Ask HN: What technology made your jaw drop the first time you used it? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What technology made your jaw drop the first time you used it?

#21

Post by shaftway » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

burntoutfire wrote: post #11

Not exactly jaw-dropping, but I thought they were pretty amazing the first time I experienced them: Virtual Machines (precisely, VMWare). SSDs LCD monitor Amiga 1200 (seeing some amazing demo on it really was mind-blowing) Action Replay (C64 cartridge which allows you to dump the whole machine's RAM to disk and later reload it, essentially giving you machine's snapshots, e.g. save games for games which didn't have th…

> Windows 2000 was super neat compared to the old clunky Win 98

My dad had a friend with an MSDN subscription, so we got a pre-release developer copy of Windows 95. Moving from Windows 3.11 to that was pretty jaw dropping.

But after a while we had an issue with the machine. Sectors on the hard drive were going bad, so we brought it into a shop to have someone confirm that. When we booted it up in the shop the tech's eyes went wide and I think he started drooling a little bit. He offered to swap the drives and copy all of our data from one to the other for free (I assume he thought he could make a copy of the OS for himself too). We declined and he was pretty crushed.

Re: Ask HN: What technology made your jaw drop the first time you used it?

#22

Post by scsilver » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

Google earth, then google earth vr.

Re: Ask HN: What technology made your jaw drop the first time you used it?

#23

Post by maremmano » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

Intel 80387

Re: Ask HN: What technology made your jaw drop the first time you used it?

#24

Post by fetus8 » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

OLED screens. Saw it in a Sony Store on a tiny screen back in 2009(?) and finally got my own 65in LG CX OLED last fall, and every time I use it, I am still blown away by the colors and motion.

Re: Ask HN: What technology made your jaw drop the first time you used it?

#25

Post by speedgoose » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

Google Earth VR. I made so many people try it, almost everyone was amazed.

Re: Ask HN: What technology made your jaw drop the first time you used it?

#26

Post by fiftyacorn » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

When I first used mosaic, also Google when it first appeared

Re: Ask HN: What technology made your jaw drop the first time you used it?

#27

Post by hnburnsy » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:47 PM UTC

Tesla... It's not the self driving, but not having to carry a key or start/stop the car is what gave me a virtual jaw drop.

Re: Ask HN: What technology made your jaw drop the first time you used it?

#28

Post by jimPkong » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:54 PM UTC

OCR - circa 1990.

I worked in a 'traditional' typesetting house and we'd just got in some 300 dpi B&W flatbed scanners and Desktop Publishing was just starting to get 'commercially acceptable'. I scanned in a single spaced page of text in less than 5 seconds with virtually no errors compared to the hour+ it took to get it 'typeset' and output to bromide. It really was like magic.

Re: Ask HN: What technology made your jaw drop the first time you used it?

#29

Post by open-source-ux » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 7:12 PM UTC

Not exactly jaw-dropping but...when I tried an iPad with an Apple Pen and the Procreate app for the first time, I was hugely impressed by the drawing experience. The pen was smooth, responsive and sensitive to pressure and tilt. This felt like the most natural experience created so far to mimicking the pencil and other mediums from real life.

I never imagined that the iPad would overtake traditional digital drawing tablet screens in the popularity stakes. But today, you would be hard pressed to find an illustrator who doesn't have an iPad and Apple Pen (and a copy of Procreate).

Re: Ask HN: What technology made your jaw drop the first time you used it?

#30

Post by pkrotich » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 7:16 PM UTC

AirDrop