iPhone... finally decent responsive touchscreen with appropriate OS, which didn't have slow/ghosting (LCD) or had to use a stylus (Nintendo DS)...

iPad... finally decent SIZED resposive touchscreeen with appropriate OS... starting to feel the StarTrek NG vibes in the home/hand...

Incidentally this was about the time nuigroup were sharing designs of massive multitouch/user displays that you could make... also with the leap in corresponding software designed from the bottom up with touch UI in mind etc... they were fun and exciting times...

20 years later and I am still here using keyboard and mouse on desktops which have differed very little in terms of physical ergonomics in the last 30+ years.

The late 90's was certainly exciting, however always felt like it was logical progression rather than "WOW" (16bit to 32bit, 3D from the arcades/simulator to the the home, CD audio as standard etc) and so didn't always feel like the future had arrived per-se, rather slowly crept in...

2006 -> 2012 I felt there were great advances in other computing aspects (HID) and this made it felt really like the future that had been portrayed in so many Cyberpunk aesthtics was becoming reality. Also this was the first time I saw real-time raytracing (Imagination/Cuastic OpenRL, and homebrewed renderers using dual TitanZ's [Jacco Bikker/ompf]) which is something I always thought was decades off given the required computational load.

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.

Early 90s, used a hypertext document for first time, thought that was "really something" then it just seemed natural on a web browser when I tried that in 93ish.

I thought I was seeing the birth of the 3D web when I first saw VRML demos/sites, but that didn't really gain momentum.

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.

Being more jaded now, I was like "Oh, 3rd time lucky for VR helmets huh?... Oh, guess not, Facebook is involved now, they're gonna smother it."

-3DFX
- Pendrive
-LCD Monitors
-SSD

Right yeah, USB flash sticks, early oughts, got a 256Mb on a boxing day sale, mind blowing miniature storage device for the times.... I know ppl will say "They were around late 90s" ummm at a huge price for small capacity, they didn't really get to us proles until after the millennium.

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.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-12-04, 14:45:

Right yeah, USB flash sticks, early oughts, got a 256Mb on a boxing day sale, mind blowing miniature storage device for the times.... I know ppl will say "They were around late 90s" ummm at a huge price for small capacity, they didn't really get to us proles until after the millennium.

Think I bought my first USB Flash stick in 1999 or maybe 2000 ... Albeit a 16 MiB 🤣

I still have it, though 😎

Linux.

It was truly unreal to have on my own PC a clone of Unix, the system from expensive RISC workstations and servers, the system that ruled the Internet!
And it came with full source code, in the era when pretty much everything was binary-only, when sources seemed to be the most guarded secrets of the universe!

Internet over cable in 1998 here in Austria. Our upstreams were not crippled like on the other providers, eg. in Vienna.
Learning for final exams with a classmate over the internet. While that he started streaming from his TV card into our NetMeeting session.

USB storage and SSD. Tablets and cellphones. Wireless of any kind both for data and charging.

Raytracing technologies past and current with GPUs cards that started to use live raytracing during motion video, not pre-rendered static frame by frame renderings and creating a movie, nor static rendering of single image is big innovation.

Web browsing.

Cheers,

Wolf3D on 286/Vga

Doom on 486 with VLB

3D Hardware acceleration on Verite 2100 (technically I had a S3 Virge prior but was completely underwhelmed).

Hardware T&L / First GPU’s - I had a P2-400 with a Voodoo3 struggling to play Quake3. When I upgraded to Geforce2 MX, the difference was night and day.

The first time I played Team Fortress online. It was around 2000 and on terrible dial-up, but 32 players from all over the world tearing up a server was as impressive as hell to me.

Wishing I still had the PC I played that on.

ItWasTheDog wrote on 2024-12-04, 16:39:

The first time I played Team Fortress online. It was around 2000 and on terrible dial-up, but 32 players from all over the world tearing up a server was as impressive as hell to me.

Wishing I still had the PC I played that on.

i remember playing unreal tournament and soldier of fortune on dial up around that time, it must have been on the celeron 500 with tnt2 i had at the time - a relatively 'modern' set up around late 1999 early 2000

I think those early online gaming moments are a milestone too, such a lot of data shuffling around our modems at the time 😀

i'm going to add any experiences we may have had with 'home computers' in the early 80's too, just having one of those 8-but machines hooked up to the tv and actually getting it to do things that had *never* been done so readily at home before, that only a few years prior had been the reserve of large cabinet sized computers with whirling visible tapes and big lights in large organisations

When I compiled and ran Mosaic at the uni unix workstation back in 1993.
Besides the fact that you could access information across the globe, what got me thinking that "the future had arrived" was the knowledge that the web pages did not have to be static and could be interactive.

The 386.
I still consider the leap from the 286 to the 386 to be one of the very greatest leaps in x86 computing, primarily because of the virtual 8086 mode. (AMD's release of x86-64 in '03 *might* be tied with it. Maybe.)

Core 2 Duo
Solid state drives

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".

Every time when a new Windows released up until W7.
Moving over from DOS to Win3.1, then to Win98, then to XP, then to Vista all felt futuristic. Then came W7 which was Vista again with some tweaks. Then came 8.1 which was Vista again with a downgrade on the GUI front and made me experiment with Linux dual booting. Then came W10 which was one step forward two steps back and made me fully go over to Linux.

Several people have already said 3dfx, but that was absolutely my computing 'wow' moment too.

Specifically- sometime in late 1998, installing the Voodoo2 card that I'd been saving up for, and running Need for Speed 3 in Glide mode for the first time. A jaw-dropping experience that was incomprehensibly far ahead of the 'just fine' software rendered graphics on the family Pentium II PC. That memory has made using 3dfx cards my favourite nostalgic experience ever since.

There was some point in the mid 2000s when there was an uptake in the installation or deployment of undersea cables that made it so it was actually possible to access websites outside of the US. Prior to this it was extremely slow or impossible to access a site from Japan for example. I do not know the exact time this change happened (and Bard doesn't know either) but this really opened up the internet.