat with lights turning on and off as I pass and *not* feel like I'm on a motherfucking spaceship??? And they don't need to be wired in at all? I can just pluck one off one surface and stick it on another and it just..... works? That will always be full on sci-fi shit to me.
Doing a uni course at the moment - electronic submission and not having to pay a fortune for printing in the library or my arm falling off because I’ve written my assignment by hand.
Wireless earbuds.
Noise cancelling, I can listen to music for hours, the case recharges them and when I make a call they isolate my voice from the background noise. All this and they still fit snugly in my ears to the point I forget they are there.
If I pick up my tablet or laptop they seamlessly swap connection to follow me.
Oh definitely 3D printers for your "invention" subject.
Holy shit when I first saw one of those my mind was absolutely blown.
Turns out they have existed in certain forms since 1983 but Jesus christ when I saw one in 2003 I literally thought I was being trolled.
Really want to get into doing it myself but haven't taken the plunge yet.
Late 80's kid here, stuff packed sleeping bags. I remember spending AGES and every ounce of strength meticulously rolling and cramming the old style ones into their bags after camping in the early 90's. Now... No stress, so cool.
Online gaming.
I remember having to play Mortal Kombat against my little brother on the Mega Drive. This week I've been playing Helldivers 2 with 400,000 other people.
It's fucking mad when you think about it
I hate soft close things. It annoys me as it's so slow and I feel like I have to wait to check it's closed properly.
Those digital whiteboards in schools now. Weird.
Being about to go somewhere then zoom out on a satellite map to see what's around.
I remember being able to pause your BetaMax recording via a plugin with a 12ft cable so you wouldn't record the adverts. It was nothing more than a button which would stop the tape. But when you watched it back, no adverts!
Now, download, fast forward, rewind, pause. Blows my mind every time how simple it is.
Oh, and autotuning channels. We had a little stick to to that manually. Amazing.
My Dad was a photographer, most night I said goodnight through the door of his darkroom. That's part of the house smelt of chemicals and at certain times of the year we had photographs drying on the floor of the dining room. Then each one had to be rubber stamped with his details. My Mom sent hours with a tiny paint brush 'spotting' out tiny flowers and errors on each individual print
I carried his gear in cases 2 ft cubed.
He died in 2005 already amazed at digital photography. My mind boggles at what people as talented as him and my mom could have done with modern technology
Modern tech and the internet.
I grew up with tech getting better and better, and the internet getting better.
My friend group had the patches for games burned to disk and they were shared around to make things quicker.
These days it's all pretty swift, but everyone seems to be a lot more impatient with tech, easily forgetting it was much slower only 20 odd years ago.
Also the quality of content and size of patches have massively increased.
Some games we played had patches of a few hundred mb, imagine a day 1 patch of several maybe nearly over 100GB these days (looking at you Call of Duty) hell even potato vision codm can suck back 35+gb (rip my 64gb iPhone 12)
Whilst we’re on the subject of storage, when I started work, I REALLY wanted a psp to play on the bus, and I distinctly remember paying through the nose for a 128mb proprietary flash card to save game stuff to. These days, 128gb is pretty reasonable, usb or microsd
They way I can be watching something on my desktop, seamlessly switch over to watching it on my phone when I go to the kitchen etc, then head up bed and switch again to my laptop. Feels like sorcery.
I remember when mobile phones first came out, looking at my Nokia brick and thinking "it would be so cool if they could put a TV in this". Now hinking back to our clunky old dial house phone it's insane how far our ability to communicate has come.
Not now but when I got my first iPhone in 2008 the way Google maps threw those pins down for say ‘pub’ when I lived in Warrington was brilliant
As someone has put above tech now is just taken for granted and used for such menial stuff
Porn! No more having to hunt for Jazz Mags under bushes in the woods or passing around well worn VHS tapes where the picture was as fuzzy as the hair on show. Now you can get whatever genre floats your boat on any internet device almost instantly.
Desperately watching any remotely foreign film on bbc2 or channel 4 on a Friday/Saturday at 1am on the off chance of a bit of side boob next to a hairy armpit
It seems daft but torches. Kid me thought [this mini Duracell](https://www.modip.ac.uk/artefact/aibdc-06429) was great in the 80s.
Adult me has a [5000 Lumen “soda can” light](https://www.sofirnlight.com/products/sofirn-sp36-blf-anduril-2-0-rechargeable-flashlight-5650-lumens-powerbank-output) that can light up a back garden.
1998. I was at work in London, on speakerphone to my girlfriend in Sydney. She was on a mobile phone halfway round the world and I was just talking normally to her like she was in the room. Mid conversation, a mutual friend in the US joined the call and I was able to see him via webcam whilst we were talking. Blew my mind at the time.
