900 Numbers
I guess it was April 1981 and we had just gotten a phone and a TV. An apparantly costly combination as I saw a commercial for a number you could call and listen into the Space Shuttle in orbit for X dollars a minute. My mother caught me a short while later listening to the phone in rapt amazement. Wow! You just push these buttons and then you can listen to the astronauts! Incredible.
On a vacation with my family in about 1987, stopped at some relatives’ house, who had this strange kitchen instrument called a microwave oven. I had been a bit isolated from technology, and thought this machine was a bad, heathen thing–playing around with things that humans were not meant to understand! 
When our church kitchen got one a couple of years later, I was shocked out of my mind–the sheer worldliness!
Similar reaction when I met my first computer–black & orange screen, dot-matrix printer. Made welcome-home banners for friends with ASCII graphics (lots of X’s or O’s or whatever, arranged in the shape of whatever letter was needed). Amazing technology–you could plan out the placement of the letters in advance, and didn’t have to worry about the letters running off the page if you hadn’t started the word soon enough. WOW!
UPSTARTS!!!
In 1953 My dad built our first TV (from a correspondence course kit)
We NEVER had a family night alone after that!! Suddenly we had friends that we never knew!!
Saw my first calculator in 1971. It could add, subtract, multiplyl, and divide!!! The cost, IIRC, was $400. It could, just barely, fit into your shirt pocket. One of our teachers had been given it as a reward to being promoted to head of the Chemical Engineering department. At the time I, and the rest of the well heeled techno geeks, were using slide rules.
a number of years ago, I ordered my first computer when my youngest son sent off to college. It arrived and I asked both of my sons about putting it together. They asked me to leave everything in the boxes, which I did.
When they arrived home, we all marched into the “computer” room, and they plopped down on the bed. It wasn’t until then that I realized that they were in for a treat, watching their old Dad try to figure out how to get this new fangled thing together. After a lot of not so nice words on my part, and a lot of snortles, gufawhs, chortles, and downright laughing out loud on their part, I managed to get everything connected and up and running. Luckily, my first computer was an Apple.
Then after dinner, I learned how to use a mouse…
I love 'em both, regardless…it’s that unconditional love sorta thing…without which none of us would survive our parents. Grin.
I’m taking a little different bent on this. A few years ago, I bought a ThinkNIC internet computer. The intent was to get my grandfather (then 89) on the net to correspond with his Daughter, living in Washington state.
The fact I could get a purpose built computer for internet access for $250 was one very incredible concept in my mind.
So we took the computer to his apartment, set it up, and went through the three pages of notes on how to do the two or three things he’d want to do with it. We magick markered the keys on the keyboard for dialing up the ISP, and the keys for bringing up the web and email, and showed him the bookmarks for the family website with our wedding pictures.
He figured out how to turn it on, and how to get it to dial, and how to view our wedding pictures.
He never really GOT email.
This is a guy who was born just outside Edinburgh Scotland in 1912. – Indoor plumbing was a luxury, electricity occasionally available, and the town had a shared phone.
I guess if he didn’t get email, that was okay. 
Wonder what we’ll see in the next 60 years?
Better Off Dead - 1985
Ack, Opalcat beat me to the punch on “Better Off Dead” but: “The Gods Must Be Crazy” didn’t get widely released in the US until 1984 and wouldn’t have been available on video for some time after that. It was still playing in a local theater in at least 1986.
My first encounter with video disks in the mid-1970’s:
You can tell it was the mid '70s, because the player was called “Disco-Vision”, and that didn’t seem stupid. My uncle Ron had one, which made him a favoured uncle for a while. I don’t know how many times I watched Fantasia and 2001. (I wasn’t allowed to touch the disks, though.)
I got my own Beta player, just about when it became clear that Sony was losing the war-- A crazy friend of the family gave it to me after he “upgraded” to a new VHS model. I’ll never forget the maintenence instructions he gave me: The machine would only play for a few hours before the tracking went wonky. He took the cover off the deck and pointed out a gummy looking capstan, explaining that, when this happened, I needed to add more dish detergent to get it to move freely again. :eek:
I got the thing home, partially disassembled it, and soaked the gummy parts in a nice solvent, cleaned 'em up, reassembled it, and carefully applied a little bit of WD40. Got years of use outta that thing, until finally it just got too impractical to replace the tapes as they wore out. Still, though-- What possesses someone to put soap in their VCR on a regular basis? “Hmmm. Picture quality degrading. Needs more soap.”
Jesus.
Larry, he did to watch dirty movies.
[Grinny here]
Holograms ~1983
Amazing. I knew they were science. But they looked like magic. 3-d pictures in a flat piece of plastic, and they were made with lasers. I stared at the simplest of them for hours.
Then Marvel made hologram cards.
~1992, I read a comic in which a time traveller gave another character a moving hologram card. The card was from 5 years in the future,he said. I thought this was an unrealistic estimate. I had plenty of jerky movement holograms. But these were monochrome, and the movement was a jerky transition between 3 or so different positions. How could the writer expect me to believe in a full color, smooth as film motion hologram could be made in 5 years?
~1994-I saw a shelf of baseball cards. Magic. I thought of Paul Simon’s lyrics “This is the age of miracles and wonders.”. The future was now and we were priviliged to see it.
Lasers ~1988
My highschool science teacher had managed to get a laser. It was 3 feet long, 4 inches tall, and 6 inches wide. It’s cost was in the thousands. It had to be plugged in. We all understood the principles. But, we sat in the class like 4 year olds at a magic show. We knew we were lucky. We’d seen something most people never would.
