Describe Your First Experience With Something Then Novel That Is Now Commonplace

My first wireless router, around 2002.

I remember when my dad brought home the very first pocket calculator I'd ever seen! We oohed and ahed, and thought that it was the stuff of sci-fi! They didn't even have pocket computers on "Star Trek"! Ten years later you could get a simple mathematical calculator for a dollar.

Yeah, I'm old.

I didn't see my first fax machine until 1986. I was an intern and the office's single fax machine was kept in a small room at the end of a corridor where only a specially trained technician could use it. You also had to schedule your transmission in advance.

Now fax machines are nearly a thing of the past. Sigh.

We had a Prestel machine in my office circa 1989.

I used to go on to pick up various notices sent to my office, but I was able to access the French Minitel gay chat rooms through it. I rang up a few huge bills chatting to guys online then. It was one of the first networked systems in the world.

Now, 30 years later I just use Grindr.

as a travel agent, issuing my 1st "E" ticket around 1997 or 1998 , after decades of paper tickets. worried that my client would not be able to board his flight!.

My mother worked for the phone company. Back in the day, they held several family-oriented events throughout the year, I guess so that we little ones could see what our parents did all day. Anyway, in the mid-70s, when I was about 10, they held a technology fair and I got to use a primitive videophone to talk with another boy about the same age attending the same fair in another state. IIRC, it cost about $25 a minute to use, and that was in 1970 dollars! I was amazed, telling everyone around me that one day we would all be able to make video calls for free, and it got a big laugh from everyone within earshot.

Fuck, you people are old

Welcome to DataLounge, R7.

I also prognosticated that we would all have televisions connected together on which we could share whatever pictures, text, and even movies we wanted, and was told that would [italic]never[/italic]happen because it was just too complicated for everyone to be interconnected all time time.

I think the iPod was the thing that blew me away. So many songs on such a small thing, and no longer having to carry around a delicate hand-held CD player (which ate up batteries like nobody's business, and routinely skipped if you were jogging).

I remember being part of a small team of people in the 1990s who hd been "early adopters" on the Internet. We traveled around in my large company introducing the concept of "e-mail" to other groups -- it would often take 30 minutes to to get them to that that "a-ha!" moment when they realized that the communication was virtually instantaneous, even across the continent. I also remember the period afterward (before IT figured out how to stop it) when people could mistakenly "reply all" to a company-wide email, which would result in a cascade of people who would 'reply all" to that message ("don't send this to me""you shouldn't 'reply all" "why did I get this") and then "reoly all" to those, etc - sometimes amounting to an unintentded internal DDOS attack that would shut down the system. LOL Good times!

I remember my parents buying me a PC and dial-up internet service, for Christmas, when I was around 10 years old. Family members would actually just gather around and watch me "use" the computer, my cousins would bother me all the time to let them use it. Then I told everyone at school that I got a computer for Christmas, and I spent the rest of the year showing teachers and the Principal how to use theirs.

I remember doing my word processing exam in 1984 on a BBC B computer at college.

I had to save my work on a massive floppy disc.

R13, massive floppy? Tell us more!

My dept. was the first in my company to have computers so our group always had the tech guys around trouble shooting problems. I told one of the techies that the MAC I was buying for home use had a hard drive of 175 mb. (all the computers in the office had 100 mb hard drives) he said that was a huge hard drive.

Dad brought home a CD from work.

We marveled at it. Of course, we had nothing to play it on, so we just took turns holding it.

COLOR TV!!!

My roommate in college got a mobile phone in a bag (Motorola Bag Phone) from her dad in 1994 because we lived several hours away and she would make that drive quite often. It was only to be used in case of emergency! I think the per-call cost was $5 or $6 per minute. I remember she made a call to her boyfriend one time when they were fighting about something, and her dad was super pissed because the call was $100.

My grandfather had a mobile flip phone a couple years after that. I didn't get my first cell phone until a few years later (around 2000)! It took me forever to upgrade to a smartphone, too.

