I was a middle schooler in 2002, and it was pretty different. I remember collect calls since cell phones were just starting to proliferate with my classmates. VR aka Virtual Boy had flopped a couple of years earlier. DVDs will still a thing, and so was Blockbuster.

I remember my dad had to use map quest to take me to baseball games and I was listeneinf to music on my CD player while he was cussing because he missed his exit. Porn wasn’t free and you had to rely on playboy mags or wait a while for a single pic to download.

What’s funny is that 2012 to me was drastically different than 2002. But 2012 doesn’t really feel different than 2022. I mean I have an air fryer now, but I can’t really think of much that’s changed from then to now.

2002 was still dial-up internet for many, though broadband was on the scene. The internet was scattered, knowledge and communities were based around n specific domain name forums and video media was not the norm. Ads weren’t nearly as targeted. Technology was still seen as “nerdy” by many youngsters at the time. MySpace was starting its rise.

2012– smartphones had hit critical mass, WiFi was starting to proliferate (as far as publicly and freely available) and I remember just a year or so before getting a kick out of streaming a music video on demand on my google g2 smartphone as I was riding in a car The internet had consolidated into the large names we have today, but it was still finding it’s footing.

Today— AI and VR are household names, though not household tools. We’ve realized by and large that maybe connecting everyone all the time was not a wise idea. Though some wish to go back to less techy time, those days are long gone and will never return.

I am in my mid 30s and remember 2002 clearly. Here's a snapshot:

The Internet was around but streaming video really wasn't. Being able to find everything on YouTube and stream it instantly is a big change today.

Physical media was required to watch anything (outside of television, cable TV, or movie theater), so that meant buying or renting a VHS or DVD (not in HD).

Scheduled TV shows were still a big deal. You couldn't watch on your own schedule. Recording shows became easier with things like Tivo, but that wasn't mainstream in 2002. Recording anything on TV still meant a VCR / VHS tape (bad SD quality and like an hour maximum.)

If you wanted to follow a popular show, you had to watch it at its time slot or you missed it until a Rerun. ("Don't miss CSI, Tuesday at 9 Eastern only on CBS!") Primetime television still mattered to people.

Internet speed was dramatically slower. But there were still many good websites, for almost any topic you could usually find good resources online. Many people still only accessed the Internet at the local library or net cafes, and it wasn't uncommon for someone to go days not logging online.

Web shopping was just beginning to be accepted as safe. Amazon was still seen as a niche site mainly for books. EBay was very popular, but people still mailed physical paper money orders for items. It was slower.

The idea of ordering almost everything online and having it arrive next day wasn't around, although this was predicted as the way it would go.

Cell phones were far, far more basic. No smartphones but we had basic texting. People talked on phones far more, but minutes and per-text charges were a concern.

Kids and teenagers didn't all have cell phones the way they do now. It was common for young people not to have their own phone until they were of driving age, and then it was more to have in case of emergency. Many people kept their cell phones literally turned off most of the time.

Home phones / landlines were still everywhere. You memorized important phone numbers.

Cars were about the same, really. Today we have more nav systems and touch screens but a 2000 car is perfectly usable and about the same.

Car GPS was far less common then. Road trips or even just driving places was a bit more challenging, services like MapQuest existed but you often printed turn by turn directions onto paper and had to follow along during the drive. This seems archaic now.

There were nav systems like Garmin and Magellan but they were seen as "fancy / expensive" and still pretty rare.

Drones! These were not around. The average person or even tech enthusiast in 2002 still saw drones as sci-fi / Star Wars-y. The motors, sensors, computers, and batteries weren't good enough yet. Military drones got attention because of Afghanistan but these were huge and still fairly classified.

We didn't think drones would just be flying around like normal in the near future, this wasn't on anybody's radar. The idea that you could just buy a quadracopter able to hover, stabilize itself, take video, and avoid obstacles was seen as some far-future Terminator stuff.

Overall, life was mostly the same really, just far less "always online." Nobody had the Internet in their pockets yet. People's "spheres" or worlds were smaller.

I'd say smartphones, drones, and always-on, streaming Internet and video are the biggest changes.

For me personally, 2012 wasn't that different to now. I had a laptop, a smartphone, spent a lot of time on social media. 2002 on the other hand was a completely different world. We didn't have internet at home at that point.

Mom answering the phone meant the titty pic you’ve been loading for the last 30 minutes would fail. Playing PC games with friends meant hauling the computer, the monitor, keyboard and mouse into the back of the Ford Windstar. You laughed at the nerds taking notes on their Palm Pilots. Watching a movie meant going to the Blockbuster and renting a VHS cassette. RuneScape when it first came out was absolutely revolutionary. MSN messenger was the shit. Neopets was the best thing since Beanie Babies, and their in-game currency had more utility than Bitcoin does today.

