Technological advances that once impressed you

In My Humble Opinion
41

CDs - They sounded so much better than tapes and the track selection thingy was SOOOO cool.

The Internet - My dad showed me this back in the early 90s. He called it the “information superhighway” and told me universities and the like used it to communicate to each other. If we’d only known what was going to happen…

Color PC monitor - It was amazing when I finally got to play SimCity in all of its 16-color glory.

More recently:

DVDs - just got this a couple months ago. The picture on these things is sweet. I can’t wait until I can afford an HDTV.

Those electronic cashier things at the store - It was kind of a surreal experience using one for the first time. I actually went into a store and through the course of my visit managed to not talk to a single person. Creepy.

And hopefully in the near future:

DSL - why the hell can’t I get this? I live in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the southwest (Dallas/Fort Worth) and yet I’m still dialing up through my freaking telephone line? One day I would like to experience the joy of having download speeds in excess of 3.7k/sec.

42

I’ll second JRDelirious on automobile power windows. My formative years were during the 1970s; during that time, my parents were solidly lower middle class. Our cars always had wind-up windows. Driving in a car belonging to the parents of one of my friends, some 1968 Oldsmobile Toronado or 1971 Cadillac Seville or something similar, I couldn’t stop playing with the windows. Drove 'em nuts. Mom and Dad got their first car with power windows in 1993; a new Mercury Sable.

By the way, even though I grew up in a working class neighborhood, there was always one family of early adopters – those who had the first color TV, video game, VCR, and so on. In my case, it was a family that had “connections” – they lived in a small house with a pool, a couple of Cadillacs in the driveway, and a lot of visitors named “Vito” and “Angelo,” who almost always drove Cadillacs too. Still, though, we were the first family on the block to get cable television, way back in 1973. 12 crystal clear channels, baby! We got it for our new color television – we were late to the color game, but when we finally made the plunge, it was a 25" Zenith Chromacolor, in a Colonial style console with Bicentennial eagles carved on the front. Instant on, too!
In 1982, when I was still in high school, I passed by a computer store on the way to the bus, when a miraculous new type of computer caught my eye – something called the Apple Lisa. I played with LisaWrite and LisaDraw for about a couple of hours, and ended up getting home way past suppertime. I still want a Lisa.

In 1990, I saw my first NeXTStation. I finally bought one last year, for $125 on eBay. :slight_smile:

FM radio in the car. Again, lower middle class parents, who didn’t have a car with an AM/FM radio as standard equipment until the late 1980s.

First thing I did when I bought my very first house was install dimmer switches in every room. My parents didn’t have dimmers growing up; just 1950s era light switches that made a loud snapping sound when switched on or off. Dimmer switches always impressed me as a kid. I’m still the same way; house #2, and I installed fancy-schmancy Lutron dimmers in four rooms so far, with more to go.

Push button telephones. Again, as a kid, I use a heavy black Western Electric phone, hard wired to the wall.

43

Back when I was a kid we had cable TV! Two (2) channels. When I went to visit relatives in the Big City who had 3 channels I was so envious. Didn’t have color TV for years. Despite my step-creep owning a TV store.

“Glass TTYs” were cool. No more yellow paper and punch tape. Bye-bye Model 33’s.

The Xerox Alto. But really it was the Ethernet cable into it that I knew was going to change things.

The early days of Usenet. Had to figure out the path to route your email and it might take a day but it got there using simple cooperative low tech. And news groups (before new.* sci.* etc.) that had no spam and virtually no flaming. (I sort of use this board as a replacement to the old Usenet.) Time to re-invent the wheel, but this time let’s go wireless!

I have been using the 'Net for many years, and was already browsing the WWW using Lynx (text-only) but when I ran Mosaic for the first time: “This also changes everything.”

And then there was the first time I burned a (data) CD. “I now know sin.” Years ago before most people had heard of CD writers. I looked at the CD, looked at the Ethernet connection which led to the Internet. The Future was obvious, wonderful and was going to scare the daylights out of certain businesses.

44

Fridges with ice dispensers in the door. That impressed me when I was a kid. We were the poorest (well, lower-middle-class, actually) family on a rather well-off street, so many of the neighbours had the latest toys.

Coloured appliances! Camping trailers! In-ground pools! All the pipes and pumps involved with a pool were fascinating to a five-year-old.

Then there was Colour TV! With big tall antennas so you could watch more than just the CBC!!

