Starting To See A Pattern Here

Five of these panels show the typical innovation S-curve where technology evolves from primitive (MS-DOS, Internet Explorer) to peak performance (Windows 95, Chrome). Then there's music... where we apparently peaked at Napster and it's been downhill ever since. The real innovation was clearly the ability to download entire discographies without paying a cent. Progress isn't always what corporate overlords want you to believe it is.

Content 2006 just felt right. I 1988 1998 2001 2006 2009 2012

The evolution of programming efficiency is hilariously tragic. In 1975, Chad programmers hand-optimized machine code to squeeze games into kilobytes. By 2000, we'd accepted some bloat for productivity with high-level languages. Fast forward to 2025, and we've got "programmers" creating calculator apps that consume 1GB of RAM because they've stuffed 69 frameworks into an Electron wrapper. Meanwhile, they're busy impressing AI girlfriends while Microsoft casually commits open-source theft. We went from calculating trajectories to the moon on 4KB of RAM to needing 16GB just to run VS Code without crashing. Progress™

Four years of higher education and your graduation cap blue-screens. Classic. The "99% Complete" progress bar is the chef's kiss of irony - so close to freedom yet still encountering fatal errors. Every CS graduate's nightmare realized: even your academic achievement needs to restart and install updates before you can use it. At least it crashed with a smile.

Ah, the language war in coffee mug form. The punchline here is that Java programmers need glasses because they don't "C#" (see sharp). Classic programming dad joke that hits harder after your fourth cup of coffee and fifteenth NullPointerException of the day. It's the kind of mug you hide when clients visit but secretly cherish when debugging legacy code at 11pm. The irony is that most of us need glasses regardless of our language preference—staring at poorly indented code for a decade will do that to anyone.

The eternal battle between Windows and Mac developers is perfectly captured here. Windows devs proudly showing off their janky utilities that look like they were designed during the Clinton administration but hey—they're free and they work! Meanwhile, Mac devs create beautiful, polished apps that somehow require a subscription model to change your desktop background. The "compatible with Vista" part killed me—nothing says "I've given up on modern standards" quite like targeting an OS that even Microsoft wants to forget. It's the software equivalent of "my car might be ugly, but at least it starts... sometimes."