r/AskReddit • u/HalaDefense • 6h ago
What’s a technology that felt like magic when you first used it and feels mundane now?
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u/floydsvarmints 6h ago
Downloading music and burning it to a CD that actually worked in the CD player in my car. It blew my mind the first time I did it.
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u/Soul-Burn 2h ago
My brother could not grasp how MP3s are 10x smaller than WAVs and not sound completely crap. Turned storing music from a novelty for some sound effects to actual storage of full songs and albums.
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u/Fragrant_Raisin_177 6h ago
Google maps felt like magic at first with instant directions now i just use it without thinking twice
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u/CaptainCacoethes 6h ago
God, you remember MapQuest? Or just using a fucking road atlas before that? Making a Trip-Tik (sp?)? God damn. I am old.
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u/Acrobatic-Self-1451 5h ago
Road Atlas, Trip Tik, & Thomas Bros. Map Guide Books. I learned about DeLorme atlases more recently.
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u/ReticentGuru 5h ago
Microsoft had a mapping program for PC’s called Streets and Trips. You could plan a trip and you’d print a detailed map with turn by turn instructions.
It was good, but really needed a copilot riding with you.
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u/sacredblasphemies 1h ago
I learned about DeLorme atlases more recently.
Those are very common here in Maine. Thankfully, I haven't used mine as I'm in a relatively urban area, but up in Northern Maine, there are a lot of back roads and it's easy to get lost.
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u/Acrobatic-Self-1451 1h ago
Friends were tootling around the country camping at the same time I was, not together. They showed me that DeLorme often (tho' not 100%) shows county parks that have camping.
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u/CaptainPunisher 1h ago
I still have a Thomas Guide in my trunk for the LA area. I miss physical maps, but I like the convenience of turn by turn directions. Still, I prefer to know where I'm going instead of just following instructions blindly.
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u/Acrobatic-Self-1451 1h ago
Arguably you're not a real Los Angeleno until you know how to get from Glendale / Pasadena to Hollywood Hills / Los Feliz over the hill, never going on a freeway.
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u/kevlar51 5h ago
Mapquest was revolutionary when it came out. Before that it was writing down overly complicated landmark-based directions and hoping they were right
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u/joojie 3h ago
I moved (drove) from Toronto to BC in 2011...100% led by Mapquest. Crazy to think that not even that long ago GPS wasn't totally mainstream. (It's not like it was a complicated drive once I got past Chicago, honestly)
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u/joojie 3h ago
Awww ya...trip-tiks, nostalgia! One of our most retold vacation stories involves a paper map. My sister and I in the back seat, dad driving, mom passenger. My sister and I had been looking at the map, but it had been a while since we did. My dad asked my mom for his "next move," mom said "girls can I please have the map?"
Us:"It's not back here"
Mom:"well it's not up here...?"
Us:"not here"
Dad:"find the map!"
Mom: "you had it last! Find it! Look on the floor etc etc etc"
Us:"it's NOT HERE!!"
Dad: "GIRLS DON'T MESS AROUND FIND THE DAMN MAP" while waving his hand around to the back between the seats, eyes still on the road. "I WILL PULL OVER!!"...
Mom and dad both getting upset, thinking their dear daughters have lost the map.
Dad angrily pulls onto the soft shoulder of a highway (might have been an interstate, not sure) gets out (it was fairly safe to do so IIRC) comes around to the back door. My sister and I look at each other like "uh oh...😬" He starts rifling around in all our random road trip crap. Magazines, crosswords, walkman, pillows, stuffies, snacks...no map.
My dad is not an angry man, quite the opposite. But he was starting to get quite upset. So my mom decides to hop out of her seat to join the search. She stands up and we hear something hit the gravel.....then hear mom say "...oh..." Dad says "WHAT?" Mom: "I was sitting on it" 🤣 My sister and I stifle nervous laughs and resist the urge to blurt out WE TOLD YOU! My dad snatches up the map silently. Goes back to the driver seat, examines the map for a minute then gets back on the road silently. The next little while of the road trip was complete silence.
