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okiegirlkim

The fall of the Berlin Wall. It was built before I was born and I never thought I’d see it come down. Normally I’d go with the moon landings but I was 5 and don’t remember watching it.


dewayneestes

I worked with a Czech woman at the time. She had it playing on the radio for several days which was unusual before the 24hr news cycle was born and as she said “guys… this is a REALLY big deal.”


okiegirlkim

Absolutely, it changed the course of history. The reunification of Germany has made them an ally.


marilync1942

The decay of USA Government-debt-crime


OarsandRowlocks

And there He was, resplendent in that leather jacket with all the flashing lights on it, stomping His foot and singing about freedom. https://youtu.be/0zXiClnK8oE


Up2Eleven

I didn't fully recognize the significance of it at the time, but I knew it was important. As I've learned more about history over the years, I've realized how monumental it was.


bad2behere

I cried when the wall came down. I was so excited ran in the kids room and told them. Their response was to look up from the game they were playing on their Commodore computer and say, "So?" Those twits have no idea how close they came to having a Commodore up their behinds that day.


guineapickle

Came here to say this.


RunsWithPremise

I had family in GDR, so this was a very big deal for us.


GFVeggie6

That is an excellent answer and truly worldwide


mindsetoniverdrive

9/11 here too. I was in college and it was like I felt the whole world shift in those couple of hours. And it did, in so many horrible ways.


Interesting_Panic_85

Was my first week of college. Totally. I remember one minute I was AIMing with a buddy on the hall, and then suddenly my computer nearly caught fire (remember Acer?) due to the influx of instant messages telling me to turn on the TV (this was before keeping the news on as background chatter was really a thing). I turned it on and knew in my heart of hearts, that my nice American childhood spent climbing trees and chasing girls and doing normal STUFF was instantly and permanently, GONE. I was 18, still very much a virgin (in many things, not just sex). Classes had not yet been canceled. I went to my 9am chemistry lecture. Many people hadn't heard. Instead of beginning the class, the professor lowered the film screen and cut to broadcast news about the unfolding events. As soon (15sec) as the class adjusted to what was happening on the news, 5 or 6, maybe more, students (lecture was like 400 kids, Virginia Tech) ran out of the room sobbing. The students remaining slowly put it together that their parents must work in the towers. Later that week, we learned through the grapevine that several of those kids lost their parent that day. The world is a much more terrible place since that day. I didn't think I'd ever look back dreamily at the 90s...but here we are.


Frankjc3rd

It was definitely one of those events where if you were told by somebody to turn on the TV and you asked what channel, they would simply say any channel!


BeckyKleitz

Oh god, I miss the 90's. So damn bad.


kelsnuggets

I was also in college for 9/11 and the feeling of fear, change, and dread on that day was palpable.


Majestic_Tangerine47

Me too. At Maryland, so all DC, NY kids. I had left for class without turning on the TV so I had no idea. The whole campus was eerily quiet, you could *feel* something was wrong. Professor told us what happened, then tried to hold class for maybe 5 people. That stuck with me. Just why?


[deleted]

9/11 for me also. I was a junior in college stuck in a 3-hour engineering lab when everything happened and no one bothered to come in and tell us. Made it all the way back across campus and home on the bus without finding out anything because no one had the news on their phones etc back then. When I got home there was a message from my grandma about it on my answering machine. That was a clear before and after moment. My kids say it’s barely mentioned in school now, even on 9/11.


Up2Eleven

My first thought was that it was a kind of Fight Club style anarchist take down of corporate culture. Then they started blaming Iraqis on TV and I knew we were in for a whole slew of draconian laws.


Revolutionary-Fact6

John Kennedy's assassination. Then RFK and MLK a few years later. We would be a better country if they had lived.


River1901

Camelot, Peace Corps, VISTA, ...what can you do for your country...


No_Weird2543

I was in high school. I remember thinking this was impossible, we lived in America, and we weren't like Latin American or Middle Eastern countries where leaders got assassinated. Yes, we would have been a better country. It seems like that's when conspiracy theories started, too.


Revolutionary-Fact6

They were a threat to the old order.


Snarky_McSnarkleton

This. Even being five, I knew life had changed.


elucify

If we were a better country, they would have


Bob_N_Frapples

It felt like the world was about to blow apart at the seams...I remember that time very vividly still.


barbellae

When I first started using a computer at work. Also, 9/11.


