[morsch]

> From 30Mhz and 5 1/4 floppies to ~450/600 MHZ a bunch of GB in 1999.

From rare instances of people accessing their local BBS at 9600 Baud to accessing a worldwide communications network as a matter of course, often at broadband speed.

The past 20 years really have been rather dull in comparison.

[holoduke]

When you are inside a time or period not a lot of change is felt, but once you look back you can see incredible changes. You mention that last 20 years are dull. I think that the last 10 years are the era of smart phone revolution. A pretty big thing. Certainly belongs in the top 50 most impactful inventions and adoptations in human history. In 200 years from now the late 00s will be seen as the start of global connectivity.

[joefourier]

I haven't felt a lot of incredible changes in the last ten years. In 2010 I had an iPhone 4, and I don't think there is a major qualitative difference between it and the latest smartphones. The computing performance may have improved since, but apart from loading increasingly bloated websites faster and allowing for higher-quality photographs, I haven't felt any major changes.

Otherwise, the changes in lifestyle since 2010 have been incremental at best. 10 years ago I could buy most things online, watch YouTube videos, consulted Google maps, had smartphone text, audio and video chat. Now I can watch videos in 4K and the internet connection is faster, and although computer graphics have indeed improved, it is nothing like the leap from 1990 to 2000.

The only new exciting development is virtual reality, which is unfortunately still fairly niche.

There is a larger difference from 2000 to 2020, but you could do a version of the above in 2000, only in a more inconvenient and expensive manner than today, while they would be largely impossible in 1980.

[mcphage]

> Otherwise, the changes in lifestyle since 2010 have been incremental at best. 10 years ago I could buy most things online, watch YouTube videos, consulted Google maps, had smartphone text, audio and video chat. Now I can…

Now almost everyone does that. That’s the difference.

[anthk]

Not so much. PocketPC's were on par on the 1st iPhone/Android phones with similar 3D gaming/multimedia capabilities, albeit as much as expensive and not as usable.

[anthk]

ISDN was a good boost over a 56k modem too. Not DSL speeds, but bearable. With Opera and its proxy (and its awesome cacheing options) you had a pretty smooth browsing, almost a clone of DSL speed and usability standards.