Comment by nerdix
3 years ago
There are a number of things that are possible today that would have blown people's mind in 1998.
Streaming music - I remember downloading my very first mp3 (maybe around 96-ish) and my computer not being able to decode it in real-life (the audio skipped/stuttered). It also took 40 minutes to download. Streaming a song with near CD quality fidelity on a computer would have been mind boggling. Streaming music to a wireless pocket computer was unthinkable.
Streaming 4k video - similar to music but even more insane. I remember the first time I streamed video over the internet. It was on CNN's website around maybe 98 or 99. It used the real player, was some silly low resolution (lower than 320x240), and was so pixelated that you couldn't make out people's faces.
Google Maps with Street View
Google Translate
Actually good OCR (including handwriting support)
Actually good speech recognition.
Video calls
ah, I meant use cases that were enabled by/tied to the bloat
I guess you could say that streaming content is a core part of the horrible software bloat we've been suffering under. Instead of being allowed to just download a good quality copy of anything, we have to 'stream' low quality DRM-laden copies again and again
Google Maps would work a lot better as a standalone app than embedded in a web browser, but I guess that and a lot of other apps are delivered via browser nowadays
Its an entire wasteful paradigm of pull everything, cache nothing. It just relies on the assumption that you'd always have perfectly reliable data; I can't get a good wifi or LTE signal in certain parts of my home on the other hand so I guess I am screwed.