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Comment by TheTrotters | Hacker News Reader

I wasn’t alive then but I imagine it’s similar to what the iPhone announcement was for me.

Scrolling + rubber band effect, pinch to zoom, or just using your fingers to control a device. It was magical!

For the younger generation those are very normal and mundane things. It’s just how their devices have always worked.

I’d say the MacPaint demo was bigger. We had touch screen devices before the iPhone and several failed attempts at tablets (then called “slates”). The iPhone interface felt like a big leap but still an evolutionary one that we all know someone was eventually going to nail. Whereas MacPaint seemed almost supernatural compared to what was sat on people’s desks before it. Sure it drew a lot from Lisa and Xerox but at that stage most people weren’t familiar with those and that had certainly never believed it would end up in an affordable device any time soon. I remember Amiga invoked similar responses for me too. Then first time I saw an Amiga in the flesh it seemed almost magical.

I don’t think we will ever have breakthroughs like that again because of the way how tech is often previewed in public (to drive up hype) and the laws of diminishing returns with regards to computational upgrades. Plus I think people are more used to seeing hardware breakthroughs so expect more these days.

> Whereas MacPaint seemed almost supernatural compared to what was sat on people’s desks before it.

That's exactly what the experience of using a Mac was like. And it was just beyond comprehension that you could actually get one.

Magical for those that never used a Nokia 7710, released three years earlier, but I agree with the sentiment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710

I had a 7710 for a few weeks, interesting concepts, but half-baked implementation and so slow you couldn’t really use it. Gave it back. It was more of a strange tech demo, than a usable phone. You can’t compare it to the iPhone.

With the half backed support for MMS and other features on iPhone 1.0, I surely can.

What's weird is that I was working on prototype handsets for Nokia in 2004 and I have never seen that handset until today. WTF. (Note: the prototypes I was working on were all designed around stealing Apple's iPod mojo and baking it into their phones)

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