Early CD players had a slot in the top into which you dropped the disc vertically, like bread in a toaster. I held out for one of the first models which had a horizontal loading tray.

More on Prestel

[quote] In 1980 my class did a field trip to the local newspaper and a journalist demonstrated this new thing called a word processor to us. It had a black screen with green letters

OP, was that a Wang computer? They were known as having invented word processing back in the day. I also worked there when they were at their peak of success in the early 1980s.

June 2007. At a dinner party when someone pulled out the first iPhone and everything stopped while he showed us how it worked.

In 1970 or 71, a new neighbourhood had a Parade of Show Homes, where nosy people like my family could gawk at the new houses, despite having no intention of moving.

In one of the homes, a guy in the kitchen was showing off a device that was, at that time, pretty much unheard of: the residential microwave. He had a freezer full of donuts, frozen rock hard. He would bang them on the counter to demonstrate how cold they were, pop them into the microwave for a few seconds, then serve the steaming-hot result to assorted house gawkers. We were blown away!

I remember the first time I could withdraw money at the ATM of a bank that was not my bank. The convenience of the whole concept was overwhelming.

I also remember the first time I hooked up my clamshell iBook before Wi-Fi R1, and it was amazing. Previously, I had ethernet cable strung all over my apartment.

In 1990 I one of those Sharp Wizard handheld computers. I put my Filofax in the closet figuring I'd never need to use paper again.

Today even the simplest cell phone has more memory and features than the Wizard.

I remember the first time I heard voice mail that was provided by the phone company. Before that it was those clunky voice mail machines.

[quote]I remember the first time I heard voice mail that was provided by the phone company. Before that it was those clunky voice mail machines.

I had to tell my aunt several times that I had voicemail and could not hear her when she'd say "please pick up if you're there!" *long pause* "I'm giving you ten more seconds" *pause* and finally "please call me back." You also had to pay extra for caller ID.

My college experience ('90 to '95) was almost completely internetless--except the campus to campus email system (it started in 1993?) that I thought was truly magic. You had to go to a special room of computers (green letters on a black screen, of course) and I would sit and write long-ass letters to my friends at other schools, sometimes missing class because being able to do communicate in this way was just so fucking awesome.

As a graduation gift, my parents bought me an "upgraded" personal computer with--wait for it--dial-up capability! With aol.com, I could actually just write and access email IN MY APARTMENT!

14.4K, baby!

I got my first pair of shoes when I was 8. Walked our gravel driveway for hours and hours and ruined the soles of my new shoes. My Dad was pissed and I didn’t get another pair for a year.

I'm still waiting for the Darfur Orphan to make an appearance...

I remember when I saw my first spoon - it was wooden.

I am not an early adopter of new tech. I'm usually the last on board as a matter of fact, but when the Ipad first came out, I absolutely had to have one right away. I walked into the Apple store on the first day and bought it. I was out of town at the time and took it to the airport with me. I had a crowd around me at the gate watching me use it.

In the ‘90s a friend worked for a startup in Boston that was developing the technology for the e-reader. What he described to me sounded like magic.

A Pulsar LED watch. Friends used to stand around and watch the digits light up when I pressed the button. I received it as a graduation gift. My father asked if I was sure I really wanted "a battery watch". I should have listened to him.

Home internet access! A giant pc with dial-up - the phone cord going all the way down the hallway. It was amazing that you could EMAIL your friends and relatives! No more costly phone bills! The future had arrived.

So quaint now, but at the time it was amazing.

In 1982, I was in the fourth grade. At lunchtime, I sat at a table with a bunch of friends and opened my lunch bag. Inside was a curious triangular silver pouch filled with juice with a label that said Capri Sun. After studying it for a moment, I couldn't figure out how to open the damn thing, and neither could my friends. I ended up taking it to a cafeteria monitor who couldn't figure it out either. Finally, one of the lunch ladies stabbed the bag with the attached straw, and lo and behold, sweet faux watermelon fruit punch was accessed. Never trust an early adopter mom.

