What bit of tech would you show your younger self that would blow their mind?

Thanks to Doom's long legacy we've got a decent spread of age groups on these forums, so I'm curious what kind of technological developments from the space year 2024 would impress their younger self (more specifically, your child shelf but that can include your teenage years).

For me, as someone who was into flight sims in the early 90's, and thought X-wing and wing commander games where incredible, I would like to put my 10 year old self in a VR helmet and let him loose in Elite Dangerous. While I never got to play the original Elite, I was aware of the game, and seeing all those basic geometric shapes being turned into sophisticated interstellar spacecraft via actual art direction and well thought out sound design rather then my imagination, and to have it in VR! I know modern VR still has it's problems, but if your sitting in chair with a decent flight stick set up, it's pretty close to perfect. I remember reading a book about video games from the 80's, written in the Defender, Break out, Qubert ect era. While some of the predictions of in their 'games of the FUTURE' section where wacky, what they had for 'The ULTIMATE Game' was a fully 3D space game where you could do what ever you want, which, given how much money was thrown into Star Citizen, I think it's safe to say they where on to something, and I think it'd be a laugh to show child me an example of arguably the most successful version of it when people where barely comprehending Frontier: Elite II

Fleshlight

I'd probably go with VR too, which is kind of odd given that I don't really use it now; but it's such a visceral technology that was so primitive if not nonexistent in 1997.  I think a lot of other things like touch screens, advanced graphics, pocket-sized computers etc. would've gotten a "wow neat" out of me but I'm not sure would've reached the mind-blowing level necessarily.  I think VR would've tickled some deeper nerve of wanting to truly inhabit a fictional, imaginary world, and being awfully close to being able to do so.  With the right programs, of course (would have been really eager for a VR Commander Keen, shit I'd still love to be able to wander around Fribbulus Xax and the Omegamatic as though I was there.  At least there's probably something that'd let me explore Mars, probably)

Being the dullard that I am that is impressed with technology that is not just strictly limited to videogames, I would easily go with cloud services and microcontrollers.  On one extreme there is a whole suite of tools and services readily available to design complex distributed systems without having the deal with bare metal maintenance (cloud services) - and on the other is basically a computer you can tell to do some relatively minor and potentially useful things (microcontroller as smart home implement or others) including being used as a way to extract information from ROMs and others with some clever crafting and knowledge about the ICs you are working with.

The smartphone.

I grew up with "dumb" phones which were very rigid in terms of what they can do. You could make calls, send SMS/MMS, transfer files with infrared or with the much more advanced Bluetooth feature, take photos. They had some cool features but were very limited compared to a computer. 

And then smartphones were made, which were basically entire computers but pocket sized. You can install any program you want with them and basically replace many other devices. Not only you could have a map in the phone but also use GPS and let it guide you to your destination. For free! When I got my first smartphone I was amazed by the versatility of the device.

Also the evolution of storage devices. The fact that the mighty DVD which could store 4,7GB of data would be absolutely crushed by dirt-cheap flash drives where not only you could delete the data in them, but also store 128GB of data if not more. Optical disks used to be high tech when I was kid, now nobody uses them.

Quake in a pentium 133

That shit is nuts!

Apparently, there is that WarCraft III total conversion - Chronicles of the Second War - that aims to completely revamp and reimagine WarCraft II and its expansion; the Orc campaign from Tides of Darkness has been released already and unlike other half-assed fan attempts at recreating classic Blizzard games, it looks very impressive and professionally-made! Sadly, it seems exclusive to the infamous Reforged re-release and I do not care for Blizzard anymore to pay for the latter, but I bet my past self would play the shit out of it:

If I knew there’d be a time I could fit all the games I grew up with on a given system within a single SD card inserted into an everdrive cart my mind would’ve been blown and I wouldn’t have wasted so much time and energy on physical collections for as long as I did. 

I would just show kid me my current computer, as my Steam games, Adobe programs and YouTube history would cover everything. That's a good way to get a general feel for current tech advances. 

I was 10 in 1995, and at that time I found myself imagining far-out tech, like the cybernetics, time machines and military drones of the Terminator films. But for everyday tech, I couldn't picture beyond say, each individual student in school having a personal laptop. It would have absolutely blown my mind to see smartphones, Chat-GPT, and real-time ray/path tracing. 

Greek fire.

Modern video games.

Definitely modern Smartphones

Being able to use the Internet anywhere, a portable Camera, gaming on the go that isn't just a simple Maze game, Music on the go.

It was my childhood tech fantasy come true.

Younger self? The tech blows me away today. All these a.i. language models sound like the stuff of science fiction. Self-driving cars with a.i. voice personalities used to be fiction on a tv show called Knight Rider. 

On 1/14/2024 at 10:21 AM, Koko Ricky said:

and real-time ray/path tracing. 

Ray tracing is soooo overrated. I watched my brother yesterday attempt to run Portal RTX on his beast of a PC and it ran on lowest graphics at a staggering...wait for it...5 FPS. No hyperbole.

Even when it works and doesn't tank performance, the effect is so subtle, it's as if it's not even there. Kind of like God.

A few years ago I visited Berlin. I would show my younger self this thing, which blew my mind when I was there:

After you've finished a bottle of Bepis or Conk or whatever you bring it back to the shop, put it in the machine, the machine spins it around, and you get a voucher for 25c! Which means that if you bring four bottles back you get 1€.

That's right, alt-gr plus 4 is €. Thank you, the alt-gr key. I have overlooked you in the past. Taken you for granted. But you are indispensable whenever I want to write €.

The thing is that I don't speak German. I was terrified before using the machine that it would flash up an error message or ask me to enter an account number. But no! No! It just worked. I remember wondering if I could make a profit. Perhaps involving derivatives or futures contracts. Or if I could grab loads of bottles from the street and make a profit. But I couldn't find any bottles. What would happen if I stuck my dick in it? Would the machine break? Is this how German kids learn about sex? Etc.

Yes, it's a stupid thing. A trivial thing. And when I was young it was actually quite common to get money back on milk bottles etc. But it worked.

7 hours ago, Ashley_Pomeroy said:

A few years ago I visited Berlin. I would show my younger self this thing, which blew my mind when I was there:

 

I don't know if that would blow my younger self mind, but that is some pretty cool tech!

It'd be cool to see something like this where I live

You know these old videos on YouTube showing what the "Xbox 720" (or One as it's officially known), PlayStation 4 and the new Wii could be like? If I brought an Xbox One and a PS4, better yet, a Series X and a PlayStation 5 and show it to 7 year old me in 2011, I guarantee his mind would go off like Tsar Bomba.

On 1/9/2024 at 1:39 PM, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Fleshlight

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"AI".

But then again, I thought it's already been implemented back then (thank to sci-fi from as far as the 1950s)

Most of the things I was anticipating when i was younger turned out rather disappointing. The tech was weaker but still got things done, since the "things" themselves were weaker, and it's a task in itself to come up with an idea how to make good use of it all. All i could ever ask for and make good use of was always out there.

There's a lot of tech stuff I would love to have not existed today, though. Some of the possibilites are disorienting rather than inspiring.