this is how my grandfather must have felt

These days I am often coming back to vivid memories from my childhood that relate to technology.

In the mid 1990s, my parents bought their first desktop computer. An Intel 386 processor, a floppy drive (5 1/4 inch) and a 3 1/2 inch disk drive, an 120 MB hard drive, a mouse, a color screen, and a monster of a color inkjet printer.

A short while later, my dad hooked it to the telephone line with a 2.400 baud modem to do "online" banking before it was called that, via BTX - which was back then a very popular use case for the pre-internet service.

In other words: we were living in the future.

And even though I loved it - especially after discovering that BTX not only offered banking, but a chat function, where one could meet people from all over Germany - I also felt a bit sorry for myself: all the groundbreaking discoveries had been made, the personal computer was there, electronic mail and networking across the world was now established and certainly, there was nothing more to expect than boring, iterative developments of technology going forward.

Pardon?

You see, I had not yet learned of Moore's Law, had not yet been disappointed by Windows ME, knew nothing about the "AI winter"... but I knew about the development that technology had made in the decades prior. Not only did we have big books about the history of technology at home - I had my grandfather. He had been born 80 years before me - in the year when the brothers Wright took their first flight. He grew up when horse carriages were what you expected to see on the streets, electric trams were all the rage in big cities, and cars were a rich-people novelty still. By the time he was in the later stages of his working career, he flew to congresses for work in a commercial airliner with jet engines.

From the first motorized flight and horse carriages to flying on jet airplanes for a work event. THAT was a time of rapid technological advancement.

I felt sorry for myself, for my whole generation even, sitting there, next to the beige desktop computer, chirping its dial-up sounds.

The irony!

Fast forward over thirty years.

You know when I remembered this story, this generational, epic FOMO of my younger self?

Sitting at home in the living room, surrounded by virtual computer windows that only I could see through the computer strapped to my head in a device smaller than a ski goggle, steering it with my eyes and snapping my finger in thin air - all whilst talking through a business issue with an AI assistant that I had summoned with such a finger snap, and with whom I was holding a fluid, natural conversation.

This is AT LEAST as crazy a development from where technology was when I was born like my grandfather must have experienced it. Innovation moving so fast that it causes societal whiplash[1], and no end in sight.

To quote Steve Jobs' last words:

"oh wow. oh wow. oh wow."

[1] For the sake of this childhood memory, I hope you forgive me indulging in a onesided and hopelessly techno-future-optimistic vibe here. There are so many things wrong with technology today, and wrong things done with technology... but this post is just a happy story about me eating a big piece of humble pie, thinking back to my late grandfather.