Technology has a way of feeling incremental. Think about this past year, what really happened? We got a slightly faster iPhone, Facebook did some interface tweaks, Microsoft released a new version of Windows. These seem like really small improvements. But if you look back to the original iPhone, what Facebook looked like in Zuck's dorm room, or what Windows 3.1 looked like, the change is staggering.
The linked video shows this phenomenon full effect. The internet in the video is slow, clunky, and ugly. How could a page take 30 seconds to load? Why does everything have a murky gray background? The difference between the web of then and now is staggering. But as someone who grew up through the early 90s watching the internet expand, it sure didn't feel like things were changing fast. It happened gradually - companies starting coming online slowly (and often with a very limited presence): nytimes, barnes+noble, moviefone. Then the internet started getting organized better, first with Yahoo's directories, then with search engines like AltaVista, Excite, Lycos. Then, Google came along, gradually improving their algorithm to the point where we can now access almost any piece of the world's information in seconds. In retrospect, there was so much going on during that time period, but living through it didn't feel that way.
More than anything else, I think this is a testament that having a real impact on technology in the long-term is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to have a vision, and incrementally improve on it constantly, even if it feels like you're not accomplishing much in the short term.
Your point is well taken but there have also been a number of things that did not feel incremental to me when introduced to them. Google, DSL/Cable providers, Napster, iPhone, YouTube, and Bitcoin all felt like big jumps.
Also wikipedia, stack overflow, multicore processors (no more having your system lock up on most heavy tasks), git versus svn/cvs. Lots of technological advances that improved things greatly. Just takes some additional thinking to recall what those things are.
I still recall going from a single core AMD to an Intel q6600 quad core CPU and thinking how amazing it was that I did not have to worry about my entire CPU locking up on one bad app going bonkers and eating 100% of the CPU. It became possible to have an app crash and max out a core and not even notice it immediately. Even when OSs and apps did not do mult-core processing overly well, I still manually set the affinity to most heavy apps so they were isolated to their own cores.
> How could a page take 30 seconds to load? Why does everything have a murky gray background?
This perfectly describes the modern. JS-overloaded "subtle shading" design of modern web apps...
The grey backgrounds were really weird, in retrospect. But they were cool and different! Oh, and that's why grey on grey is back-- fads coming and going to look cool and different.
The linked video shows this phenomenon full effect. The internet in the video is slow, clunky, and ugly. How could a page take 30 seconds to load? Why does everything have a murky gray background? The difference between the web of then and now is staggering. But as someone who grew up through the early 90s watching the internet expand, it sure didn't feel like things were changing fast. It happened gradually - companies starting coming online slowly (and often with a very limited presence): nytimes, barnes+noble, moviefone. Then the internet started getting organized better, first with Yahoo's directories, then with search engines like AltaVista, Excite, Lycos. Then, Google came along, gradually improving their algorithm to the point where we can now access almost any piece of the world's information in seconds. In retrospect, there was so much going on during that time period, but living through it didn't feel that way.
More than anything else, I think this is a testament that having a real impact on technology in the long-term is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to have a vision, and incrementally improve on it constantly, even if it feels like you're not accomplishing much in the short term.