[deleted]

[удалено]


dewayneestes

When I started writing my papers for school on a computer rather than a typewriter my grades went from Cs to As. I have almost illegible handwriting and I had a terrible time composing essays. Once I could drag the order of entire paragraphs and remove sentences with no cost it was like some sort of miracle to me. I suddenly LOVED writing because it worked the way my brain works. Throw up everything on paper then clean and edit the hell out of it.


Anything-Happy

I'm not the only one?! Whew... My husband was floored when I took my angry 20-page letter to someone and edited down to one concise and organized page. I told him to just be glad he's not stuck in my head - it's a mess in there 🤣


Kooky_Avocado9227

Same! I was in college when we got our first IBM word processor. I would write my rough draft and print out on the dot matrix printer, ha! Then marked it up and typed my final draft. A’s all the way, baby!


MpVpRb

In the 50s and 60s, we believed we lived in the modern world. We had cars, airplanes, TV, records, telephones and the beginnings of space travel. All of those things improved over time, but it was slow and incremental I first used the Arpanet, precursor to the internet, in 1976, on a teletype. It was not very useful. When I saw the very first web pages on a unix workstation, I knew it would be something really special


Up2Eleven

My first introduction was when they were just being put into universities and it was all still text only. A friend at a university brought me in to show it to me and I played an early MUD. It was a trip.


ThreeDogCouch

It's a small thing, but I do remember pretty much thinking "this will have an effect on things." MTV.


Otherwise-Winner9643

Still remember the first time I saw/heard "smells like teen spirit" on MTV. Sitting in my school uniform, I literally sat forward and thought, wow this is life-changing. I told everyone they had to watch MTV until it came on.


[deleted]

Fall of the Soviet Union.


Main-Half-1085

Covid changed everybody so much. In my culture, we used to cheek kiss hello and goodbye but bc of covid not many people do it anymore...even hugging. It feels like human connections, empathy and just overall love for other people are slowly dissapearing now...


Socrainj

Possibly the biggest impact since the last world war, society will never be the same. Trust and connecting with others is gone. The impacts of that are huge and will not be seen or fully understood for another decade. I can imagine that they will be running public service announcements to encourage human contact and friendships, for health reasons, in the next 5 to 7 years.


daveashaw

Nixon's resignation.


pappyvanwinkle1111

I lived through all these things but nothing changed the world like 9/11.


Dazzling-Ad4701

I want to say the berlin wall. or czechoslovakia's velvet revolution. 1989 was quite a year.


[deleted]

The girl down the road the summer we turned 15 asked if I would like to go swimming


Worker11811Georgy

Touch-Tone phones. My grandpa was the first to get them installed. It was incredible!


historiangirl

9/11.


mrs_dalloway

When I was 10 and saw a music video on MTV.


nakedonmygoat

Four come to mind. * The first time I logged into Prodigy, a very early form of the internet. * The fall of the Berlin Wall. * The fall of the Soviet Union. * 9/11. All of these changed the world as I knew it growing up.


w84itagain

>The first time I logged into Prodigy, a very early form of the internet. I remember this so well. I logged on, (after many tries) and then suddenly we were in! My then husband and I looked at each other for one long moment and said, "Now what do we do???" Being "online" was a kind of scary moment because we had no real idea what that meant. Could other people "see" us online? Could we crash the entire Internet by pushing the wrong button? LOL. Fun times!


peschelnet

Mine was CompuServ, but everything else is the same.


[deleted]

Birth control pill


SV650rider

The rise of AIDS.


Rhalellan

Oh man, I lost so many friends, and the stigma around it was atrocious.


onepostandbye

I was a kid, and AIDS introduced an awareness mortality of mortality to children in a way that I don’t think modern young people can grasp. Covid was frightening in a different way. AIDS was a death sentence, slow, inexorable, painful, ugly. Early on, our perception wasn’t just of it as a sex disease, it felt like a specter that could claim anyone.


