Certainly one of my most joyous technology memories concerns Project Origami. The trouble from Microsoft, Intel and others launched ultra-mobile PCs, or UMPCs. The devices, akin to squeezing a full Windows machine into something concerning the size of a midrange iPad, often complete with a physical keyboard, utterly fascinated me back around 2006.

At the moment I had roughly zero money, so buying one in every of the devices was entirely out of the query. But, while visiting an electronics store with my father after the primary round of UMPCs got here out — we were probably hunting up a chunk of drugs for his business — I walked down one aisle of computing hardware, and, to my astonishment, I discovered a promotional endcap of UMPC devices. I could the devices that I had spent a lot time nerding out over. It was a bit like meeting a celeb to my teenaged self. I used to be bewitched.

I’ve had other moments of pure tech bliss in my life: Back in highschool when my friends and I noticed that because of Gmail’s generous storage limits and my school’s reasonable web, we could ditch USB sticks entirely and just email files to at least one one other from across the identical table. It felt like magic, to make use of bits as an alternative of anything that we needed to carry in our pocket.

Technology has a simply beautiful way of taking your breath away at times, showing you that there’s a recent shortcut or recent way of considering that’s now before you that was previously entirely occluded. That is how the iPhone launch felt, to spotlight a widely known example of the phenomenon.

Not much since then has given me the identical jolt. Perhaps once I fell in love with Twitter, realizing right away that I just tweet as much as I wanted, and nobody could stop me; the primary moment I had my very own blog on the web and I used to be free of any form of publishing constraint.