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Your Holy Shit List

I’ve starting a HOLY SHIT list. This is list of technologies/software/hardware that blew my mind when I first understood them.

You know what I’m talking about, it’s those HOLY SHIT moments where the unlimited potential of a “thing” just spills out of it. I have two litmus tests for this type of realization. It’s either when I start calling random friends who haven’t heard from me in months just to tell them, “HAVE YOU SEEN NAPSTER? DO YOU REALIZE THAT THE WORLD JUST CHANGED?” The other test is when I try to explain the HOLY SHIT to someone I know will never get it. “NO SEE, YOU CAN BUY ANYTHING ON EBAY. ANYTHING. NO I DON’T KNOW WHAT EBAY STANDS FOR GRRRRRRRRRRRR”.

Here’s the unordered list so far. Please feel free to add or create your own list. I’m certain I’ve forgotten some key HOLY SHITS:

  • Macintosh
  • Doom
  • Telnet
  • Windows 95
  • Ebay
  • Netscape Navigator
  • Napster

There’s a future column which will walk through these items and talk endlessly about their personal significance. I’m guessing I’ll also need to explain why obvious candidates such as the PC aren’t on that list.

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53 Responses

  1. Ryvar 22 years ago

    Hmm . . .

    agreed, Telnet, also-

    OpenBSD: the first (and best) *nix I really got into

    C: for being utterly intuitive and perfect

    Gnutella/Freenet: decentralization = sexy

    BIND/the DNS system: mind-blowing when you first ‘get it’

    Quake’s BSP trees: even more so by far

    Ultima Online: persistent online world with real depth of system to it? 88 hours of uninterrupted playing?

    and most recently Morrowind, a non-linear fantasy game/world in first-person 3D, with all the latest graphical bells and whistles. A crucial early step in moving games from the wornout puzzle/narrative realm and into the arena of potential reality substitutes.

    My (younger) age plays a huge factor in not finding the Web/Macs/Doom, etc. terribly surprising – all of these were contained in the subconscious intonations of our cultural meme-fabric before I arrived on the scene. The real paradigm shifts (buzzword++) that are unlikely to trickle down to the populist radar are still preserved and fresh when encountered. Close runner-ups for my list lie along similar lines but are more difficult (for whatever reason) to become excited about: TCP/IP, non-deterministic finite acceptors, FPGAs, etc.

    They don’t teach you that stuff on AOL.

    “There is nothing new under the sun.” -Solomon

    –Ryv

  2. jm3 22 years ago

    corollary to telnet: tab-completion.

    i still remember the day i saw someone make long unix commands magically spring forth from the screen without typing them.

  3. juli 22 years ago

    My list.

    NEXTSTEP

    Scour (First usable P2P to get vids, that I saw)

    Jerkcity

    IRC

    FreeBSD

    OpenBSD

    Links (I loathe w3m, etc. this is what made me go “oh shit, I don’t need a gui anymore”)

    Cocoa development

    C#

    BLATHERING ON AND ON HERE TRYING TO FIND SOMETHING INSIGHTFUL TO SAY.

  4. juli 22 years ago

    Rands, I was not being nice, though perhaps the HOLY SHIT aspect would be more appropriately attributed to THE WORLD WIDE WEB (thus WorldWideWeb.app, thus NEXTSTEP — but I digress). Jerkcity is proof that you can take something and run with it online. My HOLY SHIT moment would have been ManBeef.com in this area, but of course DUH I WAS RUNNING THAT. When you get death threats because of something, you try to not think about its impact on the world. Jerkcity has opened up a world for people to make stupid, pointless, quotable random shit into comics without any work or creativity involved. Any fuckwit with half a potty mouth can make absurdity and obscenity into art… But Jerkcity did it best. I went HOLY SHIT because it was different, it was proof that something about the WWW had _worked_. No, not the collaboration and passing of news on 2001-09-11 over every forum around. No, not the dot-com rise and fall. No. Jerkcity. That is when I realised that this all worked.

    Jerkcity.

    Well, and porn.

  5. rands 22 years ago

    Tab-completion. Damn, that’s sexy. I can think of whole slew of small timer savers like that.

    – Debugging windows code on a dual monitor a la Borland circa 1991.

