Ahhh yes, I remember the transition from the discman to the mp3 players - it was amazing! No more disc skipping when listening in the car! You suddenly had winamp in your pocket, it was so great. I had one of the cheaper ones, couldn't afford the ipod but it was still so great.

I remember storage sizes getting bigger and bigger, and how 100s of songs on one mp3 player was mindblowing.

I also remember cameras going digital - those blew my mind. You could take as many pictures as you wanted?? And it did take up a valuable spot in your limited roll of film? And you could see it??? Holy shit, man. Then also watching the megapixels start getting better and better.

DivX ;-) codec, making it possible for me to watch Matrix on my computer.
At least 3 times a week for that whole summer.

The graphics jump from PS1 to PS2 shattered my 10 year old brain.

Sidekick phone. Complete gimmick, but it was the coolest thing ever.

So, a bunch of years back, I stumbled upon a little-known application called Synergy that was fledgling at the time. The idea of a virtual KVM using a client/server architecture completely changed how I was able to interact between my various PCs/Mac/Work PC and it was great.

First time I used a (relatively) modern touchscreen, which for me was the original Nintendo DS, really felt like something from the future at the time.

Diskettes The computer I had loaded programs off tapes, and that was a pretty "involved" process taking anywhere from 5-20 minutes. Then we got an Atari 800XL with a disk drive, and not only did loading only take a little while, but you could also save to the disk without special workarounds.

Flat panel displays The first computer LCD screens were small, not very impressive display quality wise, but they were SO THIN! They were making an image without the large back of a "traditional monitor". I'd vowed to own one one day. (turns out that CRT screens still beat them in some areas to this day...)

Home broadband before about 2000, i had to sneak around a long telephone extension cord to be able to get online for at most a couple of hours. Then one day we got a message that they were rolling out this "broadband cable" thing, and my whole world just shifted. My machine was ALWAYS ONLINE. The internet was ALWAYS THERE. I could download things that used to take me minutes in just seconds. It blows my mind even today still.

MP3/XVID/DIVX Suddenly my harddrive could fit whole songs and later whole movies...that coupled with the whole broadband thing opened up a whole new world of possibilities.

SSD It'd used to be normal for a computer to take a couple of minutes to start up. Even when it was, doing more than a couple of intensive drive bandwith things could really bog it down to the point of being unusable. Then SSD's came along. They started as pretty small things (still have my 30gb OCZ drive somewhere), but they were so incredibly fast. Systems now started in seconds. Games in a fraction of the time. And everything just felt snappy all the time.

It feels incredible to live through these times, where we take for granted that everything will always get better/smaller/faster during our lifetimes (hell, every year even) where that has never been the case at any point in history.
And technology wise it'll never get any worse than it is right now. That's pretty goddamn neat.

other than the internet? hmm... cellphones. I grew up in a world where telephones were bulky devices stuck to the wall, or on a short cord, and to call anyone outside of your local area you'd be charged a per-minute fee.

now - cellphones are basically supercomputers in our pockets where you could theoretically call anyone on the planet, if only you knew their number - and everyone has one.

next up is IoT, where everything is connected to everything else, in near real time.

When I first booted up an Xbox it felt like something futuristic. I would also include having a mini disc player was pretty awesome because of how portable it was compared to a cd player.

Compact disc was crazy for me

Word-processing. I fancied myself a bit of a writer when I was young. First my Dad gave me an electronic typewriter and that was a game-changer for organising ideas, sentences, paragraphs ... incredible, but my PC with Word, and Publisher, Wow! No more rewrites in countless exercise books, or liquid paper, or erasers. Amazing!

I grew up with and into the internet, most things came naturally and where not that mind blowing. I've been looking forward to ML/AI and its currently blowing my mind that it actually works so well as a programming "assist".