Rip Van Winkle was a character in a Washington Irving short story who went to sleep before the American War of Independence and woke up twenty years later in an independent US of A. A loyal subject of the British Monarch, he went to sleep to run away from his nagging wife, and woke up to find that his wife had died, his friends were nowhere to be seen and the British Monarch was no longer of any import in his land. So he “saw” dramatic change seem to appear “overnight”.
If, instead, he’d gone to sleep at the end of 1989 and woken up this morning, these are some of the changes he would have seen:
Costs of compute power
A gigabyte of storage
The Mobile Phone
Access to the internet/the web
The march of AIDS
Climate change: The Arctic Icecap