    – Syntax highlighting. Some are annoyed by this, I love it.

    – The ALT-ENTER convention in IE for adding http://www..com to anything in the URL bar. (Hint: I hate using a mouse) (Hint #2: Ok, I really meant to say CTRL-ENTER)

    – Frames in HTML circa Netscape 3.0. Actually, that spills into the future column. Netscape 3.0 had a bevy of reasons to say HOLY SHIT.

    Re: Ultima Online. I played it, but never fully got into it because I lacked the time to devote. I think I saw the beginnings of massively online games in the form of online Diablo (yes, I know they are drastically different), so when Ultima Online and the like showed up, it seemed like a natural progression.

  6. TheDragon 22 years ago

    jm3: That would be “CTRL+enter”

    and things I’d add to the list:

    PHP for it’s insane versatility in web design.

    any FPS made by id.

    Blizzard. By far one of the best companies out there. Always besting their past standard-setters.

  7. TheDragon 22 years ago

    Sorry about that, jm. I meant to correct Rands on that one.

    =P

  8. P000 22 years ago

    I’m surprised that something like Quake or Warcraft would be considered something Holy Shittable since they’re pretty much the same thing. Single player follow a path with micromanagement while watching FMVs at relevant moments without any particular feeling of exploration or discovery. Multiplayer being the same except with assholes on the other side using cheat scripts and maps which are reminiscent of the other twenty maps already available on the original CD. Other games being blast this shit and get a bigger gun to finally beat the soldier-boss cycles and in multiplayer doing the same thing with little variation.

    Half Life, on the other hand, is good because it added more depth and playability that went beyond “DUDE THIS IS THE BEST MAP EVER!!! THERE’S A NAKED CHICK ON THIS ONE BITMAP TOO!!!”

    What id and Blizzard have done is create a skeleton of a game which has tremendous potential because it lets people make their own stuff. The folks who actually give the games a different flavor beyond different sprites, polygons and bitmaps are the ones who make me think holy shit. For me playing those games is like reading the dictionary for entertainment. Sure I’ll learn soemthing that will stay with me but it’s still not the same experience as reading a good work of fiction or non-fiction.

  9. rands 22 years ago

    Juli, indulge my obvious bias for a second and explain why the discovery of Jerkcity was a holy shit moment for you. OR WERE YOU JUST BEING NICE?

    P000, the reason I

  10. TheDragon 22 years ago

    mmmmm porn.

  11. hannibal 22 years ago

    Stressed-skin construction. But I really think there’s something to this computer stuff.

  12. Klaatu 22 years ago

    Dr. Herb Simon, Ph.D.

    http://www.psy.cmu.edu/psy/faculty/hsimon/comp-sci.html

    “It’s more fun to compute”

    -Kraftwerk

  13. Konrad 22 years ago

    WWIVnet. (Basically an intermittent network between BBSes)

    At the time (1990?) I didn’t know about the internet, so finding a network that would let me send email across the world was pretty impressive. I remember sending email to random people at random hosts just to ask what the weather was like in wherever-they-were.

  14. hep 22 years ago

    BBSes

    Tfile groups

    Zork!

    perl

    gopher

    USENET

    SSH

    BBS and tfiles because it was the first time that I was exposed to the idea that i could communicate and befriend people who i might NEVER MEET IN REAL LIFE and thusly share my ideas and thoughts on things with people who I thought could relate to them. It really shaped the younger me a great deal, I can’t imagine what I would be like now without having known that since so many of my friendships and interactions are shaped, influenced by or are in some way dependant on computers. It’s my primary social communication means, not just for things like IRC, AIM, etc, but also in setting up social gatherings and commitments (via email lists, irc topics.)

  15. Casey-san 22 years ago

    Nominations from ancient history … that seemed new and revolutionary when they first appeared …

    Amazon.com

    windows, menus and mice (when they were invented at Xerox PARC, ages ago)

    embedded disk controllers (SCSI & ATA, replacing dumb interfaces like ST506, ESDI, SMD) …

    extend that to include any object or tool with embedded “intelligence” …

    futures: nanotech, when available

  16. drew 22 years ago

    four-track recorders

    when i got one and realized i could make almost anything i wanted with music, by myself.

    drew.corrupt.net

    when i realized:

    1. it’s neat to put things on the web and have people really like them, but creepy to get mail from “fans”

    2. no matter how funny or smart your writing/drawings/pictures are, 99% of people would rather see legos fuck

  17. P000 22 years ago

    The only thing on my holy shit list is MOO. A text based adventure where I can build shit? And talk to other people? I can code and run scripts without switching environments? All of that was really cool and it still is to an extent. Just don’t do much of it anymore.

