The obvious answer would rightfully be the smartphone. Nothing has inflicted such good and bad as much as the conflicted world it has put in the palm of our hands.
There was something before, though. In the beginning, computers had whole dedicated rooms, not too different from today’s data centers. Then computers broke containment, and the era of the personal computer was born. I would posit that the modern world was built as much from people hunched over an TRS-80, Apple ][, or Commodore PCs in 1979. In fact, once the pieces came together, there was an explosion of PCs, and the power of computing was showing up in every home.
You can’t build Facebook without the formats pioneered on early BBS and gopher services, and those even modeled on newsgroups before that. Literally, you can’t build a smartphone without an Apple II.
Just like those at the momentous occasion of the first computing device, I was present when that power was put in everybody’s hands.
When I was playing with a TRS-80 at the local Radio Shack, learning Level 1 BASIC, I would never have thought that.
I had a whole career making stuff to run with that newfound power, all the way up to ones that run on the one in your hand. Nothing else has profoundly changed me as much as the PC.
Remain Lost 
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