this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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Man, I'm still hyped that I have a device that fits in my pocket, can carry an entire book library, a giant collection of music, plus selected videos, and if that was all it could do, it would still be a sci-fi dream come true, but it does more than that too.
I started my game development career in 1996 and we were developing for a brand new system that used "the internet" for touch screen terminals.
At that time of my life, if you told me you could have something the size of a pack of cigarettes that could render 3D video faster than my entire rendering farm, let me talk to any human on the planet like a Star Trek communicator, tell me the upcoming weather... I would have told you you are insane and this will never happen
"An iPod, a phone, and an internet communications device."
That quote never gets old.
Broadband satellite internet. The proof of concept was HugesNet, but was so awfully slow as to be virtually unusable nowadays.
With the proliferation of LEO satellites (and acknowledging the problem this brings to astronomers) we can now have broadband connectivity even in the middle of the ocean.
That we came from 14.4kbps hard-wired connections shared by residential phone service to space communications which can be used in the palm of our hands amazes me to no end.
I try to remember to appreciate it the way ten year old me would have (when still loading computer games from tape). It's so much more satisfying.
Yeah I think our little pocket supercomputers are the most amazing devices created in my lifetime. Still calling them "phones" reminds me of Star Trek TOS when they called their little solid-state data slabs "tapes". If only they knew the real thing today would be the size of a fingernail.