I remember my father bought a Beta VCR. It was huge but it was so amazing. The first movie I ever rented was Star Wars. Before the VCR, I only had memories of seeing it in the theater when I was 8. I invited my friend who lived across the street and her cousin. It was amazing.

I also remember my mom having all four of us kids gather around this thing called a "microwave oven." It was also huge. Mom put a marshmallow into it and we oohed and ahhed at the way it expanded. We made smore's a few times but they weren't as good as making them on a campfire.

Cordless phones were amazing too. Prior to them, we had to sit near the phone in the kitchen to talk to our friends.

Cable tv. ON TV was the shit. I remember my dad no longer had to climb on the roof to adjust the antenna so we could watch a certain channel.

[quote]In 1982, I was in the fourth grade. At lunchtime, I sat at a table with a bunch of friends and opened my lunch bag. Inside was a curious triangular silver pouch filled with juice with a label that said Capri Sun. After studying it for a moment, I couldn't figure out how to open the damn thing, and neither could my friends. I ended up taking it to a cafeteria monitor who couldn't figure it out either. Finally, one of the lunch ladies stabbed the bag with the attached straw, and lo and behold, sweet faux watermelon fruit punch was accessed. Never trust an early adopter mom.

How long before you blew into the straw and the "juice" spurted back out at you?

That sounds dirty now that I've typed it, but I really am talking about the Capri Sun packets.

Having sex with a condom. Before AIDS, no gay man had ever thought of buying a condom.

First video game late 70s. It was green background and white line dividing it, and 2 cursors to hit a ball. Tennis. We played for hours

Sliced bread RIGHT OUT OF THE BAG. You no longer had to cut it yourself! Each slice was the same size, which made for pretty, yet still tasty, symmetrical sandwiches. I still get goosebumps when I think of those exhilarating sliced bread moments from my youth.

I'm old enough to remember when VCRs became popular in the early 80s. It seemed like everyone ran out and bought one all at the same time. Like the above poster said, it was amazing to watch movies in your own home, whenever you wanted to. Going to the video store was a big event.

It's all so quaint and silly now in this DVR/streaming age, but VCRs and home video were pretty revolutionary at the time.

R21, it may well have been a Wang or a VectorGraphic. I used both in the early 80s.

I guess when my workplace got Wangs in 1982, it was a big deal.

Just as revolutionary was the fact that you could record TV shows on VCRs. There was all this talk that it would be the demise of the television industry because Nielsen ratings would become meaningless and on the recordings people could speed through the commercials.

Around the turn of the millenium, I was a little kid watching an episode of The Jeff Corwin show (for those unfamiliar with Jeff Corwin, he's the poor American man's Steve Irwin). I forgot what the context was but he was using this high tech GPS device, (probably to track down tagged wild animals or something like that) which I thought to myself how cool it was.

Now everyone has a GPS in their cars and in their pockets.

I saw color TV for the first time in 1960. My father's secretary had an electric typewriter around that time. They were very rare. And my father had a phone in his car. It was a Bell Telephone system that transmitted normal calls by radio waves. Very futuristic for the early 1960s

R39, likely about 5 minutes in.

My college had a small newspaper with a large classified section. People would use them to flirt with and tease each other. This was 1980. I went to the office and submitted a classified addressed to “Calvin from Grange Hall...”, and they refused to print it.

Some weeks later, I went back, but changed it to “Cal from Grange Hall...”, and they accepted it.

Cal and I wound up dating, but I never told him I submitted the personals. We separated over the Summer, then started dating again. I recall it was the night John Lennon died. Anyway, I told him he looked distracted, and he told me the saga of the personal ads and not knowing who was sending them. And that it was odd to resume in a subsequent school year.

I had to tell him it was me. He laughed and said, “Yah, that sounds like you.”

He was a great guy. He was an equestrian with a butt that you could bounce a quarter off of. He died of AIDS about 1987 at age 30.

