Recently I’ve been reminiscing about my rowdy, younger days and it got me thinking: How different am I now? Things around me have certainly changed. Back in the day, it was dial-up Internet and fax machines that were cutting edge; now it’s everything mobile and 3-D printers. If you plot any two points in history and give them 20 years of distance, there’s always going to be transformation. But do people change like technology?

Sure, I now have a few extra gray hairs, maybe I’ve put on a few pounds, and my recovery time has lengthened a bit. But have I really changed? I’m 45 years old, and I see the world with the same eyes, but with a different lens.

“Perspective is worth 80 IQ points,” computer scientist Alan Kay once said. And I couldn’t agree more. That’s probably the biggest difference between my 20s and 40s: perspective. I wish I knew half as much today as I thought I knew 20 years ago.

Below is a list of some of the innovations I’ve experienced over the past 20 years (and I don’t think I’m alone):