I love Rand’s idea of a HOLY SHIT list (updated), both as a conversation starter and as a way to remember how revolutionary something once was that we now take for granted.
This is [the] list of technologies/software/hardware that blew my mind when I first understood them.
You know what I’m talking about, it’s those HOLY SHIT moments where the unlimited potential of a “thing” just spills out of it.
-
Some POS word processor that ran on a hand-me-down 8088: I had to type my first school report (topic: Mt. Baker) on a typewriter. I thought: How is this useful? If I make a mistake I have to type the whole thing again—or at least a whole page? This is stupid. I typed my second report (topic: Moctezuma) on a word processor, and I still remember the cursor navigation keyboard shortcuts.
-
TI-85: I didn’t have to remember what I’d typed into the stack. I could barely use a normal calculator then and really can’t now. I wouldn’t have gotten far enough in math to be an engineer without this calculator.
-
Lexus-nexus: Boolean-supported full text search of any newspaper article. As a policy debate guy, trying to get the latest reserach on current events it was invaluable, and it pre-dated Google by over a decade.
-
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II: It wasn’t even that good of a FPS, but it was the first game I remember multi-player on a LAN. Being able to play real people changed everything. (And no, Mario Kart on the N64, while awesome, is not the same.)
-
Mapquest: It’s crummy now, compared to Google maps and my expectation of what Apple is likely to release later in 2012, but at the time it was amazing. Before Mapquest you had to have a hard copy of a map, and have it with you, and know how to use the index to look up a street you’d never heard of—all just to find directions. I was totally unable to navigate around the town I grew up in when I got my license, so the value of having access to a map of anywhere right there on the internet blew my mind.
-
Garmin: see above + GPS. Instructions at the point of need, given by an Australian with a sultry voice. I got lost in a sub-division in rural Nevada at 3 am in the morning, in a snowstorm. That type of thing is simply not possible anymore, if you’ve got the right technology.
-
iPhone: I remember thinking that iPods sounded cool, but that I’d never use one because I don’t want to carry something around that doesn’t do anything but play music. I also wanted a phone that made it easy to sync contacts, because I couldn’t abide having to type them in or the limits of what could be stored on a SIM card. I also hate impenetrable menus and idiotically designed UI. Thanks Apple.
-
Wikipedia: It shouldn’t work. It should be a disaster. And if you want to edit it, it is. But if all you want is the CDF for the Gamma distribution or complete list of all the West Wing episodes, somehow, magically, it’s there.
You know what I’m talking about, it’s those HOLY SHIT moments where the unlimited potential of a “thing” just spills out of it.
…and when nothing afterwards is every quite the same.