  18. memo 22 years ago

    Grand Theft Auto 3.

    Fallout. (You mean I can actually play a genuinely evil character and steal and murder without SUPER TOWN GUARD UBERMENSCH teleporting out of nowhere and killing me? And that I can actually solve every required puzzle/obstacle in the game without always having to shoot a bunch of people or piss around endlessly in dungeons, unless I specifically choose to? HOLY SHIT!)

    Half-Life.

    Counter-Strike.

    The original NES. (YOU MIGHT SAY I PLAY VIDEO GAMES A BIT TOO MUCH LOLOL)

    My discovery of the “cyberpunk” literary/film/visual/etc. style. You know how unrelentingly romantic types sometimes say how they felt like they knew this person all their lives even before they met them, etc.? Cyberpunk is a lot like that for me — I had this vague idea of urban future somethingorother which I couldn’t quite pin down until I had actually found it.

    Leisuretown.

    Star Control II. (YES AGAIN WITH THE VIDEO GAMES)

    Aphex Twin.

    Watchmen.

    The now-defunct Dysfunctional Family Circus. (Long story, but here’s a good place to start: http://www.zompist.com/dfcdead.html)

    I’m probably forgetting a few. But that’s okay, because I got kinda long-winded here anyway.

  19. brett 22 years ago

    I don’t know about the rest of the world, but here are some technologies that really changed my part of it:

    VCRs (yes, I’m that old)

    MIDI

    USENET

    UUencode/decode (kind of a sub-item to USENET, but hey – there’s arguing about your personal nerddity with other nerds halfway around the world, and then there’s PORN)

    VST

    CD burners

    Vibrators

    Relevant: http://www.angryflower.com/thisin.gif

  20. hep 22 years ago

    I am also going to add “makeashorterlink.com” to my shit list. Possibly the best idea to come to the internet lately. How many times have you needed to paste huge garbage laden URLs to friends that wrap for three lines?

    the only BAD part is, now you cant identify a goatse.cx url. :(h

  21. bobjameson 22 years ago

    Marijuana.

  22. rob 22 years ago

    wolf3d

    dune 2

    at dos prompt type doskey then able to scroll up using arrow on all commands entered after doskey

    my first batch file

    apple II with games on cartridges and a the 5 1/4 floppy drive.

    later in life:

    cdBurning

    mp3’s

    irc

  23. jeph 22 years ago

    cable modems- not having to wait for the internet anymore was one of the most pleasurable experiences i have had involving a computer.

    online multiplayer games- a community of people who like playing the same games as i do, without the body odor. yay!

    MIDI sequencing- i can make a computer produce beautiful* music.

    *:your definition of beautiful is probably different than mine. and that’s okay :).

    digital audio recording/processing- being able to record an entire album in your bedroom and not have it sound like ass is a really, really cool thing. in ten years only audiophile jackasses will be recording in analog anymore. in ten years you will be able to produce immaculate records at a fraction of the cost that it is today. in ten years there will be a lot more shitty cds out there, but there will be a lot of good ones too.

    HTML coding- the ability to instantly publish WHATEVER YOU WANT where the whole world can find it is another really, really cool thing.

    photoshop- when i first got the program, it was a pirated version off my campus network. i was like “hey, these filters are neat.” when i actually learned how to USE the program….damn. the ability to manipulate what the human eye sees is a power akin to that of a god.

    as you can probably tell, i’m not a hardcore programmer. i know html, i run a site, i play lots of games and use computers to make and record music. a lot of my other holy shits (napster, the internet in general) have been pretty much covered, so i concentrated on things which haven’t gotten quite as much mention (i think).