I guess you could say you could have figured out my career back when I was a teen. I got my first computer when I was 13 years old. Note my first - many have followed. And home net access I've had broadband for 25 years.

I remember when my parents got their first car with AC. We used to take long car trips in the heat of the summer and to have AC was a wonderful thing.

I remember in 2003 my best friend's dad bought a Prius and they drove over to my parents' at midnight to show us. We gathered in front of the house to see this car that made no noise and ran on batteries... sometimes. His dad still has that car, with almost 300k miles on it. The battery hasn't worked in years.

The phonograph! A faithful dog could hear his master's voice, pressed onto plates and then recreated with a needle!

My sister married a computer tech who worked at Compaq (remember Compaq?). He had a spare CPU so he mailed it to me--that's how I acquired my first computer and hooked up to the World Wide Web in my apartment.

I'm a music freak and had read all about Napster and was SO EXCITED to see if it would actually work for me. After downloading the software, I needed to try it out. So I thought it would be smart to try to download (share via P2P) the current #1 song on Billboard: "Bye Bye Bye" by Nsync.

That was it. That one stupid song by that one stupid boy band started me off on my long and twisted road of illegal downloads that lasted for years and survived numerous CPUs. I'm embarrassed to say which year it all finally ended.

When I hear that awful song, I smile.

I remember the first time I saw a close-up on a movie screen. I was furious. I told the cinema manager I paid a nickel to see the entire actress and all I got were her eyes, nose and mouth. He gave me some bullshit about it being some new visual syntax or something and I told him if he didn't give me my nickel back his nose would see a close-up of my fist.

My stepmother was a legal secretary. In the early 70s she got a [italic]correcting[/italic] IBM Selectric typewriter. She showed us how the correcting tape worked, just thrilled by how efficient it was. No more erasers, no more Liquid Paper.

I learned to use a dedicated word processor, a CPT, as part of the typing pool back in 1976. Place a cassette tape into the holder, much like a music cassette player, type away and it was all recorded onto the cassette. The cassette could be played back (print) or edited using buttons on the cassette unit. No screen, which came much later. If memory serves, the bottom holder was Record and the top was Print. Or vice versa.

My husband LOVED word processors once they were made available for home use. The first I've he had was a Panasonic and when it glitched, he made all these phone calls trying to get it fixed, He didn't realize that things were being made to self destruct, since he was moving up from a manual typewriter.

Panasonic stopped making word processors so he had to buy Brother processors after that. He mourned that .panasonic for years.

SUSHI. I was in a meeting that was taking longer than it was supposed to, someone ordered sushi for all so we could continue with the meeting without breaking up to go to lunch. I had never seen that fucking thing so, instead of using chopsticks, I took a roll with a fork and with the knife I proceeded to spread the wasabi un top of it like if it was butter.

I could barely contain the tears

I bought a Handspring Visor Prism. It was more advanced than a palm Pilot and it had A COLOR SCREEN. I downloaded a pharmacopeia on it to use for work. I also downloaded calculations (Plug in the numbers and it automatically calculated stuff like SVR). Downloaded the normal values of ABG blood gases and abnormal ones so I could determine if someone was in metabolic or respiratory acidosis. Boy did I impress everyone.

Cost me $500. It had a "springboard slot" that you could put modules in. The modules were like very, very thick memory cards. I almost bought the medical book modules. They cost $60 -80 a piece and you had to carry them with you. I already had my pockets stuffed with flashlight, reflex hammer, beeper, etc.

They eventually developed a "cell module" so it could be used as a phone, but it was very complicated. We didn't have wifi and there was some kind of thing where you needed a modem. I'm glad I didn't buy that because they announced after only 2 or 3 years from inception that they were going to concentrate on turning it into a pocket cellphone. The idea was ridiculous. Why would they a want a PDA to be a phone? A PDA was a "handheld computer," we didn't need to make phone calls on it!

