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

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

#11

Post by burntoutfire »

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 them).

Laser printer

Non-dialup internet connection at home

Torrents (a decentralized sharing network that works and truly can't be pulled down!)

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

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

#13

Post by psyc »

The technology that made my jaw hit the floor hardest was the Super NES, running Mario World. Mine eyes did fall upon it suddenly, at a mall kiosk, when I was 14. I was so used to NES graphics, my brain could not fully process the color depth, resolution, and sprite sizes.

Runners up include iPhone, Oculus Quest 2, and Wolfenstein 3D.

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

#14

Post by apollopower »

Funny to think about now with hindsight - but a prototype version of the Magic Leap One.

It was an incredibly novel feeling of seeing the room I was in get mapped out, furniture and all, to see interfaces and 3d models rendered in a way that felt interactable in real space. Moving renders of objects around to see how things could be - well, it was just a lot of fun; it felt like playing with a new video game console as a child.

Sure, the overall experience was clunky, with the motion tracking and sub-par lenses constantly reminding you that it was only a prototype, but that first interaction excites you about all the things that could be possible if it actually is refined into a final product. Perhaps this was the same experience that led many of the early investors to put so much faith in Magic Leap while there was still a long road ahead of them.

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

#20

Post by squibbles »

The Motorola 6809E[1] and the MC6883[2]. The 6809E was a 0.89MHz CPU (with external clock) used in the TRS-80 Color Computer[3] sold by Radio Shack. The MC6883 was the Synchronous Address Multiplexer (SAM) used to drive the display.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_6809

[2] https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Datasheets/M...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer

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