I don't even consider myself that old, but there is some technology today that is pure sci-fi despite being commonplace to the point of banality.
One such technology is flash memory. Its super cheap and something most people barely think about. In my phone (smartphones being another topic), I have a 128GB microSD card. This is a tiny device the size of a small fingernail. For comparison, a CD can store 700MB. This tiny card can store 183 times as much data as something far larger. This is equivalent to (almost) 2 of the LARGE spindles! My dad has a CD changer for 100 or 150 CDs, this one tiny chip can store more than the entire thing, and that's without using compression! CDs were considered pretty advanced not all that long ago. They were considered to be an astronomical amount of storage until the mid 1990s. DVDs came out in the late 1990s. The max size of a DVD is 4.7GB * 2 sides * 2 layers, about 19GB. That tiny SD card holds almost 7 times as much data. And I don't believe that to be a common configuration, they are usually single side/single layer, single side/dual layer, or single layer/dual side. IIRC, Bluray is around 50GB, although the latest may be closer to 100. And this is fine for mass distribution, but the comparison remains.
And remember, on top of this, we are talking about a tiny, tiny, tiny, little thing, that only requires a handful of contacts and not a relatively large complicated mechanism of moving parts. It's super fast for transfer AND for seek time. And cheap. At the time of this writing, it was less than $40 for a name brand! They also have 200GB and recently 256GB, albeit for somewhat more money.
Up to the 1990s, we used VHS tapes and cassettes. These would hold an hour or two of video or audio, and were large clunky things. Not to mention COMPLETELY linear -- you had to fast forward or rewind to get to a specific spot. In a video camera, you used a VHS tape holding 2 hours. Later, they had mini DV tapes, holding 60 minutes of SD video. These are actual impressive for the time, in that they hold like 12 or 15GB of digital data. For these formats, you might need to buy (and carry/store/etc) several tapes for several hours of footage. With this one card, which in case I failed to mention is tiny and cheap, I can store HOURS of HD video, higher quality than professional equipment at the time. If I was storing VHS quality video, I'd be willing to bet I could store (at least) hundreds of hours. AND you needed a complicated and delicate mechanical mechanism to read the tapes.
We are truly living in the future.