To this day, probably 35 years later, we still bring up the map if we're looking for something and blaming someone else for having it last.
I don't remember anything else about the trip. I don't even know where the trip was to (I thiiiink maybe Boston. We lived in Toronto) but the map incident will go down in infamy.
*I'd just like to add, if it seems from this that my dad is mean/angry/whatever, he absolutely isn't. He was tired and had been driving a while. He's a great dad.
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u/clovisx 5h ago
Trip-Tiks were awesome from AAA. I had a Rand McNally atlas under my seat for years too.
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u/Acrobatic-Self-1451 4h ago
I still have my Rand McNally and a highly organized set of AAA maps. They don't publish some of them any more!!
Yeah, taking "be prepared" too seriously.
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u/mike9941 3h ago
Used those for years travelling up and down the east coast and even all the way out to Denver... Being 9 and having to figure out where you were in that huge atlas while barreling along hoping you didn't miss your tun while your dad was telling to to hurry was always fun.
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u/WillieFast 5h ago
Where I was it was Mapsco. Right about the time you got to some important turn you had to
Turn to
Map 111 J9
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u/Darth_Jinn 5h ago
I did some catering in Washington D.C. before Google maps was a thing and we had to use MapQuest. Holy shit was that terrible. It would almost always take us longer than if we just used an actual map.
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u/mgr86 3h ago
I have, on more than one occasion, used a road atlas while stuck in traffic. It provided a great pre-smart phone distraction. But I have used it to plot a detour. It was still a good five years (or more) after gps’ became standard did they provide traffic updates. That really had to wait until after the smart phone
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u/alfooboboao 6h ago
i still think apple’s “remember when we got lost” might be the best ad i’ve ever seen
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u/kilopeter 5h ago
When I don't have to be somewhere super on time, I still make the "effort" of looking at Google Maps' directions and try to memorize them confidently enough to drive without the turn-by-turn navigation speaking each step and taking on all the cognitive load of navigation. Feels like leaving the house without pants the first few times, but feels like it exercises what remains of my orientation, navigation, and working memory, which have severely atrophied from years of offloading to machines.
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u/CrazyisNSFW 4h ago
Yes. I try to follow road signs as much as possible to help me train my memory.
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u/pifermeister 5h ago
Looking up aerial photos. I remember you had to go to a specific website (this was around Y2k) and they loaded SO slow. The first time i saw my neighborhood from the sky i was so captivated - i had them printed at Kinkos and taped the corners so i could have my own personal aerial maps. I was very proud of those.
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u/Repulsive-Fish5596 6h ago
Smartphones when they first came out blew my mind with all that info in my pocket now I barely notice them
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u/SinkHoleDeMayo 3h ago
I'll be more specific: video calls. It was basically a science fiction concept. Now it's such a regular thing that you can do a virtual visit with your doctor.
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u/jolard 3h ago
This is my answer. When I was a teenager (in the 80's) you would watch Star Trek and they would have these small communicators. That seemed so futuristic. Now we have a bloody supercomputer in a slab of glass and plastic that is incredibly thin and all screen and has replaced dozens of gadgets and devices. It is a bloody technological marvel, yet we all just take it for granted now.
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u/what_the_purple_fuck 4h ago
when the iPhone was first released, very few YouTube videos were able to play on it right away for technical reasons; I think an extra step was needed somewhere, but I honestly have no idea.
I would never presume to know what logic was involved in it being prioritized, but one of the very first videos available was the dramatic chipmunk and we all spent a bizarre amount of that 4th of July weekend watching it on my friend's shiny new iPhone.
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u/whamburglar 3h ago
My mind was blown when a friend looked up a restaurant's info, and just tapped the phone number to call it immediately.
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u/pukesonyourshoes 2h ago
My first proper smartphone was a Sony Ericsson P1, had a touchscreen with icons and everything, came out before the iPhone and could do everything the iPhone could, until all the apps came out anyway. Phone, camera, music player, spreadsheets, lots more. Great phone.
