You must have gone to the old Fry’s on Mission. They moved to Auto Mall near 680, and the new location is much bigger.
You people are so young. 
Somewhere around 1992 I took a Sun clone home over Christmas. This was called a luggable - you could move it easily, but it was still a bit heavy. It had a fairly large disk, maybe a Gig, which I figured was more disk than the entire world had in 1964. Running our ATPG program at home was pretty cool.
Playing SpaceWar, the first Atari game (before Pong) was pretty fun. Seeing it on the PDP 1 was even better.
Pretty recently actually. I could probably come up with the same experiences that every other poster here has described, but in all fairness that would have been when I was a babe swaddled in electrons and not knowing any better.
Every thing that was coming down the pike in that magical age was gee whiz and I was awe struck as were many. But now time has passed and I think I can honestly say this is when we truly discover our information age moments.
So my two most recent examples.
For those of you with the Iphone and other smart/blackberry phones , we now have mostly data packages that allow us to connect anywhere. No more need of T10/100 cables , no hotspots.
I was on the beach recently just watching one of our last few nice weekends go by and sitting at a picnic table reading the dope or hofo depending, thinking to myself this is what its going to be about, anytime , anywhere.
The second was just a couple of days ago , I was doing something on facebook at lunch , and one of my bosses who is on the list casually asked exactly how I was able to do this , as I am not authorized to use a workstation, I have no access name / password, and lastly , facebook is one of the blocked sites with the companys nanny ware.
So out comes the Ipaq and lo and behold , my boss has an epiphany that the companys IT policys are now left in the dust, since I was using it at lunch , the most that HR could have nailed me for is creating a hostile work enviroment by viewing porn, the modern day equivalent to having a pin up girl on your locker or tool box.
Most enlightning 
Declan
No, I recall it as a maze game, with huge mazes, and I was supposed to move a dot (?) through the maze. Seems to me it was orange on a black screen, but that was a lot of years and a lot of chemicals ago, so no doubt I’m wrong. 'Twas pretty amazing, regardless.
My profound information age moment:
Standing on the bridge wing of a ship about a mile off a particular port in a Australia, phoning a guy in that port on his landline, connecting to him, discussing the situation with him and saying to him that I’d drop in and discuss the situation with him in his office in an hour or two when we got into port and having him say:
“no you won’t”
“oh, you busy?”
“Well, I’m in Germany. I’m on holiday. I’m driving down an autobahn.”
Being somewhere totally disconnected from civilisation and dialling a simple number and being able to speak to someone on the other side of the world driving a car, all so smoothly you don’t even know it’s going on is pretty damn cool.
I’ve heard you can get that from the App store now.
For me it was, realizing that having my elcheapo cellphone, iPod Shuffle and an umpteen gig flash drive (I think it was a four gigger) in my pocket meant that I had more computing power and data storage in my pants than they had on the Apollo missions and that the total cost of this was less than $200!
I teared up a little at the Cavalcade of Information Advances in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFfdnFOiXUU video about all the stuff Bell Labs has come up with over the decades. Somebody linked it in the “We Didn’t Start the Fire” thread. I don’t know, I found it touching and awe inspiring even though it’s them tooting their own horns. I’m such a dork.
I was in the Math office at my high school, fairly early in my freshman year. As I walked through, I heard quite a noise from one corner, and saw an upperclassman I knew sitting at a Teletype brand teletypewriter, with a continuous roll of yellow paper coming out of the top. A dial telephone was sitting next to the Teletype, and the handset was nestled into a couple of rubber cups on the front panel of the machine.
I looked over his shoulder and saw the Teletype print out a picture of the Enterprise, in Ascii art. Right after the picture, the machine asked the guy for his move. What??? He was playing a Star Trek game? On a computer??
It was 1971, and the dial-up connection ran at 110 baud. That’s 10 Ascii charcters per second. If you got into a large printout, the machine would shake hard enough to knock the phone loose from the acoustic coupler, severing the connection.
I was hooked.
I’ll admit I have said the word “kew-well” out loud when…
[ul]
[li]PacMan–the game machine you sat down at–arrived in arcades.[/li][li]Pong was given to my brother and me by our parents for Christmas. [/li][li]I used my first word processor, an AES something or other. It used a 12"x12" floppy disk, which was positively whittled down to 5 1/4", then 3 1/2", then WHOA! CD-ROMs and CD-RWs, et cetera.[/li][li]I saw a client carrying his cell phone into a meeting. It was in a suitcase and probably weighed 5 pounds.[/li][li]my husband came home with one of the earliest cordless cell phones. It was 6" wide at the mouthpiece, about 8" long, and weighed at least a pound. I said 'kew-well" twice as loud when I got my own because it was half the size and weight of his.[/li][li]while managing a retail music store and:[/li][li]the first Sony Walkmans arrived in shipments ordered by head office for all outlets. The boombox had shrunk to 6"x 1"![/li][li]the first compact discs arrived in shipments. We were a bit horrified that new releases were being priced at $25 and upwards, and completely peeved with the clunky security packaging and ill-thought displays sent by H.O.[/li]
[li]and getting a new point-of-sale machine with inventory tracking capability. Mon Dieu, c’est impossible! Mais pas, ici il est!. [/li][li]I fired up my own $2000-plus 486k IBM PC with a 9" CRT monitor and dot matrix printer. I was blissed out that it could run Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards without too much bogging on screen changes. You Don’t Know Jack featured prominently, too.[/li][li]telemetrics came on PDAs! Very Mission: Impossible stuff. [/li][li]and yeah, the pee-ohh-arr-enn thing.[/li][/ul]
Lotus 1-2-3 (v 1.something). I could put a whole 100+ column Public Accounts spreadsheet into it and it would calculate all the totals and subtotals for me. And if I had to change anything, I didn’t have to erase two dozen different figures and recalculate it all! No more table-top size paper spreadsheet pages ever again.
Holy crap, I think I just had my moment.
Behold the power in Tuckerfan’s pants!
In no chronological order:
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The first colour printer and the first hard drive I saw in operation, both in my primary school, both of which I helped set up (a perk of being the headteacher’s son :), he was keen to do the job himself). I remember that the printer cost something like £600, in 1980s money.
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Sending my first email, in 1995. And being annoyed that the recipient was so rude in taking ages to respond
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Working out how to produce bold and italic text on the rather basic DOS-based word processor available on the school computers, pre-Windows 3.x. Even though it was pretty much identical to how we do this and this, it mystified all the staff, including the IT technicians, and earned me a lot of good marks I didn’t really deserve. Sadly, I was foolish enough to tell a couple of people how it worked. I never told them about the spellcheck, though…
Watching Reading Rainbow when I was 7 or 8 and seeing a professional illustrator use (what was then) a state of the art whatever-it-was-called precursor to the Wacom tablet. He drew a dragon and then changed the colors of the eyes. Holy. crap. I had a drawing program called Splash that I loved, but it was, of course, nothing compared to the professional stuff they were showing–and he had a PEN that he was using ON THE COMPUTER.
It was a very important moment for me. I dragged my mother into the room to show her and declared that I would buy one of those and do that when I grew up.
Now, I do that. My husband bought me a Wacom tablet in 2003. I love it dearly and use it in Photoshop regularly.
The second time was in my entire first week of college when they showed us Illustrator and Director. Heaven.
Egads…I feel old.
When I wired up my first application on an IBM 407 accounting machine and it ran correctly…
When I successfully compiled and executed my first Fortran program on the CDC 6600, which at that time was the world’s biggest supercomputer.
Adventure.
The Commodore 64.
And now my laptop, which has boocoo more computing power than the 6600 ever dreamed of.
Yes, I am a computer weenie, through and through.
Sometime around 1997, I had a puzzle ring I needed to re-assemble. I searched for instructions online. When I found them, I knew all information was available on the internet.
In junior high school in 1990 or 1991, I played a Star Trek-based video game on my school’s Macintosh LAN. Very cool.
Oh man, there’ve been a few:
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VisiCalc! Way back in the early 80’s when I worked at Atari, a co-worker in accounting showed me how to work it. I was absolutely amazed. Even more amazed - eventually - at Lotus 123 and Excel.
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Back in the spring of 1993 when my soon-to-be husband was off on business in Singapore and we corresponded via email. I was so jazzed over this new tool that allowed me and the sweetie to sleep regular hours and still communicate easily and quickly. Heh. And the “PC” I used? A Sun SparcStation!
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Wireless internet access just ROCKS. I can sit on the bow of our sailboat in the harbor and surf the web, do work (eww), look at porn, you name it.
My first thumb drive – having thirty times the storage capacity of my first (enormous) computer ON MY KEY CHAIN.
Computer Camp–Summer 1983. We learned basic on a Commodore VIC 20 with a cassette tape as the memory. That fall, my girl scout troup went to SUNY Potsdam to see their computer, which filled an entire room.
A videogame system, much like Pong, from the late 1970s, that my grandparents bought so we could play at their house. Basketball, tennis and squash were pretty much the same game back then. Now, I’m taken aback when I see a videogame commercial that I briefly think is a movie trailer.
They’re not profound, but they remind me how far we’ve come.
If the rate of advancement we’ve witnessed in the information age isn’t profound, I don’t know what is.
Microsoft Mouse tutorial, circa Windows 3.0. Double-clicking made a basketball GO THROUGH THE HOOP! OG’S HOLY TROUSERS!
Runners up: ICQ and Napster.