It wasn't a success and they got bought out in 2003.

We all know what happened in June, 2007.......

I bought all of the supplies to start seedlings decades ago and I became completely obsessed. I drove my roommate crazy "Does that look like a green spec to you?". Eventually he told me to leave him alone. Lo and behold after three days I checked them and it was a blanket of tiny baby plants. I was so thrilled I couldn't sleep. Now I keep detailed journals of temperature and light and I can predict within a few hours when most of the seeds will germinate.

My family bought the first color TV in 1963. It was the first one on my street and all the neighbors wanted to come over to watch it. The colors were bright and garish but we all thought it was beautiful.

That first taste of fudge straight from daddy’s ripe hole...

I went to a party with my younger boyfriend filled with his friends many of whom were in extended youth with university studies well into their late 20s. Among the signs I was nevertheless from a different generation was the number of people using MySpace. I checked it out and found it both exhausting and empty, a sentiment I carried over to Facebook, which I was never able to embrace. Now I am old and my 20 yo students use aps and in a way totally different than the college crowd just 10 years ago.

I had a Brother word processor in high school and through most of college (mid-90s). It looked like a typewriter with a monitor attached (amber type on black background). You used it like a typewriter but could manipulate everything before printing it. To print, you fed paper one sheet at a time through the typewriter and it tap-tap-tapped it out as if you were typing. Wrote many a college paper on it. PCs were coming into wider use by that point but I'd have to go to the computer lab on campus to use them.

Here is that word processor in action!

I was with my parents in 1977 at Bloomingdales in White Plains, NY. There was a VCR on display behind a locked glass case.The price was $1000!

In 1999, I booked a trip to rural Scotland using just the internet. It was still pretty rare to book via the internet - especially with smaller hotels/B&Bs etc. Everyone was amazed that you could communicate with Europe via email.

I remember in college while studying geo info systems we got to walk around with a GPS!

Wow! This satellite can pinpoint right where I am in this big city! No one seemed to care about my excitement when I told them it was such cool tech.

10 years later and Lindas use them to drive off into the Mojave desert with bad apple maps directions. Now people couldn’t live without it.

GPS has made life so much easier. Remember the days of keeping a map in your car, having to pull over to the side of the road or into a parking lot to unfold the damn map to figure out where you were going, and many times you still couldn't find your destination. What a pain in the ass that was.

In LA, it was the Thomas Guide - a very thick book filled with city street maps.

[quote] I remember the first time I could withdraw money at the ATM of a bank that was not my bank. The convenience of the whole concept was overwhelming

Hell, I remember when ATMs first appeared. In school in the late '60s we had learned about these amazing machines in Japan that dispensed cash but it wasn't until the mid 1970s that ATMs started appearing in US banks. The first one in San Francisco was at Crocker Bank so I moved my account there just so I could use the machines. Prior to that you had to either go to the bank to cash a check or cash one at a grocery store or department store (but only if you had an account there).

The first time I deposited my paycheck at an ATM scared me to death. I was sure I'd never see the money again. I felt the same way the first time I deposited a check using my phone. Now, of course, nobody writes checks for anything.

But yes, the first time I used my ATM card to cash in a foreign country was life changing. Not having to carry around travelers cheques and hunt for a place to cash them made traveling abroad so much easier.

my first email exchange. after HOURS of work trying to fix the modem (we're talking mid 90s) and the telephone i sent a mail saying something like "is this working?" to a friend. she replied and i felt like i discovered the law of gravity or something.

[quote] Remember the days of keeping a map in your car, having to pull over to the side of the road or into a parking lot to unfold the damn map to figure out where you were going, and many times you still couldn't find your destination. What a pain in the ass that was.

Yes, it's easier to get around now, but as a nerdy little kid I used to love to get the (free) maps from the gas station, spread them out on the floor and spend hours poring over them. This was in the '60s, and every year I'd get new maps and watch as the Interstate Highway System grew.