~1998
Anybody can buy a laser keychain for $15. They ran on two watch batteries. They were many times brighter than the laser I'd seen in school. I finally bought one from a flea market dealer. It cost me three dollars. I went home and pointed it at everything. I played around with mirrors and crystals. I took it with me on walks after dark to see how far the beam went. But, the epiphany had come when I first saw one in the store. The miracles of technology were becoming cheaper and more commonplace. What unbelievable device would be in every house next? Was any prediction too ridiculous?The one I remember the most clearly was the calculator. My dad had been given one at work, I think it was the Christmas gift given to every employee, and they were quite impressed with it.
The family gathered around the calculator, my dad solemnly explained it was like a little computer, only in our very own home. Obviously, people couldn’t have real computers in their own homes, so the calculator was a good substitute.
We punched in various simple math problems (for hours) – and get this – it worked EVERY TIME. That’s what amazed us. It would have been neat and all if it had worked, say, 95% of the time, but it got the right answer EVERY TIME. For a while it was a special treat – being allowed to play with the calculator.
I’m guessing this was around 1975, based on the house we lived in, and the fact that the hardest math problem I could come up with on my own was 12 divided by 4.
About a year later, I went on a class field trip to the local college, where we saw a desktop computer. This was a marvel for our teachers as well as the students. Each student was allowed to type his or her name, and the computer printed out an ASCII picture of Snoopy, with our name printed under it. We were able to take these home, where I proudly displayed mine on the door to my bedroom (I wouldn’t let my brother rip off the punched edges of the paper, otherwise it wouldn’t look like a cool computer picture!). I remember being vaguely confused about what computers do – our teachers had told us that places like NASA and the government used computers, but I couldn’t figure out why a bunch of grown-ups would sit around all day printing out pictures of Snoopy.
I bought one about two years ago at Target for $5, and use it as a cat toy. Who could have predicted THAT 14 years ago? All that cool technology, wasted on the cats. :smack:
For a while I had my PC hooked up to a wall sized projector. as well as my regular monitor. The mouse-pointer moving around the wall drove my cats bugsh*t-crazy. I never felt more like a 21[sup]st[/sup] Century Man than when I started interfacing with my pets through my computer.
We have one for our cat, too, but I never realized how odd it was until just now. Imagine 25 years ago, someone saying “My cat’s favorite toy is a laser!” That sounds like something Richie Rich would say.
Ok, this is really long ago:
We had a TV, all our friends had TV’s. One of our friends had this lens thing in front of the screen, to make it look like a colour TV. (We all had B&W TV’s, btw) I didn’t like the colour thing that much, made the picture fuzzy.
Then, Dad decided to buy a real colour TV. He was an engineer and had an inside track on getting one without selling the other car. Seems someone he did some extra work for was a bigwig at RCA or somewhere (I was a little kid, so some of the then unimportant details are missing).
On that TV, I first saw colour written as color. Hmmm…
I really wasn’t that impressed until one certain show, something about jungle and white guy and guns and medicine and animals and whatever. There was a scene with a camp fire. I looked at the scene on our TV. I looked at our fireplace on the other wall. I looked at the TV. Oh My God! It’s the same! The fire is the same! Quite wild for a young boy. Now I realized just how good it was for Dad to get a Color TV.
Now, I can get one 93 1/2 times better for about 1/5th the real world price. I know 1968 and 2002 prices are not comparable, but real world prices are. That’s what I call the amount of time required to work in order to purchase a certain item. What took a week and two days to earn to buy then, takes about 9 hrs to work to buy now. (Not an actual cite, just to give the gist of my reasoning)
I remember it well…My first microwave oven…1962, I was in the army in Munichl, Germany. I walked into the base snack bar, got a cold burger, and plopped it in the oven to warm it up. I sat down nearby, since I knew it would take 5 minutes or so…WRONG…after about 20 seconds, the bell went off, I got up and opened the door thinking there was some problem. But no, as I lifted the top bun off, I could see steam coming from the meat! Impressed me so much, I did another one.
A strange part is that after I came back to the US in 1965, I expected them being used here, but it seemed to take a few more years until I saw them for sale.
My dad brought home a top-loading RCA VCR (which for years we called the “tape machine”) in 1978. For days, maybe weeks, I was afraid to touch it. Finally, my mom asked me to turn it off when her show was over. I hesitated for about two full minutes before working up the nerve to dart my hand out and press down (!) on the Stop button.
Play, Record, Stop, Rewind, Fast Forward and Pause were all flat tabs that jutted out from the deck. To use them, you had to press down about an inch until they latched, or in the case of Stop, snapped back. Pause gave you a black screen, as well. And I can still hear my mom saying, “Hold down Record and press Play”.
I read this and immediately thought of that Young Ones epsiode where Mike and Vyvyan are trying to work the VCR Mike rented. (“Yes, we’ve got a VID-E-O!”)
Mike: Well, I don’t call this a new era in televisual entertainment.
Vyv: No. I call it very, very dull!
Mike: Must have gone wrong somewhere. Maybe you shouldn’t have poured all of that washing-up liquid in it.
Vyv: But it says here, Michael look, “Ensure machine is clean, and free from dust”!
Mike: Yeah, but it don’t say, “Ensure the machine is full of washing-up liquid”!
Vyv: No, but it doesn’t say, “Ensure the machine ISN’T full of washing-up liquid”!
Mike: Well, it wouldn’t would it! I mean, it doesn’t say, “Ensure you don’t chop up your video machine with an axe, put all the bits in a plastic bag, and bung 'em down the lavatory”!
Vyv: Doesn’t it? Well maybe that’s what’s going wrong!
The Internet. 1993. It had finally come to India!!
We spent so many, many, many nights looking up porn!!
Remember, xash?
I should mention, I was 18 then, and porn was not something easily accessible here…