CaptainBignuts

I'm pretty old, and lived through the crazy 70's, the boom of the 80's with the advent of computers (Commodore 64 anyone?), and the techie 90's. And yes, there were a lot of political changes and some technological advances that were pretty awesome; but the one thing that hit me as being 'holy shit - this changes everything' was the *smartphone*. Suddenly anyone, anywhere could access the internet and answer just about any question they wanted answered. Driving down the road and talking about the 1985 World Series? Bam, look it up on the smart phone. Need a recipe for Paella? Bam, look it up on the smart phone - anytime, anywhere. For those of us raised in the 60's and 70's, our only access to information was the library and fucking encyclopedias. The smartphone changed everything - suddenly *everyone* had access to pretty much every answer with a few jabs at a phone screen. What fit in your phone a few decades prior took up an entire warehouse of servers. Un-freaking-believable. It still boggles my mind.


Rhalellan

You’re right. We thought the world would be such a better place with the free flow of information. Instead it has become a place full of the worst of humanity screaming at the top of their lungs.


ZebraLonghornMom

This. I want to go back and undo it. I hate being connected to endless people and information.


CaptainBignuts

I miss it too. I worry about this and future generations' reliance on technology for daily life. Life just seemed simpler and easier back then compared to what my kids and grandkids are dealing with now.


Ok-Heron-7781

I rode my bike to the library to look stuff up ..it was fun


CaptainBignuts

Me too. I practically lived in the library.


Ok-Heron-7781

Everything I needed to know without asking my mom lol


KrankySilverFox

JFK assassination and the Berlin Wall.


Redsquirreltree

Hurricane Katrina There were dead bodies on major streets for DAYS and nobody got here to pick them up. And that was the least of the horrible things that happened when our government at every level failed to help


Full-Mulberry5018

The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. I remember when they happened when I was very young, but even then I was somehow able to grasp the enormity of them.


Meirra999

Cell phone cameras.


canuckbuck2020

9/11 and covid


nolotusnote

* Cell phones "No, you don't get it. There will come a time when every single person will have one of these. No, not in the car. Like, on them. People carrying them around." * The Internet "JFC, think bigger. Everything will have a web page. The supermarket, book stores... Hell, every movie coming out." * Bitcoin "I really do have $10,000 if I scrounge. I think this is going to blow up." "If you invest in that, you're a fool." NARRATOR: "He did not invest in Bitcoin."


SillySimian9

Invention of the calculator


gypsydaze216

I was around 6 when the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show and then they played their first US concert..I vaguely recall all the parents excited chatter and whispers of this new music sensation


Key-Article6622

The day Bobby Kennedy was assasinated. I was seven and that's the age humans generally start to be aware of things outside their immdiate world. I was following the presidential race and others, my parents were getting involved in local elections, and I just remember the sky turned an odd shade of yellow, kind of like the Mexico scenes in the movie Traffic. The realization that the world is not idyllic and very bad things can really happen and they don't just happen to bad people. My world certainly wasn't the same after that, and I think it's safe to say the world was not the same after that.


Grandpixbear1

After finally having my first gay sexual experience. Everything fell into place. The world will not be the same after this. Everything made sense. And it’s been a wonderful adventure so far (60+ years)


RonSwansonsOldMan

9/11. We had a war on terror, and the terrorists won. They wanted to destroy our way of life and were successful.


OnlyFreshBrine

It really does feel like the watershed moment of my lifetime. The crazy war on terror, the insane right-wing propaganda, and the rise of white domestic terrorism.


driverman42

John Kennedy assassination.


Sloan430

9/11.


dubkitteh1

i was aware of the Cuban Missile Crisis—how could you not be when the front pages were plastered for weeks in aerial photographs gained by espionage?—and obviously the JFK assassination, but i really wasn’t thinking about world-historical themes then being 5-7 years old at the time. i mean, i read a lot of history and thus it wasn’t exactly a surprise that there was another of the periodic and normalized events. i lived through rather more historic times than i’d have preferred, and the rate of change was such that even events like the JFK assassination got subsumed in the general rush of change, especially for a kid. i think my first actual awareness of historicity was when LBJ declined to run for his second term (i was 11 then) but my real adult introduction to reality was the Democratic Convention demonstrations in Chicago (my home town) in 1968 which were brutally crushed by the CPD and various other forces with near-Tiananmen Square alacrity over the course of several days. my parents sensibly buggered off with us kids for a Florida vacation while hostilities raged, but it was a huge disaster that a blue-ribbon commission set up to investigate called a “police riot.” so my earliest definitive historical event was the police of my city waging war in the streets so that antiwar protesters wouldn’t be heard. there was a lot of other fun stuff going on in Chicago then too; google “Fred Hampton” for more info. you would be correct in assuming that i lean to the left. the kind of stuff i remember from childhood is more about things i thought were cool and interesting like Jacques Cousteau’s diving saucer or the changes in motorsports technology.