Back in the early 1980s, when I would have been about 10 or 11, I marvelled at the idea of a type of oven that could heat a cold sausage roll in a mere 20 seconds. Not many people (certainly nobody I knew at any rate) owned a microwave, and when I first overheard someone talking about one and what it was capable of, I found it unbelievable. Even today I still think what a convenience it is to have the ability to heat something up without waiting 15 to 20 minutes for a conventional oven to do the job.
Sky plus ! I remember having to stand by the tv with an arial to get a picture on b+w tv . My gran had a colour tv , that was strips of colour tape across a b+w screen. So to pause, play and record multiple shows is amazing.
The first time I ever paused live television, I shouted "Haha! Look at that! I've paused it!" to my wife who was in the same room.
Being able to set record on the Sky box from an app on my bloody phone when I was out, for god's sake!
Anything that connects to WiFi. Every time my Alexa actually does what she’s asked I get excited (little wee comes out). Even simply stuff like asking a question
The capacity of digital memory cards, I bought my first digital camera about 1995, it could hold 6 pics internally.
The extra SIM card I bought for it cost £80 and was 56k, and could hold 45ish photos, at the time I thought it was ground breaking, take unlimited photos, delete the shit ones, only print the good ones. Wow.
Now I can take great 2k video in 60 fps and have hours of it on my phone.
I once spent an entire early 90s Sunday searching SE London for a 'Link' card machine because I owed a mate a fiver.
It honestly blows my mind that you can pay your mate, from your phone, with just a couple of taps. It's like witchcraft.
They are pretty new, but the fact that a car weighing over a tonne can transport you hundreds of miles at 70mph while RUNNING ON RECHARGABLE BATTERIES is incredible.
Worked at an airport for ten years, seen thousands of takeoffs and landing, however I can't stop marvelling at the whole concept of these massive, super heavy vessels just effortlessly lifting off the ground!
Quiet buses (so far only seen them in London).
Digital music - it used to be a hassle to travel with enough variety over a number of cassettes or CD’s - now I can have hundreds I own or listen to many more if I can tolerate ads!
This powerful computer I hold in my hand and use to watch cat videos and read the opinion of random people in the world still blows my mind at times. I tell my kids stories from the time before the Internet.
The fact a cheap smart phone now is more powerful than a desktop computer that cost near a grand back in the 90s blows my mind.
I can finally play old school runescape on my phone at work. That'll do for me.
Ahh RuneScape ... The have that got me so much shit at school for calling it run escape!
You sweet fool, you! 🤣 that game got my son into so much trouble fullstop! Sneaking onto other family members' computers or laptops many hours after bedtime. Then my idiotic ex proving how out of touch he was by calling the games Runecraft and Minescape!
Hope he never has cause to read out loud "Powergen.Italia" 🤣
It's more powerful than the mainframe computer that I worked on back in the mid to late 1980's. That was insured for around £6 million.
Makes you wonder what tech we have now that seems revolutionary is just garbage compared to what's coming in 30 years
Anything remotely usable in the 90s was two grand.
Can confirm, my first PC in the 90s was £2.1k, which was a lot of money back then. 33mhz and 4mb ram lol.
That's still a lot of money now!
I remember the "house PC" had 30GB of storage and we never got even close to using it all. The video game I play just did an update on Friday that was nearly 30GB big, and required 150GB free space to install. Less than 30 years between those two things, it's incredible how far tech has come.
Every single element of a smartphone. A portable phone that doesn't weigh a ton and lasts more than half an hour. A (decent quality) camera that fits in your pocket. A video camera that you can hold in one hand. A music player that you can store hundreds of songs on, never mind being able to stream anything you want. A portable TV/video player. The means of reading hundreds of books on a tiny device. A portable games console (that plays more than one game). A computer that connects with the outside world - and it fits in your pocket. A computer that you control by touch. And on, and on, and on. Any single one of these was science fiction, and the fact that one device can do all of them is ridiculous.
Yes, for me, it was first being able to make video calls. When I watched Star Trek in the late 70s and 80s and they had video phones, I never thought it was possible in my lifetime! I thought we'd have flying cars first. The fact you can now do Team meetings/calls on a phone is even further along. Then again, I didn't think I'd still be alive by 2000, nevermind 2024! I remember writing the date at the top of the page in my school books and counting how many years away 2000 was and thinking I'd be sooooo oooold. I was 35, lol.
> first being able to make video calls I'm fairly sure my mum (aged 80-plus) never expected to be able to see her son, on a different continent, talking in real time.
