Thu 20 Aug 2009
What technology, when first introduced, was your “wow!” moment? Email? CDs? Horseless carriage?
Posted by starman10 answers so far!
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I think it was the Internet. I was fourteen or fifteen, and spent the night at a friend’s house; that evening we looked at some stuff on the web, and he did some gophering, and then he showed me LambdaMOO. And I stayed up all night exploring and talking to people in different parts of the world; it was a deep, snagging hook in my mind.
I had a less self-aware wow with video games. They definitely grabbed me and blew me away, but the line between “technology” and “toy” was blurry enough to my pre-pubescent brain that I wasn’t totally aware of just what I was experiencing.
PDAs and MP3 players and laptop computers for me. Oh, and graduating from my NES directly to a PS2.
In middle school I was quite impressed with my friend’s 386 with VGA graphics. I think he showed me some bulletin boards and a couple games (Jones in the Fast Lane?). From there I kept checking the want ads for computers and drooled over 386s and 486s in PC catalogs. I also made it my quest to figure out DOS.
Then when I was BBSing on my own, I called a board that had some sort of chat room — not sure how it worked — but there was someone from Canada online and I was excited to be typing with someone from so far away.
For me a big one was Hypercard, a Mac application/programming environment that was one of the precursors to hyperlinked web documents. When this came out in the ’80s it was a paradigm shift to me, accustomed to getting computers to do things one step at a time and mostly in a linear fashion. And what really got me excited was that it was easy enough for non-programmers to create information flows that branched in as many ways as they wanted. In a way it was surprising that nothing like that ever got legs on the PC side.
who was mata sundri?
computer can do everything but not like a human because it is a techniqual machine may be wrong or right but a human can do work correctly .
Believe it or not, the iPhone. It was like using a computer again for the first time. I dropped out of my Ph.D. to write software for it! :) Also — of course — my first exposure to the infamous parveen synthetic decision machine.
The internet, definitely. I was working in the Psychology department office at my university, where the floppy-boot computers were used for Word Perfect (DOS, of course) and the tetris and mah jong games somebody had snuck on them. One afternoon I had nothing to do and noticed an icon called “Pegasus Newsreader” and clicked it to see what it did.
It probably took me about 5 minutes to get out of the local university boards and onto some real USENET groups, and a couple minutes more to figure out what I was looking at and that these were real people in other places. And I’m sure time has added extra layers of TA DA! to the memory of that moment, but I did understand right then that this was huge.
Later that week, a student was in the office to pick something up and mentioned the local newsgroups, and after a couple of minutes’ conversation he said, “You know you can go over to the Computing Services building and get an account in like 5 minutes, right?” So I did that about half an hour later, and left with a piece of paper with my credentials and a floppy with Procomm+ on it. It changed everything, and I still get seasick with nostalgia when I hear something that reminds me of the chunky click of paging down in pine or tin over that fat 2400 connection.
1) Getting a 300-baud modem and dialing up to a BBS
2) Seeing AOL on a friend’s machine after being computer-less for three or so years
3) Napster
4) realizing that MeFi existed (…minus the ass-kissing in this answer; I always knew computers were useful for ass-kissing)
The internet didn’t impressed me very much, cause I needed in school, but I was amazed by iphones and the ways they work..