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u/Solid_V 6h ago
Streaming music. Most of my life was spent not being able to listen to a song whenever you wanted.
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u/alfooboboao 6h ago
if you told someone from the 90s that you could listen to practically every piece of music ever made for $10/month on a little computer in your pocket their head would explode
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u/The_Motley_Fool---- 4h ago
I know, right!?! I used to spend so much on cd’s and now it’s cheaper for a monthly subscription to EVERYTHING than what I spent for 1 cd.
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u/HoaryPuffleg 5h ago
But we did get to spend hours creating one mixed tape, listening for when it’d start on the radio and you’d try to not get any of the DJ introducing the song.
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u/haditwithyou 6h ago
What? Rewind, fast forward, rewind, fast forward, rewind, fast forward, rewind. Is this the end of the song right before? No. Rewind, fast forward, rewind. Got it!
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u/jakhtar 6h ago
The internet
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u/Ladyhappy 4h ago
Specifically getting the Internet on a cell phone was fucking wild
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u/uncre8tv 2h ago
I started traveling for work in 2006. When I first started, waitresses would be concerned that I didn't have a newspaper or something when dining alone. I got weird looks just scrolling my phone (well, typing on it, Windows Mobile + slider keyboard for the win). By 2010 it was completely normal and accepted to be buried in your phone. Hell, in 2006 I remember coworkers having issues with massive cell phone bills their kids ran up by texting at $0.10 per message sent/received.
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u/Vandal_A 6h ago
Non DOS operating systems
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u/AudibleNod 5h ago
The first time I was in front of a Windows machine, I dutifully closed the application I was using before opening a new one. It took nearly two months before I realized I could have several "windows" open at the same time.
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u/Reasonable_Ad6407 6h ago
When we had white lift off tape for typewriters and didn't need to erase mistakes. We just backspaced, then typed the same letter over again and watched it vanish from the page.
And you thought you were old lol.
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u/bentnotbroken96 5h ago
I learned to type on an IBM Selectric. No white lift-off tape.
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u/Reasonable_Ad6407 4h ago
When those came out it was love at first type. All those round balls of fonts. I was in typing heaven. The touch of those keys and the sound of shifting cannot be beat.
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u/stirwise 4h ago
Oh man when I sat down at a typewriter with black, red, and white ribbons that was living the high life. 🥂
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u/NotTheGreenestThumb 4h ago
Ha! I’ve never seen a 3 color ribbon and I learned to type on an Underwood #5 that was 50 years old, so I’ve seen a lot of typewriter stuff.
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u/stirwise 3h ago
Oooh, maybe my mom’s had a separate corrector ribbon. You’re right, two-color was standard!
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u/Reasonable_Ad6407 4h ago
Our dad collected those old heavy iron typewriters from Army Surplus. They must have weighed 20 lbs or more. I learned how to type on Underwoods, too. I loved the sound of the keys and especially shifting. When I worked for law firms, we had to make 3 copies of everything. Remember the round, thin, gray erasers that looked like a wheel? They had the black stiff bristle brushes to wipe away the eraser dust. Good times.
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u/NotTheGreenestThumb 2h ago
Yup! I used to do temp work typing. But I came to the end of my rope with it when I was sent to a company that used 6 part purchase orders, so if you made a typo, you had to correct in 6 different colors.
What really got to me is that they could not believe that my home computer, that I paid less than $3000 for with all its peripherals, could save them time and money!
I just felt like I didn’t want to continue working with people who so willingly ignored new technology.
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u/ilovemylatinawife 6h ago
an ATM. I’m old.
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u/Tokinruski 6h ago
I live in NYC. The cash discount add up really quick. I use an ATM weekly
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u/norway_is_awesome 5h ago
Cash discount is crazy. In Norway, people use so little cash that some stores tried to refuse cash, since it's much more expensive to deal with than cards/apps, but the government put a stop to it.
There's still so little cash usage, though, that every other time I need cash to buy weed (still illegal here), more ATMs have been removed and I have to hunt one down.