One thing I miss about maps vis a vis GPS is that a map gives you a better idea of the entire geography of an area, not just turn here, turn there.

My partner and I were planning a trip to Turkey which involved driving to Ephesus, Pamukkale, and Bodrum. Before the trip I stopped at Barnes and Noble and picked up a map. He told me I was crazy and old-fashioned. Who uses paper maps anymore?

We had the first hotel print out directions, rented a car with GPS, and loaded our plan into his iPhone. Turns out 1) the hotel printed out the wrong directions, 2) the car's GPS died on the second day, and 3) he couldn't get a signal on his iPhone.

So it was those paper maps that saved our lives in Turkey, otherwise we'd still be driving around, forever lost.

And the best part, R72, was that when you withdrew cash abroad, you got the bank exchange rate (like everything in banking, it was better than what you could get if you went to the same bank in whatever city you were in an exchanged cash). They quickly put an end to that, and then started charging you to use the ATM abroad, and we were right back where we were before the technology took over, paying the inflated tourist rate.

[quote] Everyone was amazed that you could communicate with Europe via email.

I had a now/ex in-law in SouthAfrica. We kept trying to send emails to each other in real time so we could chat for free instead of calling "long distance."

It didn't work. Both of us would get each other's emails up to 12 hours after we wrote them.

[quote] They quickly put an end to that, and then started charging you to use the ATM abroad, and we were right back where we were before the technology took over, paying the inflated tourist rate.

You are so right about this. Even Citibank and HSBC charge you to use their ATMs overseas even if you have an account with them in the US. Aggravating.

HOWEVER, at the risk of hijacking the thread, Charles Schwab has a free ATM card that reimburses ALL ATM fees. It's a little bit of work to set it up, you first have to open a Schwab brokerage account (but you don't have to fund it, mine's had a zero balance for years) and then you can open a free (no minimum balance) checking account. All this can be done online.

Once it's set up, you can just transfer money from your regular bank account (Chase in my case) to the Schwab account, get on a plane and go. I have used it all over the world, and at the end of the month, boom, I automatically get rebated all the ATM fees.

The first time we saw the NBC peacock "in living color."

Oops

1995: First week as a freshman at an all boys Catholic high school. The kid who sat behind me in homeroom is telling me all about his new computer and his he can talk to people in chat rooms. This means nothing to me. He invited me and another boy over to show us. Lo and behold, it’s America Online! That day I learned all about email and chat rooms.

1999: Freshman year at Fordham living in the dorms. My roommate keeps talking about something on his computer where he could “get any song he wants”. Finally I ask him to show me. Napster. He installs it on my PC. To test it out,he asks me to name any song. So I say “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls. First song I ever illegally downloaded off the internet was the Spice Girls.

2003: First job out of college working for a boutique media company in NYC. My boss holds an entire meeting to discuss how texting will overtake actual phone calls as a means of communication. My response: “why would I type messages to have a back and forth conversation? You could just call the person. Texting makes no sense”.

I'm old enough to remember when color TV was a big deal, but my family always had a color TV. My father was fond of telling the story about how, when I was learning to walk as a baby, I tipped the TV stand over and nearly killed myself, broke the TV and he had to go buy a new one because the old was was completely broken. I had that TV for years.

I bought a flat screen 50-inch plasma TV as a present for hubby and myself when we sold our first company. It was $10,000. There was no hi-def programming, and Blu-ray was years away, but it made a wonderful PC monitor.

Typing a document on my new computer in 1991 and realizing how easy it was to correct typos and to edit paragraphs. It made me very happy that I wouldn't have to drag out the heavy electric typewriter along with the correcting tape and whiteout to fix the document. I kept the typewriter as a backup for 6 months then dumped it freeing up a the space in my closet for other things.

Fire.

Hot.

Burned.

[quote] You also had to pay extra for caller ID.

You still have to pay extra (monthly charge) for caller ID on landlines.

