what are the greatest technilogical 'wow's' for you personally in your lifetime?
 

my sister who's 4 years older says color TV, i dont remember it, she says i was there, but too young to remember, i do remember though when not all shows were in color, the old lady who babysat us got a color TV before my parents got one and my sister says when the cartoons came on in color it was mind blowing.

for me, it was the original Nintendo system, it made my jaw drop because I had all those crappy systems as a kid, Intellivision, some Coleco thing and would sit there dreaming of a day when one of these home systems actually looked anywhere close to an arcade game.

VCR

cable modem - Internet was a piece of shit on dial up, all i ever did was troll people on Usenet, got boring fast.

i don't have a smartphone - the iphones and others definitely look like a 'wow' when u first get them.

Sony Walkman, ipod - both cool

the internet, duh

nope - internet was not a 'wow', it evolved slowly. I remember getting on the Internet in 1997 on a slow modem, nothing exciting about it. bunch of simple websites with boring information, a tiny mpeg would take hours to download.

wireless technology.

Sony Walkman. You mean I don't have to carry a ghetto blaster around and replace 8 batteries every 3 hours? WOW!

Ok first you ask people what was a WOW for them then when they says something you say "Nope you're wrong". If something was a WOW for them them who in the fuck are you to say it's not? It's THEIR opinon. Which is what you asked for in the first place. I first got on the internet in 1999 and it was a WOW for me. Our house getting a microwave when I was 12 and cable when I was 13 were also WOWs for me. I don't give a shit if you think they were or not.

Ya, the walkman was pretty sweet.

i don't give a shit what you think you walking stalking freakshow - you're not in the industry, time for Eric to clear losers like you out of here.

For me it was CD's... when I bought my first Sony CD player for $350 bucks and played my very first CD, the sound was amazing, not to mention, skipping songs was no longer a pain in the ass, just press a button.

Computer & Internet. I'd be working a day job if it weren't for these lovely 1's and 0's.

For me when I was a kid the first digital watches and I can always remember saying to my friends I wish we could have phones we could carry around and just phone our mates when ever we wanted because my parents would hardley ever let me use the house phone. So mobile phones is another one for me

the internet was a wow when I first saw it. My iphone is a wow.

I watched my first porno on a laserdisk I thought I was soooo cool :1orglaugh

Selling content on the Internet was for us a "wow".

We budgeted to sell a set and video for an extra $500 on top of other sales. So were pretty amazed when we found out what it was really worth.

Greatest invention of all time......The Thermos. Keeps hot things hot, cold things cold. How do it know?

--T

Mobile phone.

My hi fi with graphics and all that many years ago at the age of 8 or something... that was a wow I suppose!?

Since then, flatscreen with rear concert lighting made quite an effect to watch... Lol... Natalie & I both said together OMG the people look 3d as if they were coming out of the screen!

Okay, now apply that to your notion that all of the consoles you had as a kid sucked.

How do you define 'slow evolution'? It's all relative. You're an idiot.

The Internet.

It evolved slowly but was still a wow in it's early stage. I remember the first time logging in to AOL and being blown away. As for my others:

Nintendo - While there had been other video game systems, this was the first that really put console gaming on the map. You basically had to have one and the games were so much more advanced than most of what we saw on the older systems.

Pocket Cell Phones - Basically when cell phones shifted from a big hunk of plastic you had to keep in a bag to one's you could throw in your pocket.

iPod - Completely changed how we viewed technology products and how we listened to music. You could now store your entire music library on a tiny piece of electronics.

Notable mentions:

DVR
HDTV
DVDs

I was the total opposite. In 1997 we had fast as fuck connections in our high school. I remember betting on sports, ordering crap, and even looking up porn.

At home we had AOL which was also amazing to me back then. Could go into chat rooms, look up sports scores, and so on. Yeah it was slow, but it wasn't a big deal to me at the time.

computer and Internet evolved into many different 'wow's' and will continue to but in and of themselves my first encounters with them - meh. A VCR was 'wow' right out of the box, go rent Hollywood movies and watch them at home instead of waiting a year for them to come out on pay movie channels. Get 10th generation hardcore porn videos with Ginger Lynn from friends. Tape your favorite TV shows. Nintendo was 'wow' right out of the box.

No I'm afraid you're the idiot. Those consoles did suck. The first system that didn't suck was Nintendo. That those consoles evolved into Nintendo, Sega, Xbox, Playstation doesn't matter, at the time they sucked, there was no 'wow', I didn't get an Intellivision and do handstands. And the Internet in the early 90's was newsgroups read with Pine, World Wide Web an empty parking lot of boring text and a few images, email, and email who - none of your friends or family had it. it was a borefest. Now it's a 'wow'.

