1. Windows 95, as opposed to Win3.x/DOS. 100% worth the hardware/software compatibility pains for GUI/multitasking/multimedia/PnP that just worked, an amazing t

1. Windows 95, as opposed to Win3.x/DOS. 100% worth the hardware/software compatibility pains for GUI/multitasking/multimedia/PnP that just worked, an amazing thing at the time (and honestly, in retrospect, giving the preposterous unstandardized diversity of PCs & their peripherals and software in that decade) 2. SQLite, vs fopen and hand-parsed files for any random data storage that didn't rate a full blown remote DBMS. Never using sscanf again! 3. NodeJS. Memory Safety, Thread Safety, No Deadlocks, No build system nonsense, credibly scalable I/O concurrency, and only ~an order of magnitude slower than C? Absolutely worth the nightmare syntax and (then) lack of decent libraries. As soon as npm came on the scene (0.6?) Java ceased to have any reason to exist. 4. Uber. It's like a taxi, but the UI doesn't suck, and they tell you when the car is coming, and the car actually arrives, and they'll pick up in areas other than the 30% of the city and 50% of the day and 60% of the population that taxis are willing to cover in LA! 5. Linux network namespaces + associated tools. So many things I used to have to do on dedicated boxes/VMs, or multiple network interfaces, or single-purpose network equipment. Worth it for per-process ovpn tunnels alone, but you can scale it up to crazy elaborate SDN schemes if you need to. Blows away almost every middlebox and hypervisor networking tool. 6. AWS. There were lots of stick-a-host-on-the-internet services before, but nothing like this: software provisionable, software networking, reliable host-to-host and host-to-storage networks, no lead times... There are credible competitors now but it was a gamechanger for anyone working at the servers > fingers > datacenters scale. 7. This one's kind of goofy, but TimeSnapper. It just takes a screenshot of my display. Every 10 seconds. And saves it into a time-and-keyword searchable database. You can't remember exactly how you fixed that thing 5 months ago that's broken again? I can. The best productivity tool you can get for $40 with the possible exception of 1440 post-it notes.