[quote]Typing a document on my new computer in 1991 and realizing how easy it was to correct typos and to edit paragraphs. It made me very happy that I wouldn't have to drag out the heavy electric typewriter along with the correcting tape and whiteout to fix the document. I kept the typewriter as a backup for 6 months then dumped it freeing up a the space in my closet for other things.

We kept a typewriter in the office for quite a while to type on forms until scanning and PDF software made them completely obsolete. There was one poor old soul close to retirement who was allowed to keep hers until 2005 (when she retired) because she just couldn't make the leap.

[quote]You still have to pay extra (monthly charge) for caller ID on landlines.

I haven't had a landline since 2004. Caller ID displays were eventually built into most phones but in the beginning, there was a fee for the service + a separate fee for the Caller ID display, which was its own little box. It was $3 a month for a device that probably cost them $20 to make.

Bucket seats in cars are now commonplace. I was born in 1963. Until the Oil Crisis in the the 1970s, the only small cars that most people encountered were VWs. Those and sports cars had bucket seats. Most American-made cars had the bench seats, where you could have three people in the front seat. Since 1980, the bucket seats are now more common than the bench seats. Making Out in the front seat might now be obsolete!

In junior year of high school (1979-1980), I can remember computers being introduced, and we made programs...pre-historical!!!

In 2002 when the first cameraphones came out...the concept blew my mind. Couple years later and my FB would take and send these low res, dark, terrible quality dick & ass pics on his flipphone. You could barely make out what you were looking at but it seemed hot at the time.

In the mid-90s I remember a friend trying to explain the difference between AOL and the WWW/internet to me. I just was too stupid to understand. Eventually when I got online (on AOL, lol) we had the slowest dialup service imaginable, but I couldn't keep away from it. I met guys from the East Coast and England through AOL and even ended up meeting a couple of them IRL.

It's funny -- many of you are writing about very old, outmoded technology (VCR players? word processors?) that is NOT commonplace today because it has been superseded by newer technology.

I don't know when 10-speed bikes were invented, but in 1970, I had never seen one before. I had a regular 3-speed with a Shimano shifter on the handlebars, and I could hardly wait to get a 10-speed. In 1972, I spent an entire summer babysitting (and I hate kids!) to get the money to buy a fancy Schwinn Super Sport in orange. It was much more expensive than the other kids' bikes.

I thought I was the coolest teenager ever. If my parents only knew how far away from home I rode that bike, they never would have let me buy it.

The first time I saw Photoshop in action; late '80s. I was in art school and we took a field trip to Kodak(I think) labs and they demo'ed it for us. I was amazed that you could change the color of the model's dress with a click of a button and manipulated images any way you wanted. This was back in the days when we shot on film and printed photographs. I also thought that this would be the demise of photography as a creative profession. Commercially at least, the graphic designers and art directors would take all control of the finished product away from photographers. And I think that is more or less what happened.

It's funny -- many of you are writing about very old, outmoded technology (VCR players? word processors?) that is NOT commonplace today because it has been superseded by newer technology

Shows you how quickly technology is changing. Our parents switched over to TV from radio in the early 1950s and were still watching tv 50 years later. There had been a few improvements made, like color and remote control, and they could be eventually hooked up to cable, but they were still TV “sets.”

Try showing an 12 year old kid this. It’s only 10 years old.

So cute. This is only 8 years old.

I thought the Motorola Razr phone was the last word in cell phones. "It looks so cool! Cell phones will never get better than this!"

Hilarious to think of that now.

Cable tv. You could watch theatrical movies in your own home, and even tape them on your VCR. Watching movies that were not edited and no commercial breaks on your tv was incredible.

I remember the first time I saw a trash compactor. Do people still use those?

I saw my first Walkman in college in 1981. It seems like everyone bought one in the same week.. They had a huge impact on the music listening experience in the 80s (along with MTV).

Now they're no longer manufactured and have been obsolete for decades.

I forgot all about Walkmans. Ubiquitous for many years - everybody under a certain age had one.