45

Banana seats and big handlebars on my bike.
skateboards with rubber wheels
Stereophonic sound
8 tracks
Color TV and Cable and Remote
Airconditioning in cars
Jumbo Jets
Holograms
Pop rocks
Hand held calculators
red LED display watches
My Commodore 64
My Apple IIc
VCR vs Betamax
Laser technology (disco & war)
Microwave
ATM
Cordless phones
Cell phones
Scanners in supermarkets reading prices
Digital camera and digital video cameras
Liquid crystal flat screen HDTV’s
Catscans/MRI
Satellitte telephone/tv transmission
Cloning
Hubbel telescope
and
Segway people mover

46

The wheel.

47

The Sega Master System. A world of arcade-quality games (c 1986) right in your own home. Destroyed Atari’s iron grip of the home console market for good.

A typewriter that could correct a mistake with a single push of a button.

A computer system where everything was in full, vibrant 16-color EGA (begone with that 4-color CGA garbage!) and most programs had actual speaker sound.

An e-mail server that put the words on-screen almost as fast as I typed (most of the time) and didn’t crash every 15 minutes.

Reliable cell phones. Now high-level businesspeople constantly on the go could get in touch with their clients wherever they wanted.

Air conditioners with digital thermostat settings.

The automatic seat belt.

Bowling alleys that automatically keep score for you.

How far we’ve come, indeed.

48

I remember getting orgasmic over the first 3D computer graphics ever published. I taped everything I could, and watched it again and again, frame by frame. Altogether only a few seconds or minutes were produced each year. I remember one where an orange sphere bounced on a reflective surface. Ooooooh!

Having a beta video recorder to record it on was pretty cool too. Man that think was big.

Then a few years later my Dad got me a TRS-80 model I. No floppy drive. Hard drives were a dream. 4K of RAM. I could get the thing to do animated 3D graphics, at 1-bit-per-pixel, 128x48 resolution. Woo-hoo!

49

Some of you are aging yourselves! :wink:

Elmwood, I’m glad you mentioned the Apple Lisa. I was planning on mentioning that, and saw your post. :slight_smile: I’ll get to that in a bit.

The Apple ][+. Every summer beginning in 1982, my father used to bring one home from the school where he taught. I taught myself BASIC and would program my little fingers off - nothing spectacular, but that (and piano lessons - manual dexterity) taught me to type. (I’m now at 100 wpm.) The kids at school would make fun of me and call me a geek, but ::ahem:: look where we’ve come. I now work in the computer industry, though not as a programmer.

Dialing into a BBS for the first time. I felt so restricted with my Apple at home. A neighbor down the street was an Apple dealer and had all of the latest and greatest. The first time he dialed me into a BBS and I was in contact with other users “out there” - now this was what it was all about! :slight_smile:

The same Apple dealer introduced me to the Lisa. I remember playing around with it in his living room, not quite getting it, after years of doing nothing but typing on a green-and-black screen. But it was my first taste of a GUI, even though the GUI had been developed at least 10 years earlier at Xerox (a company, that, interestingly, I went on to work for as a graphic designer).

A year later, my Dad stopped bringing home an Apple ][ and starting bringing home a Mac 128K. I’d do horrible drawings in MacPaint and print them out on the ImageWriter, but at least I could write stories in MacWrite. The pain was switching between system (boot) disks and storage disks, since there was no hard drive on at least this Mac.

Dial-up and email. It was only in 1992 that I discovered these when one of my professors gave some written instructions into dialing into the university’s then-crappy email client, and using the InfoMcGill bulletin board for what not. I found my second apartment through InfoMcGill.

IRC. I discovered that about a year later. I was hooked. I showed one friend, who showed another, and so on. It was nothing like using mIRC today - it was all commands (I still prefer to use commands rather than buttons - matter of habit) and monochrome. It then opened me up to a whole new world of meeting other guys, and indirectly led to the breakup of my second relationship.

Windows 95. Not to defend Micro$not, but to have an actual drag-and-drop GUI on a PC changed things a lot for me. (I hated Win 3.1.) Soon thereafter, I got my first post-university job as a graphic designer (see above) and learned all of the major apps inside-out.

The Web. Porn on demand. 'Nuff said. :eek:

MIDI music sequencing. With nothing but an external peripheral, software, some cables, and a keyboard, I was finally able to realize the fully-orchestrated music I would hear in my head but could never express beyond just me and a piano.

I won’t get into cell phones, pagers, and the lot, because I quite frankly don’t care for them.

I now work in the field of digital video editing, which has revolutionized the way filmmakers and editors let us see things, from CGI designers, to your average wedding videographer. The apps I work with now make MacPaint look like an Etch-n-Sketch. :wink:

I love the fact that my nieces & nephew accept computers as a way of life, and send me e-cards on my birthday. :slight_smile:

So I guess the geek they all made fun of made good after all. :slight_smile:

  • s.e.