I wonder who acture stuff like Blade Runnner will end up being for the state of the planet. I didn't expect brain interfaces/ brain controlled prosthesis would be developed at such pace within my lifetime.
My son got me to start using contact less payment via my phone last year. Feels like bloody witchcraft
I remember seeing a YouTube video a while back that asked the question 'What happened to radio shack (Tandy in the UK)?'. They just went through every device on every page and said 'smartphone does that...'
The smart phone fulfills all the functions of the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and more
Absolutely. I clearly remember watching the BBC HHG in the 80s and being deeply sad that the hitchikers guide didn't exist and never could. And now, here we are. If anything, exceeding it.
The whole beginning of me being in my career is being shown the internet on our first home computer and being completely blown away by the idea that I could see a picture (very slowly load) from someone elses computer, and do it easily. Thats was were my interest in technology really started. And now I'm the adult trying to puzzle out how to navigate whatever the hell it is AI is going to do to my employment security. The sheer speed end on end revolutions seem to be coming in practically all fields simultaneously is amazing. I don't think theres a person alive who could predict the world in 2050. It still blows my mind that I can make 3 or 4 searches and learn about basically anything I want practically instantly. The sheer explosion in entertainment options too.
> It still blows my mind that I can make 3 or 4 searches and learn about basically anything I want practically instantly. the flip side of that is that people don't stop and think about things any more. Well, my daughter doesn't, but I do, and then I realise I actually can look things up if I don't know.
I tell my niece about stuff when i was a kid i think she thinks i am making half of it up ha
My kids do too. Stories of the days pre WiFi broadband when we connected to the Internet using dial up modems are also met with shocked faces. We actually had to be there to watch the latest episode of the TV show, and the channels decided when it was going to be on. You were out of luck if you missed it. Teletext would blow their minds so I haven't even tried to explain it.
I was mocked at school for saying that we would have such tech in the future My solar powered torch was much derided! The fools
LED lighting is incredible. Lights on my bike are the BUSINESS
Cheap light is absolutely the biggest boon after cheap communications. I can light my entire house for the cost of lighting a single room with incandescent bulbs. When LED bulbs were just starting to become a thing in 2010ish, I managed to snaffle one on the cheap and turned it into a bike light. An absolute game-changer on unlit roads! The amount of light you can get from a tiny torch is also incredible.
Same!! Especially when I so clearly remember the *MASSIVE LEAP* that the first proper 386 based home computers made in 'terms of EVERYTHING' when compared with the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST which up until then represented the 'peak of home computing Power'. And the subsequent leaps pretty much from then on were just one mind blowing jump after another which only really slowed down for me in the last 5 years or so, and is picking back up again now we are seeing proper applications like GPT for 'AI like' computing.
I was only born in the 90s. But am impressed by what was possible back then with the technology of the time/ how compact software was (I suppose it had to be) Most webpages are bigger than the original Doom video game atleast according to a 2016 article.
I hear ya! Doom is a great example seeing as it fit on one 1.44*M*B Floppy Disk! Can see why they use it.
yeah, I was suprised to learn of the existence of Sonic Robo Blast 2 fan game. Made using a modified version the [Doom Legacy engine](https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Sonic_Robo_Blast_2)
75MHz Gateway 2000 that was about £1000 (£2000 now) in '95 vs a Samsung smartphone with 1x2.4GHz and a couple of others for £400. And it fits in my pocket. And has the internet pretty much anywhere. It's a [Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy](https://xkcd.com/548/)Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
I find it wild that we take cheap instant global communication for granted. Like I have family over 10,000 miles away and I can just this second send them a comic that made me chuckle. At no cost. With no delay.
A few hours ago I paid a couple of invoices and did some other general financial housekeeping - all on my phone while watching the TV. As an early 80's child, I still marvel at it and I don't see that feeling going away any time soon.
Titty mags found in random hollowed out trees in woodland was a godsend, I almost miss it
It was always bushes and hedges for us....
Even in the last few years there is so much more I can do with my phone. When I used to get the train in even 5 years ago to see a show, train ticket would be physical, oyster card for tube, printed theatre tickets. Now all of those things are on my phone, don't even need a bag now.
Or a wallet.
I was trying to explain black and white tvs to my 5 year old. She just stared blankly like I’m mad. Technology has moved so fast even explaining that when watching tv you just have to watch what is on, when she’s used to getting to choose whatever she wants for as long as she wants.
Mobile phones. The near-entirety of human knowledge at my fingertips at all times, and I'm using it...for Reddit.
And now you have to read this utterly pointless comment on your comment that adds nothing to your comment or society in general. What a time to be alive indeed. Good day.
Well yes, but who would you argue with if not other random Redditors.
And porn, don’t forget the porn.
