There has been a huge shift in the way we interact with government and banking services. I no longer have to visit the motor vehicle registry to get my car registered (used to be an annual PITA), don't have to fill out a paper form and mail it to do my taxes, I renew all my insurance online rather than going into a physical building, can check my bank balance any time I want, transfer money etc.
I'm only 54 but the world did change radically since I was a teenager. That's only 10 years since the 1993 benchmark of "alien". That was a wild 10 years.
That's the really fascinating thing for me. You were a young adult when the shift happened. I turn 40 this year and in a lot of ways it feels like it's been, mobile phones being the exception, logical incremental improvements since I was a teenager. I had a 56k modem for 2 years but got a 1.5MBit DSL line when I was around 16. Computing power has grown dramatically from my 133MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM, but nothing feels fundamentally that much different beyond the fact that half the apps I have installed on my machine are written in HTML and JavaScript, embed a full web browser, and use dramatically more RAM than they used to.
I remember the shift. I remember the upgrade from my VIC-20 to my XT to my 586, but I don't remember life being that much different. The biggest difference, for me, is this whole notion of "being available everywhere all the time" that came along first with cellphones and then doubled down with smartphones. I remember being able to take off on my bike, going to a park, and reading a book with absolutely no distraction at all. Or going to the cabin and not having an Internet connection.
In the context of everyday personal computing, I would argue computing power improvements have plateaued since around 2011~2012.
Think about it: Intel Sandy Bridge and AMD Bulldozer CPUs are still perfectly practical to use today for all everyday tasks if we put aside arbitrary software limitations (read: Windows 11). Go and install Windows 10 on a Sandy Bridge, it'll be just as practically-performant as the latest Raptor Lake for all your everyday computing needs.
It's kind of interesting to look back when you're one of the guys who also witnessed the mindblowing advances in computing we had in the 90s and 00s (like you and me). The steep climb, followed by the leveling off.
My wife still uses a C2D Macbook Pro (with an SSD and 16GB RAM upgrade, if I recall correctly). It’s totally fine for most of the work she does with it. While I needed to get a beefier laptop for the work I’m doing now (involving processing TB-sized datasets), my 2014 Mac Mini (also with an SSD upgrade) still lives happily on my desk connected to a 4K monitor.
Yeah, that steep climb was amazing! Going from 3kB of RAM, to 640kB of RAM, to 16MB of RAM, to 1GB, to 16GB was incredible. I remember my first dual CPU computer and being blown away that I could burn a CD, listen to music, and play Counterstrike at the same time (Abit BP6, 2x Celeron 450s). Maybe if I still gamed I’d be more blown away by how much things continue to evolve but in a lot of ways the newer CPUs and more RAM etc. mostly just feel like a way to compensate for increasingly bloated software in my day-to-day “office work” activities.
I'm only 54 but the world did change radically since I was a teenager. That's only 10 years since the 1993 benchmark of "alien". That was a wild 10 years.