Radio headphones in the mid 1970s.

The idea of something you wear on your ears and listen to music in public seemed revolutionary to me.

Today headphones are everywhere.

Great thing about Walkmans — you could replace the batteries. Apple and other companies now make people slaves to their products because you can’t change the batteries.

I liked cassette walkmans better than CD walkmans because they were smaller. It was so funny to me that CD meant “compact disc” but cassettes were so much more compact than CDs. Yeah, yeah, I know the “compact” referred to the size of a disc compared to an album or a 45 rpm (which we called “records” but were discs).

My father used to yell at me to “turn down that Victrola!” Or “turn down that jutebox!”when my music was too loud. I don’t know why but everyone I knew said “jutebox” instead of “jukebox.”

But now I know how he felt because I’ve been through records, albums, singles, 8 tracks, cassettes, CDs, MP3s....... Do they still have little jukeboxes in diners anymore?

I preferred Walkmans over Discmans, too. Discmans were clunky and the damn CD always skipped.

R84 I guess it depends on your provider, my parents and grandparents still have landlines and caller ID is included with the basic rate.

A buddy was going to all these sex parties in Belgium, Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona and was taking Truvada off label. People were saying you could bareback with anyone even poz guys. There was a government announcement it was true. (10 years ago, Geneva).

When I was growing up, I used to have to get in shape for high school football season. I hated to run so would go at night and took a little transistor radio with me. It was in the shape of a ball and I could hold it in my hand while I ran. I thought I was so cool being able to listen to music while I worked out.

In the late 1990s I was working as an executive assistant. We had computers but the "new toy" that all the executives had was a little handheld device where they could get their emails remotely. If I needed my boss, I could send him an email. This was even before texting. Everyone loved their Blackberry. A couple of people I know still have theirs but it has been updated a few times.

I remember distinctly the first time I saw someone talking on a phone IN PUBLIC--I was standing in line at Dulles Airport, waiting to get on a plane, and a man in line was on his phone, which was the size of a walkie-talkie. He was talking about personal stuff. I was OUTRAGED. Still am.

I remember when cell phones first started to be seen in public in the early 90s, there was a stigma that people who used them were total assholes. They were almost always obnoxious, entitled corporate types.

CB radios were all the rage when I was in high school in the 1970s.

Home telephone answering machines in the mid 70s we felt we were on the cutting edge of technology having an electronic device to answer all your calls and take messages if you decided you didn't want to answer the phone or were out.

My first home laptop (1997/1998). A friend had given me one from her work that was decommissioned.

She showed me how to set up an email account, and (drum roll please) browse the web! Since it was autumn in New England, she decided to look up leaf peeping. One of the choices on the Yahoo browser was someone who read leaves. We thought it would be tea leaves. They actually read bowel movements; we discovered this when we clicked on the link.

That is when I knew the internet would become a wild place.

We got a flat screen TV in 2002. I was a huge cheerleader, and constantly made the argument that not needing a giant armoire to house it offset some of the cost. When my family got a microwave, my brother and I told my mom she wasn’t supposed to look at it without the “special goggles.” That was good for a laugh.

[quote]Today even the simplest cell phone has more memory and features than the Wizard.

It’s more than just a tip calculator, ya know!

[quote]I was a huge cheerleader

Didn’t see many of those.

I remember when that new fangled horseless carriage come ‘round. Worked good, too! Didn’t have to feed the horses or let em rest.

Though I did have to shoot em when I didn’t need em no more.

The pinball guys installed something called a video game in the bar I worked at, I think it was PONG, and the helper was kidding his boss that the thing was going to be nothing but trouble. Sure enough, it broke the next day, and when they came back the helper was going on and on about "I told you this thing would be trouble."

Well, the trouble was it it had shut off because it was so full of quarters it couldn't hold any more. God, those guys made a fortune over the next 10 years.

[quote]in the bar I worked at

Oh, dear!

^you expect more from a bar wench?