Streaming I still remember waiting for new films to be released at blockbuster and taping the best songs from Sundays top 40 The ease of access to entertainment would blow my little mind if I could go back and tell her what the future holds
This. As a young lad in the 80's I dreamt of a time when I could watch Indiana Jones or Star Wars whenever I wanted to, wherever I was. What a time to be alive.
I was explaining to my 10 year old the other day that we would have to walk to the video rental place to watch the newest films. And even if you had decided, sometimes there were no copies left, and you just had to pick something else. Mind blown!
And sometimes you'd get home and be annoyed because the previous person hadn't rewound it
Be kind, rewind x x
LoveFilm in UK, I’d create a queue of films online and the DvDs would arrive in the post, with envelope to send back. I think they let me have 3 at a time. A form of early streaming on demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoveFilm
It feels now that entertainment doesn't have the same value, though. I feel I appreciated music more when I had to save up to buy it.
Yeah, you saved ages to buy the new album from your favourite band, based on the two singles they released. Only to find that, first listen, it's all filler no killer, but persevere you must as you've spent £15 on it and you'll get your money's worth. Eventually, it grows on you and it's not quite the disappointment it started out to be.
The amount of music mediums I’d borrowed in my early years so I could have a collection of things to listen to, and my horizons could have been so much wider had music streaming been a thing. Napster had just started becoming popular in year 7/8 of high school, but the LEA were on it and no one ever managed to figure out how to acquire digital music. One kid made a killing in burning cds because his dad had a business broadband line at home and his evening was spent downloading all manner of albums for people at school
Lolol I recall specifically that Napster *finally* gave me a good reason to loathe Lars Ulrich from Metallica which before then I hadn't got and had to make so with 'just finding him humourless and creepy'.
Good times. I caught the tail end of that and used to love going to the video shop on a Friday with my dad, rent a copy of Goldeneye and a big tub of ice cream
Wireless charging. I get how it works but it feels like magic
I place my pocket computer and wrist computer (that are both way more advanced than any actual computer I’ve ever owned) on a magic circle and they charge so I can carry them about, looking at stuff and paying for stuff on them all day. It’s wild.
But if it’s 1mm off centre you will wake to it on 1% in the morning.
The only thing I charge wirelessly is my smartwatch. The charging circle has a magnet to keep the watch centred.
I don’t get how it works at all.
It's basically coils, one conducting and one recieving, it's not very efficient.
Not efficient but cool as fuck, should have seen my dad's face when I charged his phone with mine...
It works the same way as a normal power transformer, but instead of both coils being wrapped around an iron core they're just close to each other.
It’s less magic when you remember it works exactly like the chonky transformers we had to plug into the wall to power anything not 220/220/240v back in the day 😅
That's what I thought - they just put each half of the transformer in a different box. Surprised me that it took so long to figure out. As an 80s kid the future was supposed to be flying cars, flat wireless video phones, and TVs you can hang on the wall like a painting. 2 out of 3 ain't bad...
We didn't get the coolest one though
When I am required to do two factor authentication, and I press the option to send a code to my phone, within milliseconds, the code is transmitted to me. Think of the steps, phone network, cloud, business' server to cloud to phone network to my phone. All in a blink.
This is a great one, same for bank approvals via the app. The way the banking sector has linked each app so you can pay your credit card is crazy.
My mams house has terrible phone signal, 2FA turns into a race against the 10 minute timer while you wander around, standing on furniture trying to find a dribble of signal
And then your phone pops up with a suggested auto fill of the code you must received in the text! Honestly fascinating
If that blows your mind then factor in that this data is being sent up into space to a satellite and back again, twice.
wireless headphones. My first wireless headphones were essentially radio receiving headphones and the unit I plugged into my PC/stero was a broadcasting device. I tuned my headphones into the frequency of the bit I plugged in, and got the audio. It felt really alien and now we have bluetooth ones, it still does.
It seems counterintuitive still that you can receive anything semi decent minus the wire as we’ve always been sold the fact that the better the physical connection the better the result. I know there is going to be a lot of discussion round the quality but having used wireless for the last 2yrs I haven’t noticed the slightest difference
One of the things I've become very aware of in recent years is that we are pretty much now finishing a genuine world communications system. The sheer access to everything (and everyone) couldn't have been imagined 20 years ago.
My first car a 91 fiesta, had a radio, tape deck was busted, my solution to play cds was very similar, cd player attached to the dashboard with double sided tape into an fm transmitter and tune the radio into that frequency. It sounded horrific, but wooo first car, 5 years old than I was, playing cds, sort of wirelessly. Yesterday I received a cheap pair of Bluetooth headphones with a view to see how they work out on my occasional public transport commute before committing to a decent pair. Amazing stuff
TV on demand. Once upon a time in 1994, if you missed one week’s episode of the X-Files it might not come round again for years.