  24. brad 22 years ago

    My 3D holy shit moment had to do with Wolfenstein 3D and was upped a considerable notch, not necessarily by DOOM (although every 3D thing that came out around then was absolutely mind-blowing), but by Ultima Underworld. It blew the doors off of Wolfenstein and DOOM and I had never been so immersed in a video game before. It was one of those moments where all you can do is think “Hello future!” (I also predicted 3D video games while playing Adventure and Haunted House on the Atari 2600 and suddenly realizing how gay they were.)

    Online gaming was another one I wished for (or predicted). I remember playing Test Drive while talking on the phone with a friend of mine and wishing we could play each other. A little while later there was an awful game called Car & Driver something or other that let us connect modem to modem and drive around together. There was absolutely no point to it — no racing or crashing into each other or anything — just screw around in a parking lot. It was fantastic.

    Multitasking. This is another one I dreamed about, being DOS-based from my original 4mhz/8mhz switchable TURBO IBM Lanpar PC. Telemate (you could use a text editor while you downloaded), Bimodem (you could upload and download at the same time with somebody AND chat with them. HOLY SHIT!) Windows 95 pretty much pushed this over the edge into reality and despite trying to remain curmudgeonly towards GUIs, I had to concede that they had made many of my dreams a reality.

    It occurs to me (as I realize I could go on forever) that my entire experience with computers has been one big holy shit moment after another. From BASIC on the TI/994a, to Space Quest, to BBSes, to C, to Fidonet, to gopher, to e-mail (dear… GOD! SO… FAST!), to Usenet, to the world wide web, to having a website, insane computer speeds, Ultima Online, Napster, home recording, PHP, MySQL, to basically everything that’s going on right now. It’s really stupid how amazingly cool everything is.

  25. Asmi 22 years ago

    I think most of you people are missing the point. A “holy shit” list item is not just something that makes you go “wow that’s cool”, it’s something that makes you realize that things have REALLY CHANGED. If you think every cool video game is a “holy shit”, you’re not paying attention. If you think Aphex Twin, besides being a real weird and amusing dude, is a “holy shit”, you’re doing it wrong.

    That said, they’re hard to think of. The only one I can come up with right now is CGI: the document you requested is not real, but I’ll give it to you anyway.

  26. lowmagnet 22 years ago

    MacOS X: Gets right what all the linux people were tying at for 7 years so far.. UNIX* on a desktop.

    POV-Ray: raytracing.. wow.. I know there is better stuff out there, but this is still one of my favourite toys.

    Newton: started the handheld revolution, even if it was ahead of the curve.

    *Yes, *BSD is an officially recognised UNIX.

  27. Jak 21 years ago

    I reckon that a key shit is ‘life’ cos like, life bites shiney metal ass.

  28. jw 21 years ago

    VNCviewer. It’s too cool to run a program on a computer halfway across town (like updating MSMoney and seeing if I have enough to get another item off my Amazon wishlist)

    ssh – Secure telnet-like access from anywhere in the world, PLUS X11 forwarding over a secure link, PLUS FTP-like access (again over a secure link), PLUS you can do it all with only a single open port in your firewall.

    MP3s – it’s easy to forget, but there was a time when I had no choice but listen to a CD all the way through, when mix tapes took days to make, when I couldn’t tell MusicMatch “give me 5 hours of party songs NOW”, and just enjoy the party.

    Just about every network purchase I’m made for my home has been to ensure that these three peices just work from anywhere. The most fun is being 500 miles away from home, ssh-ing to the server, booting my main computer, and ssh-ftping some MP3s that I forgot to bring with me.

  29. tom 21 years ago

    GW-Basic

    This wasn’t revolutionary, but I was probably like 8 at the time, and I realized I could make the computer *say anything I wanted*. From there it was all downhill.

  30. david mallory 21 years ago

    when i got my first real apple an imac b i kept saying over and over “I got a real apple!”

  31. juztin 20 years ago

    i have a few to add to the list.

    mindless self indulgence : this band, when i heard them, made me say “holy shit!” and call my friends up. nothing else on earth sounds even remotely close to them.

    everquest – my friend is hardcore addicted to this game…when he showed me, i said “holy shit!”…and then stayed the hell away from it, because i saw it’s insane addictive potential.

    newgrounds.com – oh my god! enough flash movies that you can never run out! heaven!

    halloween for atari 2600 – the first game i ever saw that had blood in it!