I had just graduated high school in 2002 and started at a service academy. Laser discs were still a thing, the new mini cassette player was dying out and iPod was new. People genuinely (in most common circles) thought that AI was AGI and wouldn’t be around for a long time. There were a lot of comparisons to the 60s on why we didn’t have flying cars. There was zero insight into how AI/ML would impact life. Interesting now that there is a culture looking at future events as a side note. STRATFOR published, “The Next 100 Years” from a geopolitical perspective and I remember thinking about how future wars will be fought but couldn’t comprehend an RC aircraft could become an antonymous platform of war. In this window I joined and quit Facebook as one of the original 200K users and had a new thing called Gmail beta.

2012- after graduation laptops overtaking desktops was a big deal. It was subtle over time but I remember having a feeling of there is no way they can compete. Analytical programs to assist in quantitative studies were just breaking out. Wild when we saw what the “new world” could be and how much faster we could process information. Protecting PPI and my digital footprint became a thing. Bitcoin was front and center on a side hustle that was considered “super fringe.” Started to understand the difference between a program and app- specifically if we could use an iPhone camera for augmented reality.

2022- expanding homomorphic encryption to data in use at scale! The integration of ISR and satellites for near real time tactical edge computing, forgetting every phone number I ever learned and realizing I’m dependent on my person computer (cell phone) for knowledge retrieval. So the biggest jump personally was that it became more important to know where to find information rather than retaining bulk data as an expert.

Young'uns I still remember 8bit processors in 1980s and loading programs from cassette tape. My father was still using IBM-style cards at work when I was a child, I messed up a whole stack playing with them. One card was a line of code. He had to sort it back by hand.

I think the biggest factor of change in the last 20 years was the leap in computing and communication speed. It took us from the PC era into the internet era. This meant an explosion in online media and indirectly allowed the collection of huge datasets that are being used to train AI today.

The things I've seen. I remember Geoffrey Hinton presenting his pre-deep-learning paper "Restricted Boltzmann Machines" around 2005. That instantly got my attention and I started following the topic, back then ML was a pariah. 12 years later I was working in AI. I have seen blow by blow from the front seat every step AI has made since 2012 when things got heated up. I read the Residual Neural Network paper the same day it was published, and witnessed the birth of transformer. I have seen GANs come and go, and even talked with the original author Ian Goodfellow right here on reddit before he got famous. I got to train many neural nets and play with even more. Much of what I learned is already useless, GPT-3 and SD are so open ended they make projects that took years take just weeks now.

Funny thing, when Hinton published the RBM paper he was using unsupervised learning. I thought it was very profound. But in 2012 the big breakthroughs were supervised learning (ImageNet). For five years only supervised learning got the attention and admiration. But in the last 5 years unsupervised won the spotlight again. How the wheel turns.

Here's my experience:

2002: I had the internet but it was still dial up. Would get broad band in next few years. Feel phones were becoming more common but majority didn't have one yet. Also it was mainly for phone calls with maybe a few simple built in games. GPS probably existed but you needed a dedicated device. Social media in its modern form didn't exist. No video hosting sites like YouTube existed. MySpace or Facebook didn't exist yet. There were many other precursor simpler websites and forums. The internet was a foreign concept at this point to the majority especially older generations. You have to understand that at this time people were frightened about the thought of shopping online and sharing personal data online. TVs and monitors were mainly huge box crv types. Flat screen tvs existed but it was pretty expensive. Had to go to the bank to deposit checks and no online billing so I had to send checks over mail for payment for subscriptions or whatever.

2012: First year of mass adoption of smart phones which coincided with mass adoption of social media going mainstream. Tinder came out this year and the stigma against internet dating disappeared. Everyone suddenly had gps with their phones. Netflix started streaming services. YouTube monetizing became easier for content creators. This marked the start of a revolution of how people interacted and entertained themselves. Blockbuster and other movie rental places died. Strip malls which were already dying accelerated their death spirals due to competition first from Walmart and subsequently online shopping. Didn't have to go to banks as much to cash checks anymore due to mobile deposits starting. That said Direct Deposit had already chopped down on that substantially by 2002. Online payment means I practically never need to send checks over the mail.

2022: not too much of a difference from 2012. Mainly refining and maturation of things that existed in 2012 and the cultural and political impact that it led to.

I recall all 3 periods, but 2012 to 2022 is what I want to focus on.

Mobile phones, we had them in 2012 but they did not feel or worked like you could just do anything you wanted with one, not all web sites worked as great on mobile, and they would not charge fast, but battery would die quickly, cameras on the phones were not comparable to a dedicated camera.

If you take a foldable from today u do feel that the device came from a different era, not just a generation ahead but a difference u would have feel between a computer made in 1995 and computer in 2015 that leap but in 10 Years.

Cars were not smart at all, comparing S class from 2012 to the one from 2022 is absolutely shocking.

2012 we did not have real smart home experience, voice controlled, easy to integrate etc, cross apps and all, smart home was more of a conceptual thing.

