They are definitely the biggest change in the past century and on par with those big innovations I mentioned, so I wouldn’t want to undersell them as they’ve been a major disruptive change to most / all fields.

However, they wouldn’t exactly be incomprehensible to someone from the early 1900’s, since they already had the telegraph, telephony, and fax machines which could send pictures over a long distance came very soon after this article was written.

Whereas I think a person from the early 1800’s would genuinely struggle with understanding the modern world.