    MS-DOS – it wasn’t when i saw DOS that made me say “holy shit”, but when i started to understand it’s structure, and then it’s stability compared to windows….i loved it, love it, always will…

    fruityloops – i am a programmer of geektronic music (check my site, http://lopsided.cjb.net), and this program blew my mind. before fruityloops, i was doing LOTS and LOTS of editing in soundforge, and then mixing it all in a program called AlgoRhythm, which loved to crash on me every 15 minutes or so. fruityloops came out, and it was like…a stable algorhythm, that you could add tons of effects…wow…it’s amazing. i still only use it for it’s pattern sequencer, but, if you’re new to the computer music scene, this is where to start.

    i could go on for days…i better stop before i piss someone off. ๐Ÿ™‚

  32. Lucy 20 years ago

    I need help burning a cd. I can’t find a place where i can burn a cd.

  33. -Tex- 20 years ago

    Im a youngyun, though I do remember playing mathrabbit on my 1 piece mac back in the day.

    My holy shit moment (the moment i knew things really changed) was over the span of a week.

    first I got a cable modem, to replace my 28.8 dialup that was using aol (1999-2000 when aol sucked the MOST)

    That was amazing, to be downloading more than .5k/sec… but then I upgraded from a Mac clone 166 mhz to a G4 466…

    In one week my downloads went from .5k/sec – 300k/sec.

    I cried……

    I have gotten misty for these things-

    seeing trailors for warcraft III (and now world of warcraft)

    but those arent really shitlist things because they are not/were not new concepts… but they are damn cool.

    Its a tough call with summer rolling around, play games or play outside.. hrm…

  34. apollyon 20 years ago

    The Atari 400 (BASIC in 8 frikken K)

    The Mac Plus

    Illustrator 88

    Photoshop 0.9b (directly led to my career)

    Alias Maya (I can finally do 3D!!!!)

    iPod (music anywhere, any time, just for me)

    Digital Cameras (no more stinky darkrooms)

  35. Andy 19 years ago

    First time reading this blog, just wanted to say hi.

  36. Randy 19 years ago

    -Linux (really – start at kernel 0.99pl14 on SLS distribution – bet none of you have even heard of that one)

    -BASH

    -Descent

    -Tribes

    -City of Heroes

    -Jacob’s Ladder (http://www.woodcraftarts.com/jacob.htm)

    -The vi patch for the OS-9 editor on my CoCo III

    -Usenet

    -Emma Watson (yeah, I’m a dirty old man, and yeah, I know it’s not technology, but…)

  37. Louis 19 years ago

    Team Fortress for Quake 1. changed my life.

  38. Jeff Werner 19 years ago

    BBS

    Soft core 2fps pr0n on 5 1/4 disks

    Return to Zork (my first CDROM game)

    Netscape Navigator and the web

    mp3s

    Flash websites

    Digital cameras

  39. Harpreet 19 years ago

    WIKIPEDIA (www.wikipedia.org)

    mind blown

    world changed

  40. frisbeememex 19 years ago

    Illustrator 1.0 (Bezier curves in 1985 were a serious mindfuck)

    Compound Interest

    Unreal Tournament

    Parabolic Skis

    Star Wars

    The skill/will feedback loop

  41. the 181 18 years ago

    I will come out with the next mind-blowing invention.

  42. K. 18 years ago

    BBS. Definitively was a thriller.

  43. Frank 18 years ago

    In no particular order:

    – masturbation

    – MapQuest

    – CGI

    – Google Maps

    – ecstasy

  44. Arnon 18 years ago

    In chronological order

    – Basic on the Colour Genie… Holy shit! I can make stuff apear on the TV screen!

    – Kings Quest I (on a green phosphorous screen 8088) – Holy shit, you can play a character in an animated movie! And it understands English!

    – Microsoft’s Flight Simulator (on that same screen, 30 minutes later) – Holy shit, you can have a real physical world on that machine!

    – Telnet, agreed. I still remember the excitement. And right after that – ytalk. I logged into a computer abroad, and talked to someone in australia, and felt like I’m in “War Games”. The web is just a corollary for me.

    – Doom, the first game to make me actually feel fear (ok, maybe I need to see a shrink)

    – Matrix I. Holy Shit! He *knows* Kung Fu! I can still remember going out of the movie theater, completely soaked in adrenalin. Too bad the sequels suck.