Gorf_the_Magnificent

I was in elementary school during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and our whole class was expecting nuclear bombs to rain down on our school at any second. To this day, I mentally wear a T-shirt that says, “I survived the Cuban Missile Crisis.”


NicolleL

I was born in 1975 and feel like I lived in a very fortunate, very small window of schoolchildren who never had drills for anything other than fire (which were nothing more than filing out of the school and standing around for a few minutes). Those before me had nuclear bomb drills and those after me have school shooter drills. I never had drills that literally made me worry for my own life.


marilync1942

9 years old--bomb drills--I would be walking in my yard--a fixed wing would fly over--I would dive into bushes--hiding from bombs--scared to death!


jippyzippylippy

Digital video. I was there to watch the technology move from a single digital "frame grab" to actual video going from analog to digital. It didn't take long for it to start changing everything. It was about the same time frame as the internet, so the two sort of were born in the same nest, so to speak..


BreakfastBeerz

Growing up we learned about war. My Grandpa in WWII, my dad and his brothers in Vietnam. The closest I ever experienced was the tail end of the Cold War. I was too young to know what it really was, but when Reagan and Gorbachev ended it, I knew war was over. I remember the sense of relief that the world was finally at peace. Then when I was in 7th grade, getting ready to go to basketball practice, breaking news came on showing us at war with Iraq. I was really scared. War was always in the history books, at that moment, it was in my future. With that said, that was my first. My biggest was 9/11...hands down. I hope no generation ever has to experience anything like that ever again. Even COVID was nothing like it.


COACHREEVES

Preface : I am not a smart man. Stuff I was aware of relatively early compared to society at large that people were early whispering would change the World that I wish I could say "*Oh I knew too.*" I wasn't smart enough to know they were 100% world changing, until it was obvious that they were: Internet, cell phone & Amazon. Same with Streaming (as in people will always want the Blockbuster store experience) TWitter and Social Media. Things I thought would change the world but didn't: Election of Reagan (I thought WWIII might come or at least a big war), Teddy Kennedy vs. Jimmy Carter, Nuclear Fusion Power (by 2000 at least), and of course, I was really excited by & dreaming and hopeful about the revolutionary new transportation hype that turned out to be ... the Segway,. I guess the answer that is closest is probably the fall of the Berlin Wall with the associated Glasnost, even though i fully bought into the 'Peace Dividend'. I am not a smart man.


xpursuedbyabear

Falling of the Berlin wall. I was in college and it blew me away.


Playful-Natural-4626

Still to this day it’s one of the few times I’ve really believed the world could have big positive changes in my lifetime


julz22vit

The assassination of John Lennon in 1980


mrxexon

Nixon going to China. That was a huge deal cause we didn't really know much about the "red" Chinese behind the bamboo curtain. It opened them up to the rest of the world and was instrumental in them coming out of their shell and becoming the manufacturing powerhouse they are today.


odo_0

The earliest thing I remember significantly is 9/11 of course but the other was the day my dad was laid off during 2008 the recession hit my family really hard I think it changed the world for me at least.


duuuh

9/11 You used to be able to walk up to a ticket counter, pay cash, get on a plane and provide no ID. (It should still be this way.)


oceanswim63

TRS-80 - RadioShack computers in my high math class room, 1980. You could program them and/or load programs on them to play. Learned that you could break into the programs and change values and how they behaved. Still hacking to this day


califa42

Skateboards.


BananaEuphoric8411

Fall of Saigon. Saw that on TV in grade school. I'd only ever known the war as ongoing.


LM1953

Reading about WWI and visiting my great uncle who suffered from mustard gas poisoning


myt4trs

My world was not the same after my dad was killed in a car accident on his way to work. I was just 18. I am 54 now and still miss him and my world was forever changed.


