The internet. We blew passed the all knowing computer on Star Trek when nobody was looking. When I was a kid we went to the library if we wanted to look something up and the information available was limited to the finite size of the building. There will never be a building large enough to hold the written or visual information available on the internet.
Actually Jerry Pournelle makes the same comment about his iPhone. I read his blog.
I never thought I’d see face recognition, body detection and isolation from surroundings (Kinect) in a system people can afford at home. I also never expected voice recognition to really work.
I’m still amazed at how little space it takes to store so much data. My parents have a very large hard disk platter somewhere in their garage, that came out of a washing-machine style drive sometime around the time of my birth. It’s the size of a dinner plate, and Dad says he thinks it’s a 5MB platter.
Years ago, I finally let go of a Western Digital IDE hard drive that had worked perfectly well for 13 years, because it was only 545MB – smaller than the capacity of a burnable CD blank, and no longer big enough to hold my OS with all its swap files.
Now, I have a flashdrive hanging from my house keys that stores 4GB in a small plastic doodad that is exactly big enough for a standard USB connector. If more computers used microUSB as a standard plug, I’d be in danger of accidentally inhaling my files.
The ubiquitous internet is kind of mind-blowing as well. I can grok WiFi well enough, but the whole 3G deal was more than expected. Building the network required cooperation that I frankly didn’t think we’d ever get from telecommunications carriers again. I was knee-high to a grasshopper when Ma Bell split up; I just barely remember the actual Bell Telephone logo being on things, and I was vaguely cognizant when USWest handed operations over to Qwest.
The biggest one is probably not just the internet as a whole, but things like Wikipedia. The greatest idea underpinning the project is that people who legitimately want to build a collective reference base will vastly outnumber the stinkers who think their calling in life is to vandalize everything they touch. Looking back over the history of the human race, relying on people’s competence and community spirit seems like a terrible plan, but damned if it didn’t pretty much work.
I’m also pretty amazed at privatized space flight. I lived through the tail end of the Cold War. The Soviet Union imploded when I was not quite in junior high. I don’t think anyone thought we’d stop building huge explode-y things just because we weren’t aiming them at the Russians anymore; they just figured we’d lob them straight up and conquer Mars.
China; I only saw a very small area but it was more than I ever thought I’s see.
VCRs. DVDs. The ability to tape, rent, or buy any movie. Back in caveman days, if you were a film lover, you would have to wait for a movie you wanted to see to show up on TV. If you wanted to see a ‘foreign’ film, or a ‘cult film’, you would have to look in the paper and see if any were being shown up at the university, and take two buses to get there. Then along came cable, and you were pleased to be able to look forward to weekly ‘classics’ night. (I saw the Russian version of War and Peace, with sub-titles - absolutely awesome, as was Alexander Nevsky, and many others, famous and obscure). We had always heard about Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis - and these movies were actually shown on cable TV without commercials! Now you can rent, buy, record, stream, whatever way, any movie you can think of.
As one who took the bus up to the university to see the Marx Brothers, or a night of Busby Berkely, I consider this a wonder.
Like several others in this thread have mentioned, the peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union utterly dumbfounded me. Also, the Berlin Wall coming down! I felt very privileged to witness these events (on the news, that is).
The September 11, 2001 attacks were also a big shock!
I actually thought that I would see a black president within my lifetime (I was born in 1960), but, like another poster mentioned, I thought that a woman would be elected president before a non-white would.
Another thing that astounds me daily is the wealth of information available via the interwebs! And that you can access it via devices as small as smartphones…
I have a 3GS iphone. It’s not a 4G or whatever is currently available these days.
It blows my mind that this unassuming little device lying here on the couch next to me has infinitely more computing power than my first compaq computer did in 1993. That one had four megs. Anybody know how much there is in an iphone?
Broadcast digital audio, much less video. The whole notion of data compression was off my radar, and I confidently predicted that OTA broadcasting would stay analog virtually forever, due to the limited spectrum available. Now I can stream a digital feed from a distant radio station via 3G wireless…there is enough spectrum that every one listening has their own virtual channel, and digital television squeezes 2-3 digital channels into the bandwidth it took for a single analog one.
Like many others here, I used to work with those on a daily basis. This is a 300MB disc pack in its dust case. (that is not me). Less than half of what fits on a CD. Try hanging that around your neck.
This is the drive it went into, that’s the disc inside: 11 copper platters, 12 inches in diameter. These were in their own, climate-controlled room. You don’t want to know what a crash was like.
Modern data storage is crazy cheap and convenient.
I kinda do – the platter was in Dad’s possession in the first place because it was rendered useless for storing data by a head crash. There was a nice obvious swath cut right through the magnetic coating all the way around. I assume that the noise it made when it failed was phenomenal.
When I was in high school, Borders was just taking off and I absolutely loved the environment they were creating for a bibliophile like myself.
I never would have thought that in 20 years they would be gone. It’s really sad now seeing all these shopping centers where the huge hub that everything was built around become just an empty shell.
I never thought I’d see an iPad with a Retina display. (and I don’t think I’ll see a MacBook with one)
The Internet - all this information and entertainment and knowledge to be had, essentially FREE. And that it happened without anyone having much chance to censor it at all.
Oh, and the modern advances in surgery, even to where they can get the nearly blind to see again.
Tomorrow they could well announce that they’ve just figured out how stem cells work, and so many diseases will suddenly become yesterday’s bad dream. We probably ain’t seen nuthin’, yet.
Widely circulated pic of an IBM 5MB disc drive from 1956, when I was 3 years old. I’ve probably got more RAM in my programmable thermostat these days.
Ah yes, here in 1728 it’s like living in the future.
Cutting edge, so to speak.
It is, but it’s lonely. I miss the people I used to ride the buses with to go see the ones do the thing.
You live in hell? And you get televised sports there? Now** that’s** something I never thought I’d see!
It is. I used to work in a shop with an IBM 360/40. It was in the basement. I was the first one to work one day and when the elevator door opened, I thought a fire alarm was going off. Loud, piercing, squealing noise. I opened the door to the computer room and there was a neat arc of metal around the drive that had crashed.