One of the privileges of obtaining a doctorate is the ability to audit any course for free. My dad started taking computer courses in the mid 70’s & I remember going with him to the lab. I wasn’t allowed to use of the few (monochrome) monitors as they were new. No, I sat on the teletype machine playing games like “eliza”, a rudimentary psychoanalyst who had a list of about 10-15 answers for any questions you asked it, & a cave exploration game (Gollum?). I considered it a good night if my stack of 132-col greenbar paper was >1" thick. Yeah, green was only a color back in those days.
Mid-80’s I had one of the first portable CD players. The player was not much bigger than a CD & weighed 1.1 lbs. It could be plugged in, or you could attach the battery, which was roughly the size of the player & weighed 1.4 lbs. Yeah, it weighed 2½ lbs to carry it around, but I could play CDs, not just cassettes, like your walkman.
Late 80’s/early 90’s I remember standing in the middle of the street & calling home on one of these, which we had for a race we were putting on. The numbers would display in red.
Email in 1982. I needed to learn a new programming language and had lots of spare time. So I used it to write the first IBM mainframe mail system in my company. It became so popular we packaged it and sold it as a product.
Computers - started with my TRS-80 Model 1 in the mid 70s.
I was playing on the internet back in the days of archie servers.
Smartphones - I started carrying one in the early 2000s when I was making a Windows CE and a Windows Mobile phone.
But my real pride is that I had a very, very early web page. It was for a sports team at my university. I had the roster including pictures, the schedule, stats, etc up there. I coded the html by hand in vi.
I remember going to a book store and seeing a book called something like “The Complete Internet White Pages” - it was a list of pretty much all the known web pages at that time. I was in it.
Not realizing how awesome that was, I didn’t buy a copy. Sigh.
-D/a
I was always too poor to be cool…but I remember my mom getting caller ID so she could dodge an ex boyfriend’s call. It freaked my friends out. Yeah, that’s trashy, but hey! None of my friends had it!
In my last year of college (1970-71), I got a chance to use HTSS, the Honeywell Time Sharing System, an on-line system. We accessed it over the phone lines with a teletype with an integrated acoustic coupler, programmed in BASIC, and stored the source programs on punched tape. We also had a plotter that we could use to play a trajectory shooting game. I wrote a program to plot dragon curves and a 31-gon with all its diagonals.
A buddy of mine had gone to MIT and did play one of the earliest versions of Spacewar on an ocilloscope.