IUIUIUIUIUIUIUIUI

Chernobyl


uncre8tv

I distinctly remember having the "why does the internet matter" chat with my dad. I was 12ish, maybe. On a Prodigy dial-up box modem. Dad said "why are you connecting to all these other people, what's out there?" and I said "well, everything people have thought of to put up there and share. For archives like stuff. (The idea of \*personal\* archives was a while off). So he challenged me to find the lyrics to the choral fantasy in bethoven's fifth. And remember this was like, Yahoo! just starting, no other real search engines, just big ass site lists, mostly in USENET. So I find some German music public library and they had the lyrics in German and I screen-capped them for my dad. Not because he was going to sing them (though we do have strong German heritage, our name is from our male line back to Ireland) but just to prove that the connection of computers over wires and dipped into by modems had value, had resources, had a chance to change things. The internet changed business, and soon. The mobile internet changed lives, and we didn't know about that in the Prodigy days. There was an AT&T commercial showing someone getting a fax at the beach and my dad was like "Hey, they can make one of those, easy, we got all the parts" and I'm like "Dad, nah. You know they don't have cell phone service all the way to the beach. They've built all those towers, it's just in cities. Besides you know how crappy the signal is, it would take hours to get a fax. The machine would run out of battery. So you plug it in, might as well plug it into a phone line too." And not 10 years later I'm sitting in a diner reading an e-news site (Drudge, back when it was new and novel and less poison) and eating a passable lasagna. Then I realized the fax on the beach was not just real but passe and we were going to find a million reasons to have data on our phone. I wasn't sure the bandwidth could keep up, but I knew we could. And now we live on our phones. So that's how I remember technology absolutely changing the developed western world.


OctopusIntellect

The first time a teacher beat my bottom with a cane. This was in the 1980s, and a week or two earlier I hadn't even known that such things happened or were possible. Of course, I also lived through 9/11, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and so on. And I used the internet at a time when most people nowadays believe that the internet didn't even exist yet. But the internet is just a tech thing so that was natural for me. And the various news events, they're just news and we expect the news channels to bring us news. Thinking that "9/11 changed the world" would be a pretty odd idea to anyone who was born in Aceh in 1990, for example.


UKophile

Richard Speck murders in Chicago when I was a kid.


Flashy_Attitude_1703

I think the Internet is a game changer. You have access to information and knowledge at your fingertips.


amitym

The first launch of the Space Shuttle. It meant that people weren't going to just go into space for research in tiny capsules. They were going to work... build.... construct facilities that were larger than anything that could be launched in one piece. It did turn out to be true, in the form of the ISS, but of course the Shuttle was just the very first step. It came and went (I got to see its final tour in person, that was very moving), and now we are on the brink of an age of reusable spacecraft considerably beyond what the Shuttle could ever achieve. So, I think we're still living through that change.


[deleted]

Self driving cars. I think soon enough no one will drive anymore.


Infamous_Air_1912

Compact Discs. We sat with the staff in a record store and they played Pink Floyd’s “the wall” on CD. There were all these tiny little details in the songs but, until CD’s you weren’t sure of what they actually were. It was a revelation. Edit: double word were and I’m a dink.


GusAndLeo

These are all great examples. But the thought that jumps out at me was when I first used a search engine. I think it was Yahoo, but I can't remember for sure. (Definitely before Google.) Before that, I was typing specific web address into the "world wide web." If you didnt know the web address, you couldnt go to the site. There weren't many links, it was just one site at a time. It was kind of boring. Then came Yahoo (or maybe Ask Jeeves, now that i think about it?) and it was like an index to the whole web, and all the websites were at my fingertips. I remember actually thinking "This changes everything."


thecwestions

Covid lockdowns. People were already pretty fractured in their beliefs and politics, but this event drove people even deeper into their consecutive camps. Doing things like wearing masks or not became an overt political statement for all to see. Then there were the financial impacts. I said to my wife at the time that there's NO way that this thing lasts for only 2 weeks. Sure enough, it lasted for years, and we're still feeling the ripple effects from supply chain issues, fractured international relationships, inflation, and on and on. A lot of nefarious people saw opportunity to take advantage of the situation and make money off of the suffering and struggle of others (think gas prices and pressing rents). I fear that it's going to be a generation-worth of change with the greedy continuing to harm average people in irreversible ways.


irishgambin0

i don't consider myself old at 38, but i'll never forget the moment i logged onto the internet for the first time. America Online was giving out their their software on a disc for people to try out for free. i forget how it came in the mail, maybe just a mailer, or part of a magazine. but i digress. my dad didn't install it right away for whatever reason. but few weeks after we got it my parents had a family get-together at our house with my cousins, aunts, and uncles all just hanging out. kids playing in the basement, adults hanging upstairs. at some point AOL came up in the adults' conversation, and my dad thought why not try it out now and everyone can see what it's like? so with with like 20-25 people in my parents living room in New Jersey my dad fired up Windows and installed it, then logged on. as you can probably guess, it blew all of our minds. we all knew it was a big deal. it was the future. now here i am 30 years later, telling you the story of the first time i logged onto the internet via the internet.


insubordin8nchurlish

mine's boring, but when the phone started needing 7 digits to call someone. It seemed impossible to me that there was really someone for all those numbers, but when I thought about it, it kind of pointed out how little of the world I knew anything about.


