I was listening to the New Year’s Day concert by the Vienna philharmonic and wondered who one of the composers was so used a popular song recognition app. (I expected it would make some fuzzy match on the piece and give me the name + composer). To my amazement it did give the name and composer but as played by the Vienna philharmonic in 2005 in the same location. The orchestra does not have the same members as 19 years ago, nor was it the same conductor, so it seemed the piece was matched on the acoustics of the Musikverein where they were playing, which I found astonishing.
Broadband satellite internet. The proof of concept was HugesNet, but was so awfully slow as to be virtually unusable nowadays.
With the proliferation of LEO satellites (and acknowledging the problem this brings to astronomers) we can now have broadband connectivity even in the middle of the ocean.
That we came from 14.4kbps hard-wired connections shared by residential phone service to space communications which can be used in the palm of our hands amazes me to no end.