It still amazes me!

[PaulB]

My i-pod. It still amazes me that something so tiny can hold 2,800 songs, 23 videos of various lengths and 82 podcasts. I shake my head in wonderment every time I use it.

 

[Chromatic]

Me too, my entire music collection in something the size of a pack of cards. It is amazing.

 

[Yellow Fang]

Just make sure you back it up. I didn't, my PC caught a virus and after the operating system had been re-installed, iTunes didn't want to know about all the songs on my iPod. It keeps saying it want to synchronise it, i.e. wipe it all off.

 

[Arch]

Me too, my entire music collection in something the size of a pack of cards. It is amazing.

Even more amazing when you think how much of that is battery. The actual 'remembering' is done on something even tinier...

I think it's good every so often to sit back and think about the advances we've seen. Because they happen in increments, we so often take them for granted....

I always think, it must have been amazing to be Orville Wright, who lived just long enough to see flight move from his powered kite made of canvas and string, to the beginning of the jet age...

 

[dmoan]

I'm still amazed (and entertained) by teletext and CD players! I still smile everytime I'm faced with a 'soft eject' mechanism, in everything from cassette records to slot loading DVD players.

Don't get me started on the 'moving map' display when aboard aircraft - I could stare at that for hours!

 

[JiMBR]

Don't get me started on the 'moving map' display when aboard aircraft - I could stare at that for hours!

Ahh...that explains your Avatar!

 

[PaulB]

Don't get me started on the 'moving map' display when aboard aircraft - I could stare at that for hours!

Oooh, yes, that reminds me. GPS systems! How does that work? It amazes the bejeebus out of me, that.

 

[dmoan]

Have you experienced the joy of phoning your local takeaway for a delivery and, when you order your food and go on to start giving your address, they interrupt you to say they know where you live and read your address back to you.

First time it happened to me I was so surprised I started babling 'How do you know that? Thats great, that is? What else do you know about me? - the girl at the other end was PHSL at me!

 

[Arch]

Oooh, yes, that reminds me. GPS systems! How does that work? It amazes the bejeebus out of me, that.

I wonder if it's a technology thing, or if there have always been people saying that;

"That steam locomotive, how does that work then?" or "That wheel thingy? what will they think of next eh?"

 

[trustysteed]

ooo, what's that, fire? that will never catch on!

 

[dmoan]

I wonder if it's a technology thing, or if there have always been people saying that;

"That steam locomotive, how does that work then?" or "That wheel thingy? what will they think of next eh?"

I think it is a convenience thing - people are always impressed by things that their life genuinely easier - like train travel as opposed to horse-drawn coach, or mobile phones as opposed to telephone boxes.

By way of example, my dad is constantly amazed by the motorway between the border and Dublin, but only because he remembers driving through every town and village between Belfast and Dublin before any bypasses or motorways existed in Ireland!

 

[Mr Pig]

I still think record players are amazing! How so much detail and music can be held in a wiggle on some plastic.

And how a loudspeaker cone can make so many different types and volumes of sound at the same time.

 

[purplepolly]

I wonder if it's a technology thing, or if there have always been people saying that;

"That steam locomotive, how does that work then?" or "That wheel thingy? what will they think of next eh?"

When my dad was little his older brother told him that there were very little men inside the radio. This was in the days before telly.

 

[Arch]

When my dad was little his older brother told him that there were very little men inside the radio. This was in the days before telly.

About 15 years ago, my mum thought there was a guy sitting behind the cashpoint...

But to be fair, think of the stuff that's arrived in the average pensioner's lifetime. Diesel and then electric trains, jet airplanes and cheap mass air travel, mass ownership of, at first, landlines, and then mobiles, microwaves, TV, black and white, then colour, not just one channel, or 4, but hundreds. Computers that started the size of a room and now can be carried in a small shoulder bag, cassettes and CDs, already superceded by MP3s. The Internet! My Grandma used to ask me what the internet was and the best I could say was that it was a sort of electronic library with limitless books, but she never quite got it, it was just beyond her experience. It makes me wonder what I'll be groping to understand when I'm 90, while Oli's children sigh and try to explain yet again.

And through it all (to paraphrase Robbie Williams), the bicycle, basically unchanged. Lighter, more gears, cheaper, but more or less unchanged in form or function....

 

[Wigsie]

I still think record players are amazing! How so much detail and music can be held in a wiggle on some plastic.

And how a loudspeaker cone can make so many different types and volumes of sound at the same time.

+1 Computers & technology I understand.... a plastic circle with a wire needle.... now thats black magic!