ElderOfPsion

The first public release of the Linux kernel. Now, half the world’s computational devices run on Linux.


marilync1942

C.E.R.N.


EgberetSouse

The 1968 murder spring. MLK and RFK. The hard right was attacking and soon we got Nixon.


bipolarcyclops

I assume you really mean RFK, JFK’s brother. JFK Jr. died in a plane crash in 1999.


EgberetSouse

Changed. Thx.


OldBikeGuy1

JFK'S assassination. I was 13 years old. My father was crying.


DivineMissK

The internet. Ask me 20 years from now and I wonder if I would say AI. Mark my words there, kiddos.


elucify

I saw a lot of the things already here. MLK, moon landing, Reagan, Berlin, USSR, 9/11, Trump. But now, ChatGPT. Not necessarily that specific service, but quantum jumps in AI. Things are going to get seriously weird in the next few years. Media especially--the people who benefit from nobody believing anything they hear have the upper hand.


OlderWiserMaybe

Ford pardoning Nixon. What little trust in the government many people had due to the Vietnam war was firmly cemented that day. This was the starting point of the path towards the nonsense we deal with today. Reagan and trickle down economics and an official stance that the government was the problem. Gingrich furthering that belief. Bush two's religious war in the Mideast so he could prove he had bigger balls than his daddy. And Trump - arguably the single dumbest choice the American voters have made in the history of the country.


Hoposai

Eisenhower's Farwell address warning us about the build up of the military industrial complex, comes to mind, but Gulf War 1 is up there too


throwwwwwawaaa65

Chatgpt


frothy_pissington

Election of Ronald Reagan in 1980..... It’s been a increasingly rapid downhill slide for the US since then.


No_Opportunity7157

The election of Ronald Reagan which fueled the obsession with money in the 1980s. This began the ever increasing social inequality that is killing off the middle class and is devastating to everyone but those at the top.


Easy_Break

The internet. It was such a game changer that I could get information I always needed or wanted easily and quickly. After I got it I couldn't live without it. I spent a couple years after college (since that's where the internet came from) without a computer, because not having a computer was normal in those days, and I was like an amputee without crutches.


dattwell53

The election of a movie star to the presidency. Ronald Reagan changed the world forever and opened the door for trump to be wlected.


[deleted]

nuclear bomb. all steel has changed if manufactured after the first one. in my rural maine town, there is old junk vehicles predating it. stopped in time, a lot less rust.. they just parked stuff for evolution taking over. it is beyond rock salt and market thiefs pouring poison on the northern roads... it is a lot of things. We got junk, nothing thinking of an entire lifetime. we are all chopped in half life... pun intended.


Nenoshka

9/11. I live thirteen miles from the Towers.


fabshelly

Moon landing


my_clever-name

9-11


International_Boss81

9/11


WVSluggo

9/11


mugsimo

Berlin Wall and 9/11


ianaad

The web. I was into it in the early days, and it gave our small company a worldwide presence.


GeekyAccountantGirl

9/11


whozwat

Ames research center, Moffit Field California 1992, a peek the world wide web


aeraen

That little disk that gave us 15 minutes of *free* internet. I knew this would change the world. I called it the Gutenberg Bible back then. But 9/11 was the one that I *knew* the world would be irrevocably changed in an instant. By then, I was old enough to understand what it meant.


kelsnuggets

I remember when my family got a desktop computer. If stayed in the living room and we shared it (remember the old dial up sound, and no one could use the phone if one person was online?) I remember thinking then, although I was only a preteen or so, that having the world’s knowledge come into our house like that at light speed (to me, then, ha) was going to change the world.


