Polaroid
Frontline
Glow-in-the-dark frisbee
Diet Coke - there used to be only Tab - ugh
Pay at the pump
I remember when we got our first computer when I was about ten. And then when we got AOL, that big news back in the day. I remember the idea of talking to people across the world- it was just so bizarre. But awesome. And now I do it so nonchalantly, with the greatest of ease.
I used to think the idea of mixing CDs was so awesome, and I’m still hardly over that, because I haven’t done it yet myself.
I also used to think the idea of playing DVDs on a computer was cool, but that was a week and a half ago. I’m over it already. 
I remember when ATMs were introduced in the late 70’s. They were freakin’ amazing! It was a big deal that a couple of them were put in the Student Union at college. We called it “The Money Wall.”
They still sort of make the little cartoon exclamation points appear above my head when I use them. I mean, it’s so cool!
And my kids just take them for granted.
Portable MP3 players. I have a first-gen Rio. I got it within months of its release, when there were only two brands on the market.
Affordable recordable CD equipment, sort of. I knew the technology existed, it was more of an “I can finally afford one.”
Even though they existed for most of my lifetime, laptops. I really like the concept of portable, battery powered full-featured computing.
Desktop LCD panels.
Colour TV. I grew up with B/W TV – watching the 1974 Commonwealth Games in colour was stunning.
Remote controls. Still remember bein’ th’ kid who got up all the time to switch channels.
Having more than one TV channel.
Computers – when it got above the Rbase stage.
The Internet.
Microwave ovens.
Cordless telephones.
The modem completely amazed me the first time I ever heard of it. I had no idea what you could do with one, but it seemed like a really cool idea. And then there was Prodigy, Compuserve and AOL…
3.5" floppy disks. And to make it even more impressive, I first saw these marvels (that were floppy, but didn’t actually flop, like the 5 1/4" ones did) on a Macintosh that had two floppy drives! Oh, the decadence!
CD-ROM technology blew me away, too. I scraped and saved for my first CD drive, an external 2X model that came with a bunch of CDs I probably wouldn’t use to prop up my rickety table today, but they were awesome back then. A whole encyclopedia, and it fits on one CD! Do you know how many floppies that would take?!
Speaking of computers, remember when you used to get, say, a magazine, or even a postcard, with a computer program in it? And you would spend a couple hours typing it in, and you’d have a brand new game?
ATMs. I remember thinking how cool it was that Mom could get money from this machine. Wow! And you didn’t have to walk inside the bank! And it wasn’t even banking hours!
We had the first microwave oven in our neighborhood. It was interesting, figuring out how long, say, it took to cook a hot dog (and be sure to give 'em a cut so they don’t explode!), or how long it took to get water to boiling temperature. The first microwave popcorn was from Pillsbury, and you had to keep it in the fridge. Then, wow! Microwave popcorn you can just keep in the pantry!
We also had one of the first VCRs in our neighborhood. Took some good beggin’ on our part, too, but Dad finally caved. It wasn’t one of those top-loaders, it was actually fairly advanced in most ways, but get this: you had to tune in the channels individually. There was a little panel on the top, and you would set first whether each channel was VHF, UHF lower, or UHF upper, then you tuned in the specific channel you wanted with a little dial. Each channel number from 2 to 13 had its own button under the LED, and that was how you changed channels.
When Quicktime was released, I couldn’t get over it. Any movie file I could get, I grabbed and saved and watched over and over. I remember leaving FTP running overnight on a computer where I was working for the summer to download one especially long file. But oohhhh, the sweet 160x120 low-res video…
I still think DVD is cool as hell. Layers! On a disc that looks like a CD! Awesome!
CDs. The first time I ever saw one was back in the mid-to-late 80’s. I was about 10 and a friend and I were in a magic shop. The owner showed us a trick using a small, round, incredibly shiny disc. Today, I don’t remember a bit what the trick was but I won’t ever forget that CD. The funny thing is, I wasn’t even impressed with it as a technological marvel–the guy explained what it was after his trick but that was merely an aferthought to my amazement. It was just so freakin’ beautiful, you know?
Test-tube babies.
Auto-reverse cassette decks.
A CD player ACTUALLY IN MY CAR!!!
Zip disks - wow! a form of storage that actually fits stuff on it!