2012 had no real time working powerfull ai for image recognition or speech.

2012 did not have really smart wearables, even Apple watch first generation from 2015 did not have a killer feature.

That being said I think the leap in past decade was massive especially in things you u don't see, we did not think we can make 1nm scale processors back in 2012, we thought the hard limit was around whatever 10nm? Diagnostics and genome related progress, material science, those things moved so much in 10 years that I bet it feels like a hundred years has passed

You should have seen the internet in the 90s man what a weird place in time

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Like most inventions that take off, both the internet, and then the smart phone solved multiple problems at once. I believe that is why those 2 have been the most impactful.

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Well the main thing is the internet and its uses and Inrerface, I. E. Smart phones and tablets and falt screens, Xbox and PS... Cars, air travel, shipping, houses, all most of appliances, nothing much changed unless related to the internet...

In 2012, Internet connections were much slower (40x in my case), there were far less YouTube videos and they were of much worse quality and sophistication. Android smartphones were a bad experience (for me at least), I don't know about iPhones, but my friend switched from iPhone to Android in 2012. Many people still used Core 2 Duos. SSDs were not common at all (and when someone bought one, it was usually about 120 GB), although I had one. Most people did not have a smartphone yet (I had one). New laptops battery life was 2-4 hours instead of 12-24 hours. Only the newest laptops had a 1080p display. Wireless earphones or headphones were very rare and they offered much worse sound quality than today, the battery would last a maximum of 3 hours (writing from experience). AI was seen as science-fiction outside of machine-learning, Singularity and Futurism circles. There were far less emojis than now. Language translation sucked and was almost unusable. The WWW was far smaller than it is today. Electric cars weren't really a thing outside of Tesla enthusiasts and many people were ridiculing an electric car idea. Elon Musk wasn't yet well known. Smartphonography sucked compared to now. DLSRs were getting popular, good mirrorless photo camera wasn't a thing yet. 4K wasn't a thing. More than 60 Hz wasn't a thing. People gamed on Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. Angry Birds were very popular. Anime wasn't as popular outside of Japan as it is now. You couldn't legally buy a digital manga. China's GDP was 35% lower than today, Ireland's GDP was 58% lower than today. Overall, it was a different time than today.

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The main difference for me between 2002 and 2012 was how smartphones let you be online all the time, and everything that comes with that. I distinctly remember being lost in a city with a friend around that time. We had to call someone we thought would be near a computer to MapQuest directions for us. By 2012, basically no one would have that experience. (I actually got my first personal smartphone in 2013, but my SO had had one for a couple years at by that point.) The quality of resources for just about anything available online jumped quite a bit during that time, too. In high school, going to a large library was still useful for some school projects. By the time I was done with college, you could at least do a first pass at gathering information on any subject online. Video on the internet was terrible in 2002, but YouTube was very much a thing by 2012, as were other ways to stream TV and Movies. I think desktops for general home use phased out in those years, with laptops and later phones and tablets becoming the primary device format for consumption, and leaving desktops for work and gamers. In 2002 technology was still largely for kids (who learned about it in school) and nerds (who have always liked tech). By 2012, your Grandma had an iPad. As kind of a final note on that period, there was a line in an early episode of The Wire that's something along the lines of "What are you going to do with a computer?" That line would have fallen completely flat by 2012.

2012 to 2022 has seemed to me to be more of a period of refinement. Connection speeds, wi-fi availability, etc. have all improved drastically. Devices are thinner, and sometime feel higher quality. Basically, a lot of the same trends from 2002 to 2012 have continued, but there hasn't been a paradigm shift like there was in the early 2000s with the finishing up of the trend from the late 1990s of getting computing devices and internet connections into homes, and then getting most people online everywhere via mobile. If anything, I guess the biggest change 2012 to 2022 has been the advancements in safety technology in cars, with lane keeping, automatic braking, and so on.

I remember using screwdriver to tune the image on tv from commodore 64 playing a game from small casete... to put it this way kids today are growing up with face to face calls and fun on demand, my father remembers the first tv in his village... it was black and white. He told me about the chimney commercial where some letters would go out of chimney, he would run out to see them....

And now he is witness of the technology we have today...

Or to put this way from 2012 till now there was mor e progress than from 1950 till 2012... damn

I was in college in 2002. It was an era of the dawn of early social media and the first time high-speed (though still slow by today’s standards) wifi internet was becoming widely available. The PS2 reigned supreme in video games, and the internet was still a place you “went” instead of an overarching aspect of daily life.

In 2012 smart phones had begun their domination in earnest and the social media take over of the world was in full swing. The iPhone was changing everything, and stocks and crypto were exploding due to the free money printing - it seemed like everybody had a plan to get rich. I was one of the first people on WSB back during these times. And one of the first people into dogecoin a year after that.

And now in 2022, gestures vaguely. Here we are.

The year is 2022. When your phone battery die, you are back to 1992, but without the payphones. This is how much technology changed...