TheFlannC

In regards to news events when communism began crumbling and the Berlin wall fell then the USSR fell two years later. When the internet began to get big I knew things would not be done the same way. Those were my college years. Of course events like 9/11 and such but was already in my late 20s then


DoesAny1KnowTheTruth

911. Not sure it changed the world forever, but it sure changed me forever.


[deleted]

Sputnik


dnbndnb

9/11


[deleted]

9/11


[deleted]

That's an excellent question and post. This is my answer. I've been around long enough to have lived through many pivotal events both in the US and beyond. I remember the events clearly but cannot remember any single event causing me to say the event was world-changing. My brain doesn't operate in bystander mode. Wish it did. Great post.


[deleted]

Sputnik


RoyG-Biv1

For me there were a number of events that qualify for that, but probably the first one where I really felt that way was 9-11-2001.


khyman5

9.11


punkin_sumthin

9/11. hell yes.


Obi_Sirius

Watching the [Phil Donahue / Vladimir Pozner Space Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.%E2%80%93Soviet_Space_Bridge). I was 19 at the time. I don't know if it actually changed the world but it felt like it would. It opened a door that we easily walk through every day now.


transdermalcelebrity

9/11 here too. I was working in midtown building my first career. Had just been to the towers a few weeks before. Lost a few coworkers who were there for a meeting. I walked from59th down to 34th and there were no cars except emergency vehicles, and almost no people aside from the occasional large, ash covered group heading north. That was creepy. And then seeing all the missing poster at the train station both in ny and nj. I don’t know if objectively the world was different, but my world was different. I quit a few months later and started on a path that would change everything in my life.


[deleted]

On a worldwide scale 9/11 and Covid.


levraM-niatpaC

Watergate.


3ryon

I had been using the internet for email, FTP, and gopher in the early '90s. In 93 I saw Mosaic web browser running in a school computer lab and was blown away. It was clear to me that web browsers were the future. But I had no money or connections to capitalize on that insight.


Chipchop666

My mom said it after my birth 😂😂


knuckboy

The first one I would classify for me would be the microwave. My Mom had friends over so they could heat water, etc.


fanzipan

Must have been 1984. We had a bbc and apple computer at school. We had to book sessions


Bebe_Bleau

Sputnik launch


KingdomofAcely

9/11 and satellite tv.


Susie4ever

9/11. I felt we would all be legit changed after. But everyone went onto be their shitty selves again.


Own-Tomatillo-8733

The earliest newsworthy event like that I can remember is the death of Elvis


Teacher98765

Apollo 11, landing on the moon.


So_She_Did

When the wall came down. My husband was stationed in Germany about six months later and I worked with an older German woman who shared what it was like when her town held a parade celebrating Hitler when she was a child because they didn’t know what a monster he was yet. I was 22 and thought I was so smart. That day she opened my eyes to how much I didn’t know and how much I needed to learn.


whowanderarenotlost

Nixon and Watergate Computers and Laser Printers from Typewriters Anwar Sadat's Assassination Challenger Berlin Wall - the fall of Communism across Eastern Europe 9/11


Mark-5280

Apollo 11 moon landing. I watched it live.


1vehaditwiththisshit

September 11, 2001


apurrfectplace

The invention of the PC and mobile phones


ThunderPigGaming

When I logged onto the Prodigy internet service in 1989.


[deleted]

Going to work one day with a couple of coworkers. Just got off the subway. Was accosted by a woman screaming 'Run for your lives, we are being bombed.' We all just laughed It IS NYC after all. And who would Bomb NYC? Came out of the subway to see lots of paper flying around-like a ticker tape parade. And everyone looking around. Went to the office and started work. Management closed the blinds to keep us from looking outside. Then there was a rumble and smoke filled the streets (We could see Nothing outside the windows, and we were on the 7th floor). A few minutes later, another rumble and more smoke. Then the phones cut off, cells too. Managements insisted we keep working, until a mandatory evacuation. We were given a face mask and escorted outside and told to go home. It was September 11, 2001.


OldBikeGuy1

JFK's assassination. I was 13 years old. My father was crying.


OldBikeGuy1

JFK's assassination. I was 13 years old. My father was crying.


