amazed at how much better the results were than AltaVista and Yahoo Search.
+ Google Maps in 2004 and
dragging the map interactively around. This was a quantum leap beyond Mapquest's page reload and reset with cumbersome arrow buttons. This was a paradigm shift that let me
explore a geography better than any book atlas. I gave away all my atlases
+ MS Window Media Player's ability to
cleanly accelerate playback to 2x,3x,4x of audiobooks and tutorial videos for slow speakers. MS Windows 7 had this long before Youtube's player had a 2x playback option.
+ SQLite library : more than 10x improvement since I came from old school of writing custom formats for persisting data. No more dumping memory structs to disk or writing b-trees in C Language from scratch.