There is no relativity when it comes to 'wow' - rubbing two rocks together and seeing sparks, that i'm sure was a 'wow' moment one million years ago. it either is or isn't.

So how far do we take that? The alpha and beta stages of Nintendo were a 'borefest'. The shit didn't work, the sound was off sync and the graphics had huge glitches. Just because it's in the public eye doesn't mean it doesn't develop in the exact same way as things that are.

The internet was the Brown Box and Atari of the early consoles. Sure, the Nintendo was 'good' and it has sold more units than any other console on the planet, but was it much of an upgrade from Intellivision? Please.

the flash format is pretty fab imho, as is the quality you get with quicktime, and Mercedes for putting superfab comforts in your cars :P

tubesites.

sega mega drive 2 was WOW

Holding real cash in my hands, withdrawn from an ATM, and earned through the internet. It was a big "wow" that internet is no less real than the real world.

Then Panasonic HVX 200 was a big wow - the very first prosumer 24P HD camera.

Notable mentions:

DVR
HDTV
DVDs

yea nice note

Don't know, but the worst inventions I could live without:

cell phones

pc's

internet

Although it might sound super weird since I use all of them to make a living, I believe one could live a much better life without those.

Like actually living with other people together without all that virtual communication, not having to deal with so much totally bogus unsolicited information, rest better, be more social since one would need to go to cinema or stadium to watch a movie or sports match etc.

I actually wouldn't mind living in 50's 60's and 70's, being comfortably old when these things emerged, not having to deal with all that virtual meltdown.

Navigation in cars was a wow for me.

Nothing really was "wow" for me, everything evolved slowly, I guess I must be too young to appreciate the technology....

I disagree. I got on the internet in 1989, before the world wide web. I had access through the University of Minnesota, the inventors of the gopher system that kind of predated the web. I was accessing gopher sites in Korea, and that was just mind blowing to me. Also chatting with people all over the world on irc was amazing. All for the price of a local telephone call.

Another tech that amazes me is my android phone, with the whole web and ssh access in my pocket :thumbsup

RCA selectavision / video disc players were pretty cool. First time you could actually go to the store and pick out the movies you wanted to watch and bring them home. Before that it was either the movie theater or wait for something good to show up on TV.

Soon after the VCR was born though, and killed off the giant video disc players real quick.

Shit I am 44 yrs old... I guess it would be the PC though that totally wows me even still.

Tight vagina.

Video editing and audio recording software

microwave popcorn
but before that... the microwave oven

oh, and milk in a little drink box. Didnt even have to keep it in the fridge.

I remember back in the '80's my friend showing me a Popular Mechanics with this thing called a CD player. Was going to replace our cassette players.

The ones that were as big as a 78 rpm record?

as a kid I would have to say Cd's and like someone else said Laserdiscs.. When i was 15 I had the first Sony portable Discman that I thought was amazing that I could carry around this and listen to it with little headphones.. Haha I know it was when I was 15 cause I was a freshman in High School and I took it to school for mos and it must have wowed someone else cause they stole it from my locker after I had it 6 mos :1orglaugh


The internet was a HUGE wow for me cause i got online in 1998 when I was house sitting at my mom's while she was out of town. she had just bought the IBM aptiva a week or so before. I got online after she left and I think I was online 18 hours straight:1orglaugh. I then bought a Webtv and over the next 5 to 6 mos bought PC components one piece at a time as I could afford them and a buddy put it together for me.

Blu-ray is a wow for me cause I've always loved movies and home theater. I had Laserdiscs before dvds came out and I moved over to dvds only cause I could buy movies at half the price of LDs. But when Blu-ray came out it was a game changer for me with the quality.

My android phone is for sure a wow thing for me. I've had 2 other smartphones before the android but looking back at them they were not that smart at all. I love to be able to now go away from my laptops and pcs and watch whole movies on the couch and to be able to check all my stats, emails, myspace, FB and all that shit i would have to get up and check atleast once during a 2 hour movie.

yup those are them! haha after many years of mine collecting dust I used them here http://www.hannaheartbreaker.com/fhg...?ccbill=792677

Yeahhhh color TV for me as well. Ha. My dad was slow to jump on such "exravagences", but we finally got one, circa early 70's.

In '76 we visited some of our rather well-to-do relatives from north of Toronto who just happened to have a microwave. I'd never seen one before that. We didn't get one ourselves until maybe five years later. No one I knew had one back then other than those relatives.

That same year (1976) I was at the Olympics in Montreal, was on a day visit to Terre Des Hommes (Man and his World) and got to shoot an actual laser rifle. I remember being quite impressed by it.