Sign me up for group 3: I still remember the noise from loading programs into a TI-99/4A by cassette tape. And "portable computing" meant you had one of those early HP programmable calculators with the software on mag-cards.

The Internet was available before 91 on dial-up, at least if you were a college student. There just wasn't as much on it then, and sometimes it was more likely you could reach your friends online on your local BBS. Heck, there wasn't even DNS, you had a phone book of IPs you entered into your hosts table.

But I bet the real Internet culture shock for Gen X/Y is probably that they don't remember a time before commercial content or business activity was allowed on the Internet. It wasn't just that there wasn't a web and e-commerce hadn't taken off, it was freakin' prohibited.

You live in the suburbs of a major metropolitan area, but the city roads are terrible and you don't drive into them much. You get called for Jury duty, requiring that you do drive into the city to reach the courthouse. The GPS helps you from being lost in a mass of spaghetti-style exit structures for the access roads, and multiple one-way streets. Also important, if you make a wrong turn, and get off your chosen directions, it can help you find your way back. I know this from experience.

I can't place judgment on your opinion, because I know I used to have a low opinion of GPS, so I know how easy it is to think just as you do. In fact, my opinion of GPS was much like the xkcd on Google Maps. But after serving Jury duty, I now appreciate it greatly, and understand why people rely on them so much.

There are two factors that help a large telescope for astronomical observations, resolution and light gathering. Combining smaller scopes (through some process like interferometry) gets you better resolution. There's a limit to what you can do effectively, though and a lot of gear in between has to stay aligned properly to work it. My gut feel for the engineering of it says that the probability of something failing would go up with the square of the number of scopes. For the other factor, the light gathering power (the ability to observe and image dim objects) only comes with surface area to gather more light/photons, and that means larger diameter scopes/mirrors, even if it's multiple larger scopes.