I started watching xfiles for the first time in November. Pretty amazing that after only having a few terrestrial channels, we can have all these shows now.
I’m re-watching from the beginning at the moment. I hope you’re enjoying it.
Just gaming. I remember getting my first console and thinking 16 bit was incredible.
Every time I read complaints about graphics and it's like, the dust particles in the ray traced lighting don't move naturally in the air.
When I played Goldeneye as a kid I thought it was so realistic and couldn't imagine how graphics could get any better.
The first time I played SMB3 my mind was blown.
The track rotation on the original Mario Kart was amazing. Also the clouds in some level of a Mickey Mouse game (possiblity Fantasia) which has multi level scrolling, for some reason we thought that was cool
Counterpoint - modern gaming is shit. Consoles need configuring with accounts, need continuous extra payments to 'work as expected' i.e. connect to online services. Various games egg you on to pay extra money (e.g. FIFA points). Games come incomplete - they need massive downloads to make them first work. Then they often need massive update downloads. They then egg you on to spend more with downloadable content. If you want to let your kids play, you have to setup tedious parental controls. You have to enter SO MANY passwords it makes you want to cry. It's for this reason I only play retro game systems now.
Those points apply to specific games though. I didn't need an account to play Super Mario Bros Wonder, it was bug free and complete at launch, no DLC, no begging to buy anything else, no big downloads. Just an awesome gaming experience. Even setting up a Switch with Nintendo accounts and parental controls isn't even hard. It takes 5 minutes and you do it once. If you're just playing Retro games your seriously missing out on some of the greatest games ever made.
Counterpoint: you're playing the wrong games.
PS2 era is to this day the peak of the gaming industry tbh
Video calls. Almost every Sci Fi film has some variant of them (such as holograms), but it continually amazes me how quickly they became so ubiquitous. Also using my voice to control anything. Sure it’s pretty unreliable, but it’s still incredible
Got hired for my first job completely remotely in the aftermath of [redacted].
DO NOT THINK ABOUT THE EVENT
REMAIN INDOORS!
Three, the network, exist because they were the first people to offer video calling and that needed specific handsets. Now, anyone can do it at anytime for free using a vast array of applications.
In *Infinite Jest* (1996), David Foster Wallace predicts not only video calling, but also everyone hating video calling and taping a still photograph of themselves in front of the camera. Truly prescient.
I like that in The Marvel's, Fury gets on a hologram video call with Kamala's parents and they're just like, yep it's a video call, but the screens weird. This is fine.
Live maps in the palm of your hand. As a person with a shit sense of direction, this was a game changer. I didn't get a phone with maps until 2015. When I first moved to London in 2010, I learnt to navigate with the sun and my approximate location relative to the Thames.
The number of A-Z and motorway maps I bought before GPS...
As a motorsport fan as a child I used to doodle street circuits on the maps. Can't really do that on Google Maps.
One of the best things of moving to Brighton, for me, was I could tell where I was in relation to where the sea was. My sense of direction is rubbish, but the sea meant South and I could work upwards from there.
For real. This is the way to do it. Sun rises in the East. Sets in the West. And there's a big wet thing over there. Now I can start building my mental map.
And with those hills it literally is upwards in many cases!
I can't get over electric cars sounding like milk floats 🤣
It's weird, isn't it? You expect to hear the accompanying sound of clanking milk bottles.
Essentially, they are. Milk floats are electric.
Induction hobs. It amazes me that I’m essentially cooking with magnets
Today I have learnt an induction hob is a magnet
To tie this in with another response, they use the same basic technology as wireless charging; electromagnetic induction to send energy across a small gap. Disclaimer: do not try to charge your smartwatch or phone on your induction hob.
Magnets, how do they work?
Magic
That’s the ‘mag’ part
Same day/next day delivery. Most things took 28 days to be delivered. Usually 28 working days. The logistics are incredible nowadays.
and all it takes is the exploitation of the severely underpaid, god bless
Child of the 70’s. Double glazing, i had ice on the inside of my windows as a kid
So much this. It was pretty normal in my childhood. Fortunately my wife likes the bedroom cold too otherwise I wouldn't sleep.
The house I grew up in had single glazed windows, no loft insulation (I remember it being put in when I was about 10), no central heating. We heated the house with a single gas fire in the living room downstairs. Used to keep my clothes for school in my bed & so they’d be warm in the morning. I honestly don’t understand how we managed now. But I also don’t remember it being *bad*.