  45. JC 18 years ago

    Ok,

    In my list I would say, no particular order but

    the Internet, God bless it!!!!

    Macs,

    Flash Drives,

    Java,

    The original NES and the Atari,

    And the last, but not least Smartphones…

    …where you can do anything at the palm of your hand

  46. WBRudie 17 years ago

    Colecovision, the first game system I had (when i was but a wee lad)

    Dragon Warrior (The step up from coleco to the nintendo, i had no idea that there could be a world inside one of those wonderful cartridges)

    Duck Hunt.

    Segways. (A new breed of lazyness!)

    Bullet Trains (The magnetic ones?)

    Dungeons and Dragons. (I wasn’t around for the initial, only being 22, but when I discovered it, I found a bunch of friends who were also interested in it, and saved me from SOME of the social pressures of jr. high/ High school.)

    The Ramones. (The first time I heard the Ramones, I thought, Holy shit, this is a new kind of music! Wave of the future! of course, the first time i heard them, i was 5, but…)

    The Hummer becoming a commercial vehicle. (and, subsequently, people feeling the need to drive decomissioned APC’s around Long Island. LA, I could see, but Long Island?)

  47. Eikre 17 years ago

    No particular order, of course o_~

    ~Porn (Whoa, sex before mine eyes…I didn’t know people could bend like that…)

    ~Wikipedia (As Crowd wisdom dictates…)

    ~ .ogg format (kicks mp3 anyday of the week. Even WMA can sound better than mp3.)

    ~Half-Life 2 (Call me a fan-boy, or whatever, but that had the best FPS storyline I have ever seen, and the Gravity Gun was like no other…)

    ~D&D/Neverwinter Nights/Roleplaying (The fun, the stories!)

  49. NathanLaan 17 years ago

    1. Apple Macintosh

    2. Netscape/Web/HTML

    3. Object Oriented Programming

    4. Napster

    5. BitTorrent

  50. Sambo 17 years ago

    I think one the key “Holy Shit” inventions in the early days of computing was the humble spreadsheet. VisiCalc followed by SuperCalc running on the old apple computers. It certainly changed all of lives of anyone who crunches numbers for a living (or for fun).

  51. rolfhub 17 years ago

    Well, let me see:

    – Google: I still remember when the normal web search was the only option and it was still beta, but the quality of the search results was just so incredibly much better then everything else at that time

    – Wikipedia: I’m still amazed about how well it works, considering that every Joe sixpack from around the world could write crap into a random article, but still, most of them are very high quality, and quite understandable, too

    – Vector graphics: My first encounter with vector graphics were PDF files that had embedded vector graphics, and they were looking great even at the highest zoom level. I was very impressed …

    – Google earth: When we installed it first on the new laptop of a friend of mine, we were simply amazed about how fast and smoothly one can zoom into and out of the area, and how high resolution the Frankfurt (germany) airport is (we live not very far from it, so it was the first location we came up with after our home villages).

    – X forwarding: The local display of the GUI of a program running far away, without having to do a complicated setup and without quality loss (the program windows loop perfectly clear and crisp). Holy cow was I impressed!

    – GPS: Getting your location and speed, anywhere on earth, with a cheap handheld receiver, is just way cool.

    – IMDB.com: The ability to read about each and any flick that ever run anwhere on earth, no matter how short, cheaply made and unknown. I never would have thought there were this many movies made every year, and how old the oldest ones are. Way cool!

    – Unreal (the original game, probably from something like 1998). I remember how impressed I was about the quality of the visuals and sound, even on the cheap, midrange hardware that I had. It was the first time I found the graphics of a game level really that great that I simply forgot any gameplay and just wandered around the level, enjoying the great view.

    – USB sticks: 128 MB of space on a stick that weights about 19 grams and is not much thicker than an ordinary text marker? And that works on any computer, now matter if Windows, Linux or Mac OS (X)? And that is actually quite cheap? Whow!

    – A tool called “PE Explorer”: The ability to graphically edit the user interface of many compiled windows executables is really cool. I never thought this were possible.

    – Eclipse (for Java and PHP development): It’s impressive to see how much more effective and faster you can be with great tools.

