I think the era--to the grandparents' point--was a significant factor. Back then we still believed in immediately transformational technology. There was a widespread belief that an aviation or space-travel breakthrough was imminent. There was hope for incredible new energy sources. Effectively, there was a collective hope that there were undiscovered realms of physics that would unlock a completely new period of human history.

We have made amazing technological leaps in the last 20 years, but you don't have to go far searching Hacker News to find articles complaining about evolutionary progress instead of revolutionary.

I wonder what Gen Z thinks about technological progress. As a millennial that straddled the analog-digital divide, I took huge leaps of progress for granted. My friends and I compared American and Soviet fighter jets, we compared horsepower in muscle cars, we compared specs on processors. We also tinkered with everything, and nearly every system could be easily understood by poking at the internals. Now, what's the point?

Anyway, that's a long way of saying that the Segway hype is a generational thing, I don't think we'll ever see anything like that again.