I remember my first encounter with an answering machine. I was in elementary school and trying to call a classmate to ask about something.
I freaked out and told my mom that a robot had answered the phone. I hung up right away and my heart was beating so fast… I had no idea what to do. My mom told me it was an answering machine* and to leave a message. I couldn’t do it. I was too intimidated.
*at the time I still pictured something that physically picked up the phone to answer it.
This was 1970s Wisconsin.
Dad worked for the Bunn Company, which made restaurant equipment. Our coffee maker was a restaurant model, with handsome copper molding, & metal guts.
Everybody in the neighborhood came over for coffee, because nobody owned one.
That’s when I started drinking coffee on a regular basis.
Pocket calculators. Way too big for my pocket. As expensive as a color TV. Now, they give them away in checkbook covers.
Cellular phones, as opposed to “old style” car/mobile phones which only the richest of people had. Again, way too big. Took up a bucnch of trunk space for the car versions, big as my forearm for the “handheld.” Plus, $80.00 a month for service, $1.25 per minute for the calls, no “free” minutes. Got to make 'em smaller and more affordable… Now, I can carry mine in my mouth and have rom to spare for a small ferret. And, it’s cheaper than my home phone.
My dad worked for an environmental research company many moons ago and introduced is to the portable computer back in the 70’s. (Mind you, this HP computer was 2 feet wide by 2 feet deep by 1 foot high. Had a small 9" black and white screen and ran on BASIC and weighed a TON!) And what did WE do with computer you asked? Play games of course. 
He also used to bring home a portable laser for us tp play with. (It wasn’t exactly small either, but bloody powerful!) The handle, of which, looked like a lightsaber.
Ok but tell the story of your first encounter… that is the point. Not just what the item was or when you encountered it. Like for me, the answering machine scared me and confused the heck out of me. What was your experience like when you first encountered one of these things?
With the computer, we were so excited when my dad lugged it into the house. The first question we asked was, “Can it play games?” We were fairly comfortable with new technologies as my dad would bring stuff home all the time.
Now the laser! Oh boy! When we first saw this thing and learned what it was, there was no controlling us! The only kids ,I dare say, in the CITY to have their own personal ‘light saber’! It wasn’t practical to play with as the ‘lightsaber’ emitter was attached via cable to the power supply. (Which was rather large.) But we knew that if any Sith Lords walked into the room where it was plugged into, they were toast!!!
In '94 or so, a wealthier friend of mine loaned me her cell phone. I went through the drive through at the Wendy’s I worked at, and the guy there flipped out on the idea that I had my OWN cell phone. WOW. I and the friend who was with me thought we were so posh.
I remember the first time I tried to use a cell phone. I couldn’t make it work. (I didn’t “get” the idea of pushing another button after dialing the number)
(before anyone thinks that sounded too pathetic, I just handed it to my mom, whose phone it was, and whimpered. She pushed the right button and handed it back to me.)
Many, many moons ago the owner of the company where I worked asked me to FAX something for him on a Saturday when his assistant and all the office help were off. I had never used a FAX machine in my life, but I knew where to find it. This particular box may have been a prototype or 1st generation. I know it was very old and not at all intuitive how to use. It printed on a roll of special heat sensitive paper and the output looked like a black “carbon copy.”
After what seemed like days but was more likely only a sweat filled half hour I figured out how to send the owner’s FAX. Knowing the owner, telling him I didn’t know how to send a FAX and couldn’t figure it out most likely would have been a career ending move. Ditto if he ever found out I had required assistance. Nice guy, he was.
I we were walking to the train station from school. My girlfriend hands me the walkman she got for her birthday. It was playing The Tom Tom Club’s Genius of Love.
I put on the headphones and stopped dead in my tracks. “Wow!” I yelled at girlfriend, “I can hear everything!” I still think walking around in the street with all that great sounding music no one else can hear is cool.
And Opal, I still hand my cell phone over to my kids to do things I don’t know how.
I was three years old and being introduced to a computer by my dad. I put my hand on the mouse, and he said “Try moving the mouse up.” Exact words.
So, of course, I picked up the mouse. I was imagining that the cursor moved by means of some sort of three-dimensional guiding system.
I remember seeing ATMs demonstrated on The Mike Douglas Show in the late 70s/early 80s. I remember thinking they were cool, but wasn’t sure if they would catch on.
Later on, they installed an ATM at the Student Union where I went to college. The local bank, which I supposed owned and operated the ATM, was smart enough to offer students bank accounts with ATM cards, and they were handing them out like balloons at the circus.
When I first used it, I was incredibly impressed that this type of technology, which I had seen on TV, was now in my very own hands! I felt kind of privileged. We used to refer to it as “The Money Wall.”
My next-door neighbors were very technolocically advanced. In the early 70s they had this odd extra oven that sat on the countertop and they used it to heat up soup right in the bowl, and the bowl didn’t get hot! Just amazing. They said they were “nuking” their soup. My mother was sure they were going to glow in the dark from eating soup that had been “nuked,” but they’re still all living.
They also had this odd contraption that was hooked up to their TV that allowed us to play the most amazing game, I think it was called a “video game,” whatever that meant. It was called Pong, and the graphics were just incredible, black and white paddles moved up and down, and pushed a little ball back and forth. We were mesmerized, I tell ya.
My first experience with Pong was in 1977. I was spending the night at a friends house and he had it. I was 8 and just loved playing it. It was the most amazing thing… a game right on your TV set. The next Christmas, Dad had gotten one for my brother and I. We played it until about 3 AM that night.
In 1982 we got our first VCR for Christmas. It was so cool. We ended up watching 3 movies that my parents had rented that night: “MASH”, “The Gods Must Be Crazy”, and “Better off Dead”
We didn’t get to bed that night until 2 AM.
I was a nothing in high school until somebody came back from the USA with a digital watch for me. Huge thing, red LED display that lit up when a button was pushed. Looking back a wristwatch that took 2 hands to operate seems a bit silly but I was a celebrity because of it and I resolved to never bother with analog clocks and watches again. Unfortunately I was stopped so often by people to show it off the battery died within weeks and another could not be found in Australia. The LCD ones just never gave me the same thrill as that first all plastic Texas Instruments watch.
It was just after my junior year of college, when I was in a summer student research program that my advisor said to me, “You know how to use the World Wide Web, right?”
Uhhhh, no?
I was thus introduced to the Mosiac browser.
I used it for science, believe it or not. It was some time before I was clued into its, uh, greater potential.
Internet, 1981.
Reaction, “WOW!”
Fall 1979.
My brother brought home from work something fantastical and high-tech called a TI Silent 700 terminal. It used shiny thermal paper, could print only ALL CAPS and had a 300-baud acoustic modem with rubber cup things on the back to which you fitted the telephone’s handset.
He used this marvelous gadget to connect to something called the ArpaNet. There were some twenty or thirty computers located all across the country that you could actually log in to from home!! (provided you had an account). There was nothing in the world I looked forward to so much as the sight of Keith coming over for dinner on Saturday, carrying the terminal under his arm. We’d log in to a machine called MIT-AI to check out the SF-LOVERS mailing list (the first newsgroups were still two years in the future) and even play ZORK!! Technology! Progress! A world at your fingertips!!
whoo, those were the days. No spam, no pop-ups . . . 