Happy Birthday!
I find birthdays a great time to stop and smell the roses, metaphorically speaking. You look about the same age as me, give or take (and no, I don't look like my avatar). At least we have the same taste in efficient hair cuts...
Just look back at all the human progress we have seen. I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, microfiche was the way to find what books the library had available. Do you still remember how to get around in a dewey decimal system? To be honest, I'd have to google it nowdays.
I remember the first real pc's had ridiculously loud hard drives. That was ok though because you could fit all the shareware you wanted on that monster 40 megabit hard drive. Remember EGA Trek? How about a little further back. How about text based rpgs like Zork? What about some click to move adventures like Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender or The Secret of Monkey Island?
Everyone in that era grew up with their finger on the record button. Our reflexes determined how many seconds were missing from the beginning of each song on our mix tapes. The radio never announced which songs were up next. You had to be fast.
Remember the NES? The controller snapping, deep welling anger generating console that was the Nintendo. Remember the extremely delicate and specific things you needed to do to load up certain games? My copy of Ninja Gaiden needed a huff and two blows on the cartridge contacts, and then after you set it in the console, you needed to push it down and hit the reset button twice.
Don't forget the origins of the CD. In general, fuck cd's and sony's stupid electronic skip protection. It left us walking around town gingerly holding our cd player like a waiter with five dinners on a platter... It never worked. It didn't work in the portable walkmans and it didn't work in the car cd players. If it didn't sound so amazing, Id've gone right back to my cassette player. You didn't need to rewind it though. That was pretty huge.
Then there's the elephant in the room. We knew the world before the internet. We knew the world before search engines. Finding the one piece if information you needed required days or weeks of reading at the library. File sharing meant physically handing over a floppy disk, not a url. The concept of playing video games with other people didn't exist. That was until Doom... Have you tried playing that again lately? Did you remember there wasn't an up or down aim? I had forgotten about that.
I could go on and on about how much the world has changed since I was a kid. Every day is science fiction to me. What about your nostalgia? What sticks out as the big milestones you've seen in your life?