Growing up in my household, we were always the last to get any shiny new gadget, so I remember a time before we had tape players, color TV, a microwave, etc. But I had friends who had these items, so I’m not sure when it was that I actually first saw them.
But I do have one nobody else has mentioned yet. Some time around 1990, I was at a pre-college camp at Wright State University in Dayton, and we made a field trip to nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. A techie there showed us one of the fancy new gizmos the Air Force had, a device called a GPS which could determine exactly where you were on the Earth. The thing was the size of a shoebox, and they were working on how to make it small and light enough to make it practical to fit one in a fighter plane.
Sometime around 1970, just before I started high school, I read an article in (I think) Popular Science about the new generation of hand-held calculators that were just coming on the market.
They various models mentioned were expensive enough ($200 to $500 IIRC) to be out of the reach of us ordinary mortals, but I lusted after them just the same. Especially one of the HP models (25?) mentioned.
As a freshman in high school a year later we were still using slide rules, calculators still being out of reach for most of us. But about that time Summit (a local company here in SLC) started selling smaller and less expensive calculators. By the time I was a senior, I was able to buy a Summit for just over $100.
It had the basic four functions (add, subtract, multiply, and divide) and also did squares, square roots, and reciprocals. It used 4 AA batteries, and would run about 4 hours on a set of batteries. It was just about the coolest thing I’d ever had.
A year later, my trig teacher in college had an HP (45 I think) that had all the trig functions, plus some other stuff. He called it “God”.
Hard to imagine now, but calculators were nothing short of amazing back then.
Color TV. My parents finally bought one when I was around 7 or 8. We watched The Rifleman the night it was delivered because it was the only program on in color, and in spite of the fact that my Mom hated Chuck Connors.
Electronic tuners for guitars – I don’t hear very well, so tuning my guitar to itself was one thing, but tuning to pitch to play in an ensemble was hell for me, (and embarrassing to have to ask my colleagues or tutor to tune my guitar, even though they were very understanding.)
Anyway, my tutor was and is a gadget freak, and he’s always got the first of anything, and back in 1984 he showed up with this electric guitar tuner – analog, and you had to set it manually to each of the 6 string tones – he used to give it to me to tune up, and I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen or used! It was prohibitively expensive for me, over $60, but I bought my own just the same, and everyone wanted to borrow his or mine for ensemble practice.
There’s all kinds of digital tuners now – you can get a chromatic Korg model for about $12 a throw – and ones that actually sit on the guitar headstock itself, and mine loks like some kind of quaint dinosaur now, but I still use it, and it’s still dead accurate.
I remember my first up-close encounter with a computer. It was also my first encounter with the internet.
My brother had just purchased a Compaq with maybe 16 megs RAM.
It was AOL 3.0.
He showed me how you could search for anything you wanted to know on the Internet. Told me to type something in the search engine.
Only thing I could come up with was “cheese”.
I was fascinated by the fact that there were thousands of websites dedicated to cheese!
Six weeks later I had my own machine. And then I found The Dope.
I was a kid when the Sony Walkman came out. I distinctly remember standing in my friend’s back yard, and his older brother let me listen to his Walkman for a couple of minutes. Until that time, I had never had headphones on, and it was trippy, because the music sounded like it was coming from directly in the center of my head. :eek: Truly, a novel experience.
Same here. My exposure to lots of things was at friends houses.
Color TV. I remember being embarrassed when my friends were talking about Star Trek and they would refer to the characters by their shirt color, and I had no idea who they were talking about.
8 track tapes. My sister got one. To this day I have no idea how they worked, but I was utterly fascinated listening to that “clunk” they’d make as they switched tracks.
Eventually we got a cassette tape recorder. My mom would sneak it in her purse into the movie theater so later we could listen to the movie over again at home. We’d tape music off the radio, so we had to hold the tape recorder next to the stereo and be very quiet.
VHS and Beta recorders. Man, that was so cool. We never got one, of course. That was definitely for rich people, since even if you could afford one, buying a movie was like, $75. There weren’t rental places.
Hand held calculators. Those were so cool. You had to go to the library and check one out. We loved punching in 77345, turning it upside down and going, “see, it says 'shell!”
Computers. My brother’s high school had one, in a special room and only science geeks were allowed in. My brother was showing me how cool it was one time. The thing didn’t even have a monitor. It was basically just a big dot-matrix printer that used those huge rolls of perforated paper. They were playing some sort of Star Trek game. You’d type in some commands, and it would print out a little x or * to represent the ships. I thought that was totally lame.
Microwave. Our family never had one. I remember in third grade we were reading a chapter in our reading books about future inventions, and one of the things that might be possible in the future was this amazing device that could cook your food instantly using microwaves. “Wow!” I thought. I finally got to use one sometime in highschool.
Contact lenses. There was time when they were really expensive, and few people had them. My mom took great delight in watching the TV really closely to see if she could tell if an actor was wearing them or not. I got my first pair of hard lenses in high school, and my first pair of soft lenses in college. