CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2024-12-04, 14:50:

Internet and getting 3dfx Voodoo 1 came to my mind, although there are probably many more.

First is quite obvious, it felt so different from BBSs and it simply felt that I had the whole world available on my desktop.

First games I played with V1 felt absolutely amazing. It looked so much better than the earlier and much hyped 3D capabilites of Saturn and PS1 could offer. Those were low res and in most cases didn’t look much different from PC software renderer, but Voodoo could deliver everything smoothly at 640x480 and it did that with pretty much full 3D feature set (for the time) unlike the consoles released couple of years later. I had seen screenshots of GLQuake, Tomb Rider etc, but witnessing those graphics in person was truly something else.

My voodoo 1 experience was quite different. "smooth" was far from what I would describe it. I remember low framerates and stuttering, lots of it. First time I saw a voodoo 1 card running a game I was not impressed. Probably because it was a pretty awkward combination of hardware... or because by the time I saw an actual voodoo card they'd been out for a while - in fact the voodoo 2 was out and on sale, and so was the Riva TNT as well as other early but capable and fully fledged 3D accelerators. I remember reading about them in tech magazines.

The first game I saw running on a voodoo 1 was a Quake 2 demo. It was chunky and stuttery, but did indeed look better then the software render. It ran much faster on my mate's PC (266MHz pentium II, 32MB of ram, 2GB HDD, some ATi 2D card and a Voodoo 1) then it did on mine (133MHz 586), but it was not smooth. It was however quite playable - no - enjoyable on my mate's PC. The demo ran on my machine as well, but it was a slideshow.

The second time I got to play around with 3D accelerated graphics was when I got my K6-II. The on board Blade 3D was slow but capable. Quake 2 ran very well @ 512x340. It could push 800x600, but it was not enjoyable. 640x480 was OK. Not nearly as smooth as 512x340, but looked way better, so most of the time I played on that resolution. Later that year I got a second hand Voodoo 2 (faster video cards were out, but my machine lacked an AGP slot and most PCI cards like the TNT2 M64 were prohibitively expensive) - now that - was quite smooth. Quake 1, 2, Dungeon Keeper, Homeworld - that was my eye opener moment. A whole new world opened up for me, I've never experienced that kind of moment again. I was late to the game, by the time I got my V2 the Geforce 256 was allready out and the Geforce 2 was right around the corner, but I was still very impressed by what an already outdated V2 could do.

Namrok wrote on 2024-12-04, 19:02:

I was a little young for the first Doom to feel like "the future". I just took it for granted that Doom was just how awesome co […]
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I was a little young for the first Doom to feel like "the future". I just took it for granted that Doom was just how awesome computers were when my nerdy friend down the street wanted to show off to the Nintendo Kid I used to be. Even when I got my first 3d card and played Dark Forces 2 on Christmas 1997, a part of me took it for granted. I'd been reading about 3d cards in Computer Gaming World for months, although I didn't entirely understand them. The incremental upgrades through my highschool and college years also never really blew me away. Constant progress seemed natural. And then...

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-12-04, 06:59:

* Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT

I can run everything at max settings and I'll never have to upgrade my video card again. It already supports pixel shaders 3.0, so there aren't any new features I'll need to worry about in the future. It's a single slot card (why would anyone want a dual slot graphics card anyways) and is AGP, because who cares about PCIe. AGP is plenty fast enough.

I dumped a good chunk of summer intern money into an Athlon 64, Geforce 6800 GT computer, all to play Doom 3 when it came out. To this day, Doom 3's lighting model is among my favorite pre-RTX lighting models. I know Carmack was so fucking proud of using a unified lighting model, and dispatching with a lot of the raster tricks most game used, and still use, to this day. I don't actually know how true that last statement is, but it's what I believed at the time.

I remember when the RTX 3000 series came out, there were some remarks on I think Gamers Nexus that there hadn't been a generational leap in performance, either absolutely or in terms of price to performance ratio, since the Geforce 6800 in 2004. Then.... things happened.... and whatever value proposition the RTX 3000 series represented quickly evaporated. Still it was amusing seeing someone go all the way back to the Geforce 6800, a personal high point for me.

The only other time I thought to myself "We live in the future" is when RTX rolled out, and especially after RTX got good. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 in it's fully path traced mode on a "mid range" RTX 4070 Super at 60-100 FPS is astounding. And the realism of it's global illumination system takes me all the way back to my admiration for Doom 3 and it's "unified lighting model".

I had a similar experience when I got my first high end video card - a Geforce 7950 GT. I still remember the day I got it. Huge package, with a flap / lid that would flip over to reveal more advertising and a clear plastic window you could see the card trough. It was a BFG 7950 GT OC 512MB.

Many of mine are similar to other peoples.

Sitting behind my very first computer, the TI-99/4A. It was 1981, and a young me and family were attending a reunion being hosted by my uncle, who worked for McDonnell Douglass at the time. In his basement, he had the brand new TI machine setup and running in his home shop. I spent all 3 days on that machine. It truly felt like the future was in my hands, especially adding the speech synthesizer! I could make it sound just like War Games!

Seeing "Doom" for the first time. First person 3D games existed before it, but none of them looked or felt like Doom. The visuals, the sounds, everything about it was just amazing for the time.

"War Dialing", also as depicted in the film War Games, felt like the future when I tried it for the first time on my TI machine, and later on my C64.

For a long time, nothing really felt like the future to me. I mean, things got faster, storage got bigger, and games stated looking better and better. It all seemed natural. Honestly, while not very retro, the two most recent technologies that gave me those future tingles came in the form of video games. One was the Forstbite Engine and real-time Ray Tracing. Ray Tracing has been around a while, but hardware finally got to the point it could be done, in real time, on consumer hardware, and I think that's pretty cool. Prior to that, Seeing what the Forstbite Engine could do, seeing it in action in Battlefield games like Bad Company and BF3. For me, this was more evident in BF3 with it's massively huge open maps. Games has big maps prior to this of course, but I had never seen it on that scale and with that level of destructible and reactive environments.

I'm sure there are more, but those are the ones that come to mind at the moment.

* IBM PC/AT clones. There were 8-bit computers with floppy drives for storage before that, sure, but it was the PC with HDD and 386 CPU that made the difference. I always wanted something more from "personal computers" than just tons of similar looking dexterity based games.
* Modems and BBSes. Suddenly there were computers, plural, and access to so much knowledge. And software too I guess 😀 Also FIDO.
* Sound cards. The moment I saw X-Wing intro with sound I knew I have to have one of those. The combination of sound card, DOTT intro and me laughing made the annoyed household demand I move the PC out of the living room. Which I gladly did.
* Ultima Underworld. While I enjoy modern games, the early 3D didn't really make much of an impression on me. Sure I played Doom with friends over the RS232 link but it was UU that made me realize what games could be, even with its engine limitations. I suppose I saw many early 3D games, and the PS1, as just another gimmick for dexterity games. I changed my mind with Metal Gear Solid but that was much later.
* Windows 95. The GUI and all the apps. And DirectX. I'm not a big fan of M$ and I use Linux more and more, but credit where it's due. Win95 was the first "proper" PC OS for masses.

Honourable mentions: Linux - for being the alternative. I have little experience with BSD and frankly Linux experience back in Windows 95/98 era was so-so at best. But I used it as free and stable OS for networked machines and always figured it would fare much better if the GUI was less quirky and the HW support was better. Well, nowdays it is and I use it more and more in desktop mode.
System Shock 2 - I've played many games and quite a few left an impression. But it was SS2 and it's style of gameplay and story-telling that many have later copied, with great success too. SS2 also supported EAX on my SB128 card and I still remember that experience using headphones.
And lastly, flat screens. Which is funny considering how I long I sticked with CRT due to early LCDs being trash, but from the very moment these popped up I knew it's the future. It just needs time to improve. I still like CRTs a lot but I really wouldn't want to use one as a daily driver.

Okay, my list, in no specific order:
- iPhone. The combination of Internet + portability + GPS + etc. And reliability much, much higher than any other general purpose computer I'd ever touched. Just astonishing.
- Retina display and all the software magic surrounding it. I have had retina displays on iPhone, iPad, various flavours of Macs, etc. Always mind-blowing, even now, 14 years after my first retina display device.
- Facebook (or LinkedIn but it came later). And I will put Facebook on this list for one simple reason: because they solved the problem of keeping in touch with people. If I am friends on Facebook with someone I went to school with 20 years ago, I can msg them on Facebook Messenger and I don't need to know their current phone number or what city they live in or their current email address or whether they are one of fifty people with the same name. A few years ago I found a contact list that had been distributed at my high school graduation - people's parents' land line phone numbers and their email addresses circa 2001, many of which were ISP email addresses. Completely useless in 2024, probably half useless two years after it was handed out, if not earlier. Facebook solved that.
- digital photography. Being able to take pictures, view them immediately on a little screen, being able to take as many as your battery/memory card would let you, not having to spend money on film/processing/etc only to find that 80% of your photos were garbage because your elcheapo 35mm camera was just too elcheapo, etc.
- networked time. This is a subtle one, but 30 years ago, you had to set the clock on your devices individually, perhaps using a radio or telephone clock or TV as a reference signal, you never got it just right, your devices lost time at different rates, etc.
- modern map services - Google Maps, MapQuest, etc. I remember when you went down to the CAA (AAA for our friends south of the border) before a trip to get some current paper maps, and you spread them out all over the back seat to tell your parents where to go.
- Google Street View. Being able to see what a particular place looks like, what the road signs are like, etc before you go there.
- instant messaging, of the ICQ/MSNM/AIM/etc flavour.

I would be tempted to add the Internet/packet-switched networking, but I think I was too young to have the full jawdropping experience. My parents though, with decades of experience paying phone companies, were just blown away that you could access stuff overseas at no extra cost. Or that you could do two things at once.

And the other thing I am a bit conflicted about is CD-ROM, mostly because... well... the excitement over CD-ROM was so short-lived.

In terms of smaller but still kinda earth shattering improvements:
- SSDs
- Windows 2000. First OS that didn't need reboots every couple of days, if not earlier.
- this isn't really computing, but I'll include it anyways - high definition TV. It is just... astounding... how bad the picture quality on SD NTSC was, yet we lived with it for decades.
- GPON fiber home Internet
- smartwatch
- affordable home-grade laser printers

Then I would add potentially insignificant things that still blew my mind, e.g.
- a sound card that let you hear inbound ICQ/AIM sounds while playing music
- good quality monitors
- the sound effects on an SB Audigy, like the gender bender and the different room settings
- Microsoft Exchange email

Now, I never really felt it at the time, but looking back with the benefit of my 40+ years in this world, I think the most significant thing is how almost everything became 1s and 0s that can be transmitted over IP, how Moore's law (effectively) caused an absolutely insane drop in the price of moving those 1s and 0s via IP, and how that led to massive shifts in how people communicate, how they access information, how devices became much more generalist, etc. TV, movies, home video (VHS/DVD), photography, telephony, books, maps, travel agents, mail, cheques, etc - entire industries really just turned into 1s and 0s sent via IP at absurdly low costs. Just think about how many of those things would have been sold by different stores in a mall and today, you can just do what you would have done/bought in those stores from anywhere with your IP-enabled LTE/5G smartphone. And also things that people never managed to make mainstream, e.g. a videophone - today that vision exists, at low-cost, on generic all-purpose hardware.

Thirty years ago, you wanted to send a photo to your grandmother, you went to the store, bought film, put it in your camera, took the photos, went back to the store, dropped the film for processing, came back to the store, picked up your prints, went to the post office, got an envelope and a stamp, put the photo in it, and mailed it. Depending on how fast the photos got processed and how far away your grandmother lives, you're looking at a month-long process. And some significant costs, plus 3 trips to the photo store plus one trip to the post office. Today, take the picture on your smartphone, hit the 'send to' button, pick your grandmother, and unless she lives in North Korea or something, 10 seconds later, the photo turns up on her smartphone and she can do all kinds of things with it. Including, say, being a proud grandma who sends the photo to all her friends!

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-04, 23:51:

- iPhone. The combination of Internet + portability + GPS + etc. And reliability much, much higher than any other general purpose computer I'd ever touched. Just astonishing.

To be honest, the iPhone did not impress me, I was already able to do everything the iPhone could do with a Windows Mobile PDA with built in GPS and a bluetooth modem connection to a Motorola Razr in my pocket. Neither were very large and if they shared a battery the volume and weight would have been about the same as the iPhone. I had these second hand too, it was maybe 2004 you could do what an iPhone could.

1996, Dial up Internet. I couldn't believe I was accessing stuff from all over the world!
1999, Need for Speed 3 was my "graphics can't get any better than this" moment. It was one of the first games I saw on my new P2 with a TNT graphics card, previously I was still on a 486 so quite the jump.

Thing's like optimal media were all very si-fi but kind of boring as well, much like electric cars today. Looked good in the movies but kind of bland IRL

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-12-05, 01:16:

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-04, 23:51:

- iPhone. The combination of Internet + portability + GPS + etc. And reliability much, much higher than any other general purpose computer I'd ever touched. Just astonishing.

To be honest, the iPhone did not impress me, I was already able to do everything the iPhone could do with a Windows Mobile PDA with built in GPS and a bluetooth modem connection to a Motorola Razr in my pocket. Neither were very large and if they shared a battery the volume and weight would have been about the same as the iPhone. I had these second hand too, it was maybe 2004 you could do what an iPhone could.

Sure, but... that was multiple devices, the data plan might have cost a crazy amount of money, the amount of third party software was low, and if it was anything like the BlackBerry I had in 2009, the thing needed battery pulls every day or two because the software was about as reliable as the classic Mac OS.

The whole iPhone package, in my opinion, was extremely impressive. Simple, reliable, put together some things that had not been put together before, got rid of a lot of carrier BS, and then within a few years, the apps. Now, my first iPhone was the 4, my dad had a 3G though.

I had a friend who had iPaqs and the like, Windows Mobile. A BlackBerry for a while. Sneered at the iPhone until he grumblingly got one due to the apps. I forget if it was a 4 or a 4s or which model. But within a week or two he went from hating the idea of the iPhone to a huge evangelist.

VR completely blew my mind when I got into it in 2020. I'd been waiting for VR to make a real entrance since I tried the Forte VFX1 and Virtuality in the '90s. The initial awestruck brain tickle feeling wore off a bit after a few months but I am still stunned by the immersion often enough.

Prior to that I think 3D graphics, probably specifically Nintendo 64, Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64. I was obsessed with that console in 1996. Of course then the Verite and Voodoo came in and I was mesmerized by the way games were changing with the new CPU and GPU power.

The development of the internet was exciting too of course. From nothing, to BBS, to Prodigy/AOL and then to the WWW in '94.

For me there've been a few moments over the years when I realized that things
had changed (usually for the better):

Keep in mind that I've always been keenly interested in technical things, was
constantly building various gadgets from quite and early age - as a kid I did things like:
- Wired forest behind my house with homemade phones (you could call tree to tree)
- Built two-way radios so my best friend and I could communicate "cross village"
- Built an analog computer (that kinda worked!)

Early 70s: 1st year at University of New Brunswick - "met" their IBM 360
mainframe - I'd never seem a digital (stored program) computer before - I
know if it could be made "home sized" it would change things.

A year or two later, built my own 8080 based system. Used automatic real-to-real
tape drives decommissioned from a UNB language lab - Included tape Load and Save
operations in the 8080 monitor/debugger I created which was the main way I used it
- This was the very beginning of a life long career in low-level software development.

Mid70s: Mits came out with the "Altair" a (built it yourself) personnel computer
kit - now "off the shelf" home sized systems were starting to be available.

Late70s: Actually got an Altair - the same year I added a NorthStar floppy disk
system (whopping 90k SSSD - on full height SA-400 drives (one of the first 5.25"
systems) - Now I could write/run an actual disk based OS like the "big iron" did!

(somewhere along this time - saw a "TRS-80 home computer" at Radio-Shack
- now you could buy a ready-to-go home computer!)

Early 80s: Discovered the "C" language and realized it made it much easier to
write low-level code without having to focus on and keep track of a myriad of
"little details" - almost all of my work to date had been in .ASM

Mid80s: I had built a 6809 system (much more flexible and powerful then the
8080) - and decided to write my own C compiler - so I could more easily write
code for BOTH systems. - I eventually created my own company "DDS" and my
"Micro-C" compiler became by far my most popular software product.

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

Upgrading my computer from 256MB to 4GB (~3GB usable with Windows XP) and thinking that this was more memory than I'll ever know what to do with. And for a years after, this was true.

Nowadays for me, 8GB is anemic. 16GB is reasonable for casual use and web browsing. 32GB is comfortable for heavy workloads and games. 64GB leaves plenty of room to breathe. However, 128GB is my current minimum standard for my workstation, given the amount of multitasking and concurrent VMs I run nowadays. I'm now speccing 256GB configurations for some new home servers. Incredible.

I need SSDs storage to come down in price so that I can finally upgrade my NAS to all solid state. Another halving by next November would be wonderful. I'm planning on replacing my 8x 4TB HDD array to 12x 4TB SSDs with my next upgrade.

The general availability of affordable broadband and the inevitable death of dial up. IPv6. 64bit.

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-04, 23:51:

Thirty years ago, you wanted to send a photo to your grandmother, you went to the store, bought film, put it in your camera, took the photos, went back to the store, dropped the film for processing, came back to the store, picked up your prints, went to the post office, got an envelope and a stamp, put the photo in it, and mailed it. Depending on how fast the photos got processed and how far away your grandmother lives, you're looking at a month-long process. And some significant costs, plus 3 trips to the photo store plus one trip to the post office. Today, take the picture on your smartphone, hit the 'send to' button, pick your grandmother, and unless she lives in North Korea or something, 10 seconds later, the photo turns up on her smartphone and she can do all kinds of things with it. Including, say, being a proud grandma who sends the photo to all her friends!

sometimes i have to stop and remember such things were *only* 30 years ago and that in no way did the world feel old or slow back then, even though the internet/www was starting up in earnest. the differences between 1990 and 1999 are huge, i think more than any comparable decade in terms of global communications anyway

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-04, 23:51:

... Today, take the picture on your smartphone ... pick your grandmother ... 10 seconds later, the photo turns up on her smartphone ...

Today, your grandma (like everyone else) has a smartphone...

My kids grandma (my mother) never had a smartphone ... she only had a "personal computer" in her later years
(because I sent one to her), and never really got at all used to using it. Time change!

I don't think I can think of anyone I know today who doesn't have a smartphone and a computer.
(IMHO an excellent sign that "the future has arrived")

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

To me it was the early 2000s.
Windows 2K and then shortly after XP. Nice stable OS where you can also play games. It was a different feeling that Win9x.
Digital cameras (got my first one in 2002 I believe), it was nice to take pics and then save them on the PC.
DVD (superb picture quality, multiple audio tracks including the original language, playable on the PC)
Instant Messengers (started with ICQ, at some point moved to a multi-protocol messenger)

And in 2008 I could feel the dystopian future arriving 😒

• When I first visited arcades and friends that had mid 90s gaming consoles.
• My first PC with a 1.1 ghz duron integrated AGP videocard, windows ME and Dial Up connection. Up until then I only had a NES clone (got around '99) that could be considered a "computer", everything else was analog from the era my parents grew up in.
• When I finally got a PS2 and put aside both the NES clone and the VCR I had.
• Those first screenshoots of 7th gen games, like Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, GRID and CMR Dirt, also putting my hands on Sega Rally 3 with terrains deformation. I really thought photorealism was here.
• When I got my laptop with a Core 2 Duo with wich I started doing 3D modeling and rendering.
• When I got my first smarphone 12 years ago, a first gen Samsung Galaxy S.

Not much since then, but I plan to soon get my hand on an nVidia GPU and finally put to work CUDA and ML workloads.

USB-C. No more rotating the plug three times to get it to fit or fumbling futility in low light conditions or in the dark. I can't tell you how many times I had to turn on a light because I couldn't get my phone's Micro USB cable inserted in the dark to charge on the nightstand. Mini USB was a lot easier for this, for some reason. Does anyone remember Mini USB? I guess this event also includes "non-proprietary phone chargers" and subsequently "USB for charging", each as their own precursor milestone events.

I can confirm that the future has definitely arrived... What do you mean I bought the wrong cable? 😨

Likewise, fast charging (even though it's not healthy for the battery). Not having to wait hours for my phone to charge is the future. I'm still waiting for phone batteries that don't degrade over time. Or risk explosion when trying to replace them, because the manufacturer glued it in. Remember replaceable batteries, headphone jacks, and microSD expandable storage? Phones are truly dystopian.

Fun fact. My old Nokia phone with free Verizon-to-Verizon "minutes" would drain its battery while talking on it even while plugged in, which severely limited its use for this plan feature.

When I wanted to talk with my friend on the phone for hours, I would gather up all of the cell phones from my family and rotate through them until they had all drained before arriving back at my phone that had been sitting in its charger. Of course, it was only partially charged by that point.

They couldn't have fd that up worse, really

Deleting the u

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-12-04, 13:47:

Virtual Reality (circa 2016-2018) […]
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Virtual Reality (circa 2016-2018)

The arrival of 'modern' VR was the last time I felt I was seeing something truly revolutionary. To go from viewing a game on a computer screen, to feeling I was standing inside the game was incredible.

Unfortunately it's been marred by stagnation, in part due to the industry trying to carve out their own respective platforms (Facebook/Meta, PCVR and PSVR). I went all-in on the PCVR platform, but as content started petering out, I don't use VR much these days.

That said, the experience itself was incredible. I just want patiently for the day when the content catches up.

I agree with this. I can remember using my buddy's HTC Vive for the first time and was blown away.
Unfortunately I also got nauseated immediately so I never bought into it....but yeah that initial experience was legitimately pretty amazing.

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-04, 23:51:

- Windows 2000. First OS that didn't need reboots every couple of days, if not earlier.

LOL.
Unix - and other *real* operating systems - didn't need frequent reboots since like forever, or actually since there came CPUs with memory protection.

Jasin Natael wrote on 2024-12-05, 17:24:

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-12-04, 13:47:

Virtual Reality (circa 2016-2018) […]
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Virtual Reality (circa 2016-2018)

The arrival of 'modern' VR was the last time I felt I was seeing something truly revolutionary. To go from viewing a game on a computer screen, to feeling I was standing inside the game was incredible.

Unfortunately it's been marred by stagnation, in part due to the industry trying to carve out their own respective platforms (Facebook/Meta, PCVR and PSVR). I went all-in on the PCVR platform, but as content started petering out, I don't use VR much these days.

That said, the experience itself was incredible. I just want patiently for the day when the content catches up.

I agree with this. I can remember using my buddy's HTC Vive for the first time and was blown away.
Unfortunately I also got nauseated immediately so I never bought into it....but yeah that initial experience was legitimately pretty amazing.

I was always interested in VR. Unfortunately, I wear glasses, and the initial investment plus the cost of custom prescription lenses has always been prohibitive. I know that you *can* wear them with glasses, but that's going to be a very subpar and uncomfortable experience.