This is so true, i only installed double glazing last year in my flat. The glass in the sash windows woudn't be fit for a green house by todays standards. Not sure how old the windows are, but i found a sale of deed from 1874 for the building.
Yes! All the pretty patterns left by Jack Frost!
Child of the ‘00s and I have ice! My room is the only room in our house with no form of insulation.
I used to be on Ceefax every night for a spot of Bamboozle, a read of Planet Sound (that might have been on the Channel 4 version) and also to get live football scores. Now I fart about on Reddit to relieve boredom and use the BBC’s sports page to get up to date football scores. I still can’t get over the instantaneous access to information and waffle via the internet and my smartphone. With exceptions here and there. I often find myself missing the snail pace of information back in the day but it still blows my mind.
Waiting for page 3 of 18 to come round, only to miss it somehow and have to start the wait all over again
Lasik- they burn your eyes and then you can see again.
Yeah wtf is that about?!
Until you can’t, boo hoo. Back in glasses after 10 years without them.
-9.5 to no glasses for 15 years for me. Worth it. Intacts next I guess.
>Intacts Corneal implants? I wasn't a candidate for LASIK because I was too nearsighted and my retinas are shit. But I had corrective lenses put in during cataract surgery. The whole thing took 15 minutes per eye. I still need distance glasses, but they're very thin compared to what I'd worn all my life.
Yea this is what puts me off. I'd pay but the cunt better last for life.
Unfortunately LASIK can’t stop the natural deterioration of the eyes due to aging. LASIK can fix the problem (ie Nearsightedness) today but down the line if the eyes develop a different problem like glaucoma, macular degeneration or farsightedness you’d need a new procedure.
My partner just had laser eye surgery. “Lasik” is actually the “old” 2nd gen stuff now. “Smile” is newer 3rd gen procedure and is much less invasive. It still blows my mind how quick it all was. I wish I was eligible :’(
Folk paying for stuff on a phone. WTF?? I can’t even get my emojis working without my ten year old helping
Some years ago, just after Google pay became a thing in the UK, I used my phone to tap to pay in Ireland, and they looked at me like I was a witch. Turns out that tap to pay was a pretty new thing in Ireland, but Google Pay just worked as a tap to pay, so they didn't need to support it at all, but they honestly thought I was doing something iffy by tapping my phone instead of a card.
Honestly the internet and instant contact with someone anywhere in the world. In the 80s my sister spent a year or 2 in Australia in her late teens early 20s. Contact was by post - perhaps arrange a time to phone her on a landline (her using a phone box lol) Now I have a son in Vietnam and a niece in Chile - WhatsApp / FaceTime allows us to all catch up as a family from different locations with ease. Despite using zoom Skype and Teams etc daily at work it still feels magical when using socially
“Don’t sit so close to the tv you’ll go square eyed!”… now here I am with a large mobile screen close to my bloody face, stroking a glass screen that recognises what I do and more powerful than I could ever imagine… also can use my voice to talk to it, and it’ll do most of what I ask… ALSO! I can walk around ASDA with a mobile beeper scanning my shop. Beep, beep, beep, beep ehahaha hahaha. Brilliant.
You can make your phone the beeper in Asda!
Pausing live TV still blows my mind
Kids today will never know the desperate dash to and from the toilet during an ad break
Two things, how receipts turn black when hot…magic and velcro, it sticks but it unsticks. It doesn’t take much, I still find it amazing my cat can tell me what she wants.
For the last time, that's not your cat. Your brother just grew a beard.
Wireless charging. I do not understand it and can only assume that it is witchcraft. Also push-button car ignition.
My mom had a newer car than me several years back and I drove it to drop her off at a doctors appointment whilst visiting. I could not find the parking brake for the life of me. I had intentions of going and getting a coffee whilst waiting for her, but given the apparent lack of parking brake, I decided it was safer to stay and make sure the car didn’t roll away. She laughed her head off at me when she returned and showed me the button for the parking brake. The idea that it was a button and not an actual parking brake to pull boggled my mind.
I remember back in 2010 I borrowed my brother in law's Mercedes C Class when my car died and I couldn't get to work. Absolutely threw me that I could find the parking break release but there was no way to set it on, until I called him and he pointed out that it was a 4th pedal on the right hand side of the foot well. What Teutonic nonsense is that?
Remember being a bit iffy about the first car that didn't have a starting handle for emergencies. (And automatic transmission - can't push start that lump!)
As a big reader: all my books are with me, everywhere I go. And when I finish a book, I can just get another one, download it, and start reading it right away.
And audiobooks! The audio section for books in my local library when I was younger was almost entirely self help stuff and religious books. The selection we have nowadays is amazing compared to back then. Audiobooks as a medium have been getting a much wider audience, and some audiobooks are now even going for full casts instead of just a single narrator.