    – Live Linux CDs/DVDs: You can start a complete operating system directly from a CD and you got THIS MANY programs that just work right away without any preparation? Whow!

    – Finding out how incredibly old many ideas and concepts in mathematics are: Impressive, how detailed they thought and wrote about stuff that is both well known and really relevant some (sometimes many) centuries later!

  52. Andiyana 17 years ago

    This is not a holy shit moment. This is a *facepalm* moment, related to my omgyayjeph moment earlier. Oh and an omgyaydrew moment that I didn’t really post about.

    You would think after spending hours and hours reading this blog, I would have had an omgyayrands moment right? But I didn’t put 2+2 together there until about… now.

    But now everrrrything makes sense. And since I have now figured it all out and been sufficiently humiliated by overlooking the obvious, I think it is time to slink off to bed in shame. For real this time.

  53. Andiyana 17 years ago

    I know these aren’t necessarily the kind of “holy shit!” items you were looking for as ASMI pointed out, but I think my first two HOLY SHITS are going to have to be that:

    A) This blog has been around at least five years and I just discovered it yesterday. I believe I would be a much cooler and smarter person if I had known about it back then. And…

    B) The internet is a massive, global thing connecting a gazillion people, and one of them, whose work I was going to point to as a holy shit of my own, posted a comment on THIS VERY THREAD. At least, I think it’s him. There can’t be *that* many Jeph’s out there, right?

    Those points taken care of… I would have to say, I agree with all who pointed to mp3, iPod and wikipedia, but they’ve been thoroughly covered already.

    So personal holy shits for me, in no particular order:

    Firefox/Tabbed browsing – I have N.A.D.D. probably as bad as it is possible to get it. I’ll spare you the enumerated list of things I have open, but in this ONE WINDOW, I have *nineteen* tabs open. I love doing a million things at once. I hate having a million windows open. Being able to find my desktop is useful and finally… a solution was created. AMAZING.

    A kind of sub-holy shit could be, “Holy shit! Microsoft’s latest IE release has a tab feature too!” But it really sucks ๐Ÿ™ Well, at least they’re trying.

    Questionable Content/Webcomics – To me this is more about expanding the USE of a technology rather than the ability to put graphics on a webpage– which I’m sure was amazing once, too–but at the time I was first introduced to the web, it was already something you could already do and as far as I knew back then had never been any different.

    So for me, it was seeing a comic strip somewhere that wasn’t the Sunday paper that seemed impressive. Not the fact that you COULD do that with the web, but that somebody thought of it and DID do it, I guess.

    And… yes, I know QC isn’t the *first* webcomic ever, but it’s the first one that I was ever really able to truly relate to. I think the first I ever read was PennyArcade and I’m some nature of a geek for sure, but I’m not much of a gamer so I would only get a handful of jokes. The holy shit about QC specifically was more that there are comics for music geeks too. And he posted *in this thread*, which is so weird.

    Trillian – You mean I can talk to people on AIM, MSN, YAHOO, and ICQ and only be using ONE CHAT CLIENT?! AND IT HAS TABBED WINDOWS?!!!11 WHOAH. I think I need to sit down.

    Spellcheck – Now, if only people would USE it. ๐Ÿ˜€

    Pandora/The Music Genome Project – This is seriously cool. I don’t really know how it works and I don’t care. I was referred to Pandora by a friend and have loved it ever since. Netradio in general is pretty awesome… And did no one mention podcasting? Well, most of these posts are from 2003 or earlier. Yeah, okay, moving on…

    Macs That Run Windows…NATIVELY – ‘Nuff said.

    Skype – My first call on Skype was the best HOLY SHIT moment ever. Suddenly, I could talk to people all over the world, like ACTUALLY TALK TO THEM and I didn’t have to call them and it was FREE and the sound was good and it was completely glorious!

    GoogleMaps/AJAX – Finally, I bother to mention something technologically significant and I am too tired to actually elaborate. It’s nearly 6am here and I haven’t even SEEN my bed since yesterday.

    Okay, I think I am done wasting space in your blog. Mainly because I think I have probably written half a book in here and partly because I am about to pass out on the keys from lack of sleep. But I would like to say, I am loving your blog. I’m so glad I found it.