Cruise control
Photoshop. And every new version astounds me anew.
This thread makes me feel bad, particularly the mentions of how people in their sixties and seventies have seen some amazing changes in their lives. Why? Because I was at Office Depot the other day, looking at software, and I found myself in line behind an elderly couple. The person ahead of them pulled out her credit card to use the countertop card reader; the elderly couple leaned forward a bit, the man saying, “Can we watch you use that?” And the woman said to the clerk, with a slightly apologetic tone, “Seems like every one of these is just a little bit different.” And I thought to myself, Come on, it’s just a card reader, stay with it, you old fogeys. Then I thought, man, that was a stupid, ungrateful whippersnapper moment if I ever had one. This thread just brings back how sheepish I felt at having that rather nasty thought, even if I never ever would have said it out loud; thinking it was bad enough.
The space program. I was totally in awe of it until the politicians announced that we weren’t going to go back to the Moon again. I was four. The shuttle program rekindled my interest, but rapidly lost it when it became obvious that the shuttle wasn’t going to take me into space any time soon.
Most of the things have already been mentioned but one small thing that floored me has been always-on internet connections. Having lived on dialup for yonks, the concept of the internet literally at your fingertips instead of a 30 second computer negotioation away has changed how I use it. Need to see what movies are on, jump to their website, want to find out what flavour Pizza you want to have tonight? jump to the website. Want to find out what somebodys phone No is? yellowpages.com.
Hard disk drives.
The day my dad showed me that we could play Ultima III without having to swap out the disks, since we had two floppy drives, was cool…but to not need a floppy at all? MAGIC.
One thing that really impressed me was the shampoo and conditioner in one bottle. An invention that saved 20 seconds of my time every day. I can’t think of many other inventions that actually simplified my life.
MP3’s. When they first came out, hard drives were still relatively small, maybe a few gig. The only audio format available for songs was a WAV file. A single song would be about 50 MB, which was incredibly huge at the time. Completely impossible to download over a modem. 100 songs would fill up a hard drive. Along came MP3’s. They magically reduced the size to around 3 MB. Now you could have a directory of hundreds of songs and it was no problem. I love me that lossy compression.
Same basic deal with JPG. You went from crappy-looking GIF’s with high file sizes to beautiful looking photos that were so tiny!
ATM’s
modems
Personal Computers in general. (And among them the Sinclair microcomputer. Thought it was the niftiest thing on Earth.)
Movies on VHS
Still impressive: reattachment of limbs
When I was a child: power windows for the car. That really knocked me flat on my little 6-y/o keister. Why, this must be the President’s car!
Tuckerfan, let me sign in as another child of the Space Race – grades K thru 6 I virtually lived off of it
Quagdop: “here, take this stuff” – 
yup, that’s about as much as the man said once he got my tests back, as he put me on Cozaar.
PDAs.
The first one I ever saw was a PalmPilot 5000 brought in by a customer when I was working at RadioShack. She was showing me how it worked – tapping on the screen , using Graffiti… I remember being absolutely amazed.
A couple of month later I got a “real job” and, with my very first paycheck, went and bought one for myself. It had a black and white [well, black and dark green] display and, hold on…1MB of RAM! Of course, today I’m one of the people who live out of their handheld. My current one can display 65,000 colors, and has 80MB of RAM, but that first one was still one of the most amazing things I’ve seen.
But more recently: GPS.
Where am I? Oh, I’m right here.
How far is it from where I was? Oh, it’s that far.
I’m still amazed by it all.
Kevlar and Carbon Fiber. real neat stuff, and very expensive when it first came out. i bought a Simpson motorcycle helmet made almost entirely of Kevlar just before the Army bought up all the stockpiles for their new helmets and drove the price up. very light and strong. now, they are made with fiberglass and composites and are just as strong, but not as light. Carbon Fiber is making its way into production, but the $$ is astronomical.
Now, they make trinkity crap out of carbon fiber and have somehow cheapend the whole idea for me…
i also thought the digital calculater my dad had from TI was way cool! (somewhere around 1974)
Thought of another one… how about Tyvek? It’s like paper – but you can’t rip it. Ooooh, aaaah.
My first computer had a 40MB hard disk. 40MB!! That’s WAY more than I could ever use in a lifetime!