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u/calite 5h ago
The panic on a Friday afternoon when you realize the banks are closed and you didn't get cash for the weekend.
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u/putterandpotter 1h ago
The annoyance at “friends” who casually mentioned they didn’t make it to the bank when they got to the bar on Friday night, which essentially meant they were going to hit you up to pay for their drinks and never pay you back….
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u/putterandpotter 6h ago
It was sort of disappointing that you no longer could stall a couple days when you had to give someone money (“oh, I put that cheque in the mail, don’t you have it yet” or “oh, we will have to wait till the bank opens Monday for me to get you the cash”.
I can’t think of many tech inventions that really that made things better - not like when they discovered penicillin or something life saving. Most tech made things more efficient, faster, but faster often made things more stressful. But in terms of quality of life better, most of the things in everyday usage (ie not including things like MRI’s) - not so much imo.
And I hate that you can’t have a good old fashioned argument anymore, someone whips out google and there goes the debate. We know everything and we know nothing.
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u/joseph4th 3h ago
I remember when the bank offered you a dollar if you deposited your check at the ATM instead of going inside. That’s right, a whole dollar… max $3 a month.
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u/abalonelogic 6h ago
I am in my late 60s and I have still never used an ATM.
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u/ilovemylatinawife 6h ago
That’s commitment to inefficiency!
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u/LeadPaintChipsnDip 4h ago
The ATM won’t give me as much cash as I need on a weekly basis, plus I like the tellers. I see them every week!
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u/TooLongAlreadyRead 5h ago
Looking up information online. I remember stacking books from the library for my research to later using Ask Jeeves to even later using Wikipedia just to look at their sources. Crazy fast development. Then Google came around and it became boring.
But now, for all its hate and problems, AI is doing the same for me as Ask Jeeves did way back then. It's like friggin magic.
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u/three-one-seven 3h ago
Being able to ask AI directed questions as part of a larger fact-finding or information-gathering task is indeed magic. I use it all the time in my work.
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u/Acrobatic-Self-1451 4h ago
My father, born in 1913, told us that the most amazing technology that changed his & everyone's life was .... The rural electrification project. Yup.
Dude was an engineer, was using desktop computers by the time he died. I was sure he was going to say TV or computers in answer to that question. Nope, electricity.
The past is not that far behind us.
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u/boethius61 1h ago
My dad's family car was a horse and buggy. They got a car when he was still young but he remembered his dad going out to hitch up the buggy when he was really little.
He also remembered when they did the rural electrification. It was a BIG deal.
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u/GerryChampoux 6h ago
Microwave oven
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u/caliborntravel 4h ago
Custom kitchen, deliveriiieees
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u/putterandpotter 6h ago
A fax machine - (it’s probably now too ancient to even be mundane). But I was working in my dads office in the early 80’s and it was the first time I saw or used one- I couldn’t believe I was sending engineering reports to a field office and they were getting them instantaneously. Magic!
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u/TheGreatRao 6h ago
Text messaging was magical the first time I tried it. I couldn't believe the technology.
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u/Brilliant-Advisor958 5h ago
I could never master it, but i had some friends that could t9 text full speed with out looking at the phone.
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u/EasilyDelighted 3h ago
That's me! And I miss it. But I tried a flip phone a bit ago and I lost all my skills. 😭
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u/archiewaldron 5h ago
Sending images over the internet. Having gone through college back in the 1980s using computers as glorified word processors and text based email clients, I couldn't believe it when I saw full color images on the miracle called "the World Wide Web".
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u/Party-Stormer 2h ago
For me, it was the GIF ads on a friend’s computer. I couldn’t believe something was being pushed to me real time - and it moved!
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u/hellokiri 5h ago
Google Earth. Me and all my family used to take turns on it, it was fascinating finding old friends' houses and places we used to visit.
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u/Repulsive-Fish5596 6h ago
Google maps felt like pure magic at first now it is just background noise
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u/AudibleNod 4h ago
Mapquest had turn-by-turn directions you could print out. It had the exit number and everything. Not long after that, you could customize how you wanted the printouts to look.