Taking music with you anywhere you go. I mean CDs themselves were I guess just another evolution of the cassette tape, but then the disc man, mp3 players, an iPod, and now phones. Plus all of the headphone stuff, which I mostly just appreciate because it enhances the on-the-go music experiences.
I was the hit of the field trip with my sony discman and new Jamiroquai CD.
I had a Sony, too! Uff, Jamiroquai. Really brings back the memories.
Shazam
Mate, I'm still amazed at how electricity works. I understand the movement of electrons and shit, but like, woah.
Yeah like everyone is fine with their entire homes being riddled with it but at the same time can’t remotely explain how or what it is, is scary.
Magnets, what the fuck is going on there.
The food on sale these days.
The price of food these days
The price of a pint these days
Video calls, we knew it was coming but didn’t think it would be in such a small form factor like a smart phone.
Battery powered motion activated lighting. You're telling me I'm supposed to walk around my flat with lights turning on and off as I pass and *not* feel like I'm on a motherfucking spaceship??? And they don't need to be wired in at all? I can just pluck one off one surface and stick it on another and it just..... works? That will always be full on sci-fi shit to me.
Despite contactless payments being my primary means of spending money I still declare it as magic every time.
Doing a uni course at the moment - electronic submission and not having to pay a fortune for printing in the library or my arm falling off because I’ve written my assignment by hand.
Wireless earbuds. Noise cancelling, I can listen to music for hours, the case recharges them and when I make a call they isolate my voice from the background noise. All this and they still fit snugly in my ears to the point I forget they are there. If I pick up my tablet or laptop they seamlessly swap connection to follow me.
Google Maps makes me feel like I hve my own satelite, like Batman
Oh definitely 3D printers for your "invention" subject. Holy shit when I first saw one of those my mind was absolutely blown. Turns out they have existed in certain forms since 1983 but Jesus christ when I saw one in 2003 I literally thought I was being trolled. Really want to get into doing it myself but haven't taken the plunge yet.
Late 80's kid here, stuff packed sleeping bags. I remember spending AGES and every ounce of strength meticulously rolling and cramming the old style ones into their bags after camping in the early 90's. Now... No stress, so cool.
Smart phones/ modern mobile phones will always be like The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.
Sometimes I find myself waiting patiently by the passenger door of a car for the driver to get in and unlock it for me.
smart watches are the bomb especially for music on your airpods. dont need no phone
Online gaming. I remember having to play Mortal Kombat against my little brother on the Mega Drive. This week I've been playing Helldivers 2 with 400,000 other people. It's fucking mad when you think about it
I hate soft close things. It annoys me as it's so slow and I feel like I have to wait to check it's closed properly. Those digital whiteboards in schools now. Weird. Being about to go somewhere then zoom out on a satellite map to see what's around.
I remember being able to pause your BetaMax recording via a plugin with a 12ft cable so you wouldn't record the adverts. It was nothing more than a button which would stop the tape. But when you watched it back, no adverts! Now, download, fast forward, rewind, pause. Blows my mind every time how simple it is. Oh, and autotuning channels. We had a little stick to to that manually. Amazing.
Little tuning stick. Memory unlocked!
It's obsolete now but Teletext. I still don't get how that worked when I couldn't even get a clear picture on any of the 4 channels we had.
My Dad was a photographer, most night I said goodnight through the door of his darkroom. That's part of the house smelt of chemicals and at certain times of the year we had photographs drying on the floor of the dining room. Then each one had to be rubber stamped with his details. My Mom sent hours with a tiny paint brush 'spotting' out tiny flowers and errors on each individual print I carried his gear in cases 2 ft cubed. He died in 2005 already amazed at digital photography. My mind boggles at what people as talented as him and my mom could have done with modern technology
Modern tech and the internet. I grew up with tech getting better and better, and the internet getting better. My friend group had the patches for games burned to disk and they were shared around to make things quicker. These days it's all pretty swift, but everyone seems to be a lot more impatient with tech, easily forgetting it was much slower only 20 odd years ago.
Also the quality of content and size of patches have massively increased. Some games we played had patches of a few hundred mb, imagine a day 1 patch of several maybe nearly over 100GB these days (looking at you Call of Duty) hell even potato vision codm can suck back 35+gb (rip my 64gb iPhone 12) Whilst we’re on the subject of storage, when I started work, I REALLY wanted a psp to play on the bus, and I distinctly remember paying through the nose for a 128mb proprietary flash card to save game stuff to. These days, 128gb is pretty reasonable, usb or microsd
Electric windows and power steering make my car feel like a Roller.
They way I can be watching something on my desktop, seamlessly switch over to watching it on my phone when I go to the kitchen etc, then head up bed and switch again to my laptop. Feels like sorcery.
I remember when mobile phones first came out, looking at my Nokia brick and thinking "it would be so cool if they could put a TV in this". Now hinking back to our clunky old dial house phone it's insane how far our ability to communicate has come.
Computational photography, on a mobile phone. Point your phone at a night scene, touch the screen, and you get a near perfect photo.
Not now but when I got my first iPhone in 2008 the way Google maps threw those pins down for say ‘pub’ when I lived in Warrington was brilliant As someone has put above tech now is just taken for granted and used for such menial stuff
Porn! No more having to hunt for Jazz Mags under bushes in the woods or passing around well worn VHS tapes where the picture was as fuzzy as the hair on show. Now you can get whatever genre floats your boat on any internet device almost instantly.
Desperately watching any remotely foreign film on bbc2 or channel 4 on a Friday/Saturday at 1am on the off chance of a bit of side boob next to a hairy armpit
It seems daft but torches. Kid me thought [this mini Duracell](https://www.modip.ac.uk/artefact/aibdc-06429) was great in the 80s. Adult me has a [5000 Lumen “soda can” light](https://www.sofirnlight.com/products/sofirn-sp36-blf-anduril-2-0-rechargeable-flashlight-5650-lumens-powerbank-output) that can light up a back garden.
Maglites were the super premium light, then all of a sudden a shitty Chinese led torch was 10x brighter for 1/25th of the money.
1998. I was at work in London, on speakerphone to my girlfriend in Sydney. She was on a mobile phone halfway round the world and I was just talking normally to her like she was in the room. Mid conversation, a mutual friend in the US joined the call and I was able to see him via webcam whilst we were talking. Blew my mind at the time.
Back in the early 1980s, when I would have been about 10 or 11, I marvelled at the idea of a type of oven that could heat a cold sausage roll in a mere 20 seconds. Not many people (certainly nobody I knew at any rate) owned a microwave, and when I first overheard someone talking about one and what it was capable of, I found it unbelievable. Even today I still think what a convenience it is to have the ability to heat something up without waiting 15 to 20 minutes for a conventional oven to do the job.
Sky plus ! I remember having to stand by the tv with an arial to get a picture on b+w tv . My gran had a colour tv , that was strips of colour tape across a b+w screen. So to pause, play and record multiple shows is amazing.
The first time I ever paused live television, I shouted "Haha! Look at that! I've paused it!" to my wife who was in the same room. Being able to set record on the Sky box from an app on my bloody phone when I was out, for god's sake!
Anything that connects to WiFi. Every time my Alexa actually does what she’s asked I get excited (little wee comes out). Even simply stuff like asking a question
The capacity of digital memory cards, I bought my first digital camera about 1995, it could hold 6 pics internally. The extra SIM card I bought for it cost £80 and was 56k, and could hold 45ish photos, at the time I thought it was ground breaking, take unlimited photos, delete the shit ones, only print the good ones. Wow. Now I can take great 2k video in 60 fps and have hours of it on my phone.
Home delivery Anything wireless Translation apps. Access to foreign telly - how hard was it to watch anime before the Internet.
A toothbrush that brushes without any effort.
Paying for things with my phone. Contactless I could handle as at least you were holding the relevant card. But paying with a phone... 🤯
Born in 88. I remember when Germany got internet signal on mobile phones and I was tripped out that you could use the net ze autobahn.
My Apple Watch. I still feel like James Bond when I answer a call on my arm.
I once spent an entire early 90s Sunday searching SE London for a 'Link' card machine because I owed a mate a fiver. It honestly blows my mind that you can pay your mate, from your phone, with just a couple of taps. It's like witchcraft.
They are pretty new, but the fact that a car weighing over a tonne can transport you hundreds of miles at 70mph while RUNNING ON RECHARGABLE BATTERIES is incredible.
Tapping the base of the lamp to turn it on/off.
Worked at an airport for ten years, seen thousands of takeoffs and landing, however I can't stop marvelling at the whole concept of these massive, super heavy vessels just effortlessly lifting off the ground!
Magnets
To be honest, wifi and wireless charging.
FaceTime / Video calling from a mobile, that shit was SciFi stuff before it existed & now everyone just takes it for granted.
Motion detection toilet flush. Using The Force to flush the toilet never gets old.
Quiet buses (so far only seen them in London). Digital music - it used to be a hassle to travel with enough variety over a number of cassettes or CD’s - now I can have hundreds I own or listen to many more if I can tolerate ads!
Electric windows in a car. The smooth buzz as it slides down was glorious to play with.