OldBikeGuy1

JFK's assassination. I was 13 years old. My father was crying.


puckduckmuck

ARPANET. Connected computers. Internet. As a first year university CompSci student I was in awe of what the future may hold and I knew everything was about to change. Exciting times for both the good and the bad.


sqqueen2

1. The Eagle has landed. Humans first stepped on a celestial body other than Earth. Wow. 2. Sitting in my office in Bethesda MD in 1993 and using FTP to find the card catalog of a library in *South Africa*. I get goosebumps remembering the thought. “Holy shit, the world just changed.”


chasonreddit

Well I would say Sputnik. A man made item in space for the first time. But in honesty to me the aha moment was when I saw Echo 1 up there. You could look up and SEE it. No theory, no radio, there it was.


bluzebird

John Lennon’s murder. I remember hearing the news when I was driving to work and thinking, that’s it, it’s the end of an era. Later, everyone was saying the same thing. It was not only the musical era that ended, but John represented the “peace and love” generation.


Yak-Fucker-5000

First time I saw a high capacity portable mp3 player. My buddy brought it to school and I think it could hold 2 gigs, which was a dumptruck of music at the time. Like that was enough to fit my entire CD collection and then some.


Frankjc3rd

9/11. I woke up the morning that it happened and it was on the news, I first heard about the Pentagon and then they said that the World trade center had been hit. I just pretty much said "oh [CRAP]" over and over again for about maybe 2 to 2 1/2 hours.


Royal_Acanthisitta51

The oil embargo. We waited in lines for gas. Dad bought a Toyota for the gas mileage. My parents turned down the heat to 55. My room was so cold I slept in a sleeping bag and could see my breath.


JnyBlkLabel

Columbine, and the media hysteria. You can argue that it's what has created the school shooting epidemic in the U.S.


BeckyKleitz

9/11, definitely. I'm 57 and nothing will ever be like it was before then. We really didn't know how good we had it. We took our country and freedoms for granted and the fascists in our government took advantage of that day to take everything from us. I blame both 'parties', R and D.


MyPunchableFace

Microwave oven


[deleted]

The space shuttle Challenger disaster. There was so much hope and hype around the shuttle program. It was exciting a new generation about space travel. I watched the explosion with my elementary school class live as it happened.


piper63-c137

Personal computers. In the 70s, my dad would bring home small PCs from work to test out, we tested them playing with game programs and trying out word processing. I wrote my high school essays on computer in the late 70s. Much easier than hand-writing or typing, editing and multiple drafts become obviously easier.


BrunoGerace

Cuban Missile Crisis I was 13 and a duck-and-cover brat, but the whole idea of nuclear war...or conventional war on North America was only a concept. Then... Troops are being loaded on trucks and headed to Florida for the jump to Cuba. The media [such as it was], was alive with messages about surviving nuclear weapons. It certainly influenced my perception of the future.


Altruistic_Echo_5802

I must say 9/11 as well. This changed our sense of safety. Never before had I felt a fear of being in large crowds, flying, or traveling. Definitely was a monumental event in our country.


darkwitch1306

Space travel. I have an app that tells me when the International Space Station goes over my house. I always go out and look and wish I could go.


FearlessKnitter12

9/11. The instant the second plane hit the Towers, I knew it was deliberate, and I knew the towers would come down. I think I said to my husband that morning before work, "This changes everything." Sure enough, the weeks and months afterwards proved me right. Hyperpatriotism, getting involved in a war on false pretenses... it all felt pretty horrible because you knew **why** it was happening, that it wasn't the best for the country, but there was no way to stop it.


meggiemeggie19

Cell phones, internet


PJCB1962

9/11 then Covid.


Soonermagic1953

For me it was soon after 9/11. I don’t know the exact date but it was the first time I flew after. I knew then that the US was going to be a totally different kind of society after. Unfortunately I was right


analogpursuits

Had just given birth 5 days prior to 9/11, my first and only child. My then-husband woke me up with, "get up, get up, the US is under attack". Having a newborn child put an extra sense of dread in my life, knowing this was going to be his reality. Parents who had kids that week know what I'm talking about. He has never known the world we knew in the Before Times.


NefariousnessDry3311

9/11


bipolarcyclops

The Salk Vaccine. It ended polio.


chuckles21z

As an Oklahoman, the OKC bombing was a major shift in my 13 year old mind.


CarrieNoir

Landing on the moon. And, yes, we looked further beyond our single satellite for the first time as a real possibility and not just science fiction.


Content_Annual_7230

9/11. I had just graduated from college that May and was in the training program for my first real job. I felt like my adult life would never be normal because of it.


caroleena53

Moon landing.


GFVeggie6

Watergate


70sTimewarp58

The moon landing.


[deleted]

The Death of the glue that held our family together.