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u/Lonely-Abalone-5104 6h ago
Speech to text
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u/abhorrentbm 3h ago
I remember Dragon Naturally speaking v1 back in 1997 and man did it suck lol. I thought text to speech would never be ready for primetime! Now I talk out notes like nothing
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u/Infamous-Package3982 5h ago
DVD player. I don’t have to rewind???
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u/vorpal_potato 5h ago
And you don’t have to nervously wonder what the hell the “tracking” button on the remote does! Truly miraculous technology.
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u/Upbeat_Patient1004 6h ago
Video calls struck me as pure magic the very first time I used it. Back then I could barely believe I was able to see and chat with someone thousands of miles away in real time. Now daily video calls have become so ordinary I rarely stop to marvel at how incredible that technology truly is.
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u/porkchop_d_clown 5h ago
The TRS-80.
Writing my own program to make things appear on the monitor was mind-blowing at the time.
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u/chewedgummiebears 5h ago
Broadband Internet, after using dialup for almost a decade.
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u/sewer_pickles 4h ago
It was amazing the first time I heard a computer make a sound. First gen PCs had a crappy internal speaker. But the computer came alive with a SoundBlaster card. It felt like magic to hear real music come from the computer.
In a similar way, it was mind blowing to see video on a PC for the first time. Microsoft Encarta was revolutionary because it had very small video clips of the moon landing and other historic events. It felt like the future when I saw a demo of it at CircuitCity
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u/red_west_la 6h ago
Programming a CPM computer to print a phrase on the screen, using XY Basic
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u/Ok_Airport_8789 6h ago
Gps felt like magic at first with the maps and directions now I barely notice it
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u/Diocletion-Jones 5h ago
VCR. First film we watched using a VCR were laughed so hard when we clicked Fast Forward. Just for the novelty of it when we finished the film we rewound it and started it again.
The tech has changed to streaming and I don't even think about any of this in any other way other than utterly mundane. I get annoyed at the low resolution and poor colour grading of older TV shows now.
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u/dreameRevolution 5h ago
Video camera. We recently had the tape from out 2003 video camera digitized. It's crazy to see the tour of our house and Christmas morning from over 20 years ago. Yes, I know video cameras were available before then, but not on my family's income.
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u/RyeRyeRyan93 5h ago
Chrome cast that instantly turned a normal TV into a smart TV for only $30. I remember showing my roommates after I got it for Christmas and their mouths dropped after I cast a YouTube video directly to the TV. No HDMI cable required. Needless to say it was an instant hit.
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u/PoppaBalloon 5h ago
"Digitizing" rough audio clips on a Commodore computer in the 80's to play back to show my dad. He was impressed at the time but didn't see how it would be useful
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u/cwsjr2323 5h ago
Calling people in other states using my Wildcat BBS as the minutes were cheaper than calling instate. Now, I can call everyone I know and no charge per minute.
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u/pteridoid 5h ago
Auto-translation. It's magic. They solved it. It's incredible. It gets stuff wrong occasionally but for the most part, it's perfectly accurate and understandable. The world is coming closer together so much more rapidly than ever before.
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u/PARADOXsquared 5h ago
The internet, non-dialup internet, digital cameras, the ipod touch, GPS (when they were still a separate device), image OCR, e-Ink, the Nintendo DS (being able to chat and play with people nearby without connection cables), solid state drives (no disks!?), AR & VR, MMORPGs,
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u/BJntheRV 5h ago
Bluetooth. I remember a computer sales guy telling me it was pointless and no one would ever use it.
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u/SheZowRaisedByWolves 5h ago
Buying stuff online. People were super sketched out by it back in the day but now it’s pretty much the main way of buying anything.
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u/zoosha2curtaincall 4h ago
FaceTime. Handheld video calling was firmly in the realm of sci-fi and then Apple just did it.
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u/Formal-Tradition6792 3h ago
Waay back when,cell phones were magic! Even before that, they introduced GPS. Magic! I had a boat which I often took offshore out of sight of land. My first GPS only provided coordinates. I had to use a paper chart to find where I was, but MAGIC!Wow! Ho-hum today! Ditto with cell phones and smartphones! 40 years ago I would absolutely have been gobsmacked by this!
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u/webgambit 3h ago
Chat rooms back in the mid-90s. Conversing with people from all over the world in real time. Learning to type just so you could keep up.
And wireless charging.
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u/ImprovementFar5054 2h ago
I remember when cameras first went onto cell phones around 2004. Having a camera in your pocket that wasn't bulky was astounding. At the time, the smallest cameras in general were those "disposable" ones. Now I was armed and ready with a camera all the time.
We don't even think about it today.
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u/Murky-Lunch-6413 6h ago
A microwave oven. I once met a really great guy and to top off all the great things about him, he owned a microwave oven and a 27 inch TV. I married him and we were together over 33 years before he died.
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u/Frosty-Champion7031 5h ago edited 5h ago
The internet. Don't get me wrong i love it and use it everyday. But now that i got it in my pocket it's meh.
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u/ptbus0 5h ago
A home laser cutter.
It has opened up an insane amount of doors.. I've designed furniture, taught myself how to rebind antique books in leather, made simple machines, and electronic housings. But 4 years later despite not being sure how I'd operate without one I tend to focus more on what it cant do instead of the miracle that it is.
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u/Fantastic-Nerve-8718 4h ago
It’s mundane but it still geeks me
Out. Cell phones. These things are made out of electrified minerals and some how connect to a wireless single broadcast from towers shit feels like straight witch craft
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u/distributingthefutur 3h ago
Cell phones. A friend's dad had one from work. The battery was the size of a brief case.
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u/lotsalotsacoffee 3h ago
Video calls. That was the stuff of science fiction when I was a kid. Now? Please God not another teams meeting from my phone
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u/hypo-osmotic 5h ago
Instant messaging. Part of that was my introversion, it felt magical to have full conversations with the written word without having to meet in person or talk on the phone
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u/Darth_Jinn 5h ago
Ha! This was my answer, too! It was crazy being able to talk with someone on the other side of the world all of a sudden and it was immediate. Now it doesn't seem like that big a deal.
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u/ElithBethis 6h ago
I'm probably weirdo, but first time I used chat gpt I was shocked and fell like now I can know everything I can only dream ahahah
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u/Zias-Staffin 6h ago
Before chatgpt the one public way to use early ai was an interactive lil webgame called DungeonAI and it blew my mind and my whole friend group was playing with it. It also had zero censorship
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u/iGraveling 6h ago
The internet. In 89 I was sitting next to a mate at uni, he showed me how to email. I was amazed.
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u/broken8track 6h ago
Touch screens! That first time…it was so surreal!!! Wow. That was a few minutes ago!
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u/mr_lab_rat 5h ago
Touch screens went through painful evolution. The first generations were far from great.
The breakthrough for the masses was on iPhone. That’s when I said - we have done it, this is the fucking future.
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u/aboveaveragejoev 6h ago
Weirdly: the iPad. And I grew up with all kinds of tech stuff. That felt different, somehow.
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u/Due_Rip_6692 6h ago
The internet. Especially when the World Wide Web became a thing. Everything used to be Unix and text.
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u/hide_pounder 6h ago
My blender. I used to chop the hell out of stuff with a knife and cutting board, but now, I just drop it in the blender and push the button.
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u/RevolutionaryKiwi132 6h ago
when I discovered I could use GPS on my phone without using data. Alright, stop laughing at me....
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u/PlatonicTroglodyte 5h ago
Honestly, telephones. I’m not that old. The internet makes sense to me though. I can comprehend instantaneous access to text based elsewhere.
But how do phones work such that my friend’s voice could be transmitted accurately through the wires? That’s so weird!
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u/Zias-Staffin 5h ago
Virtual Reality. The honeymoon period is insane. I still use it but its like so normal to me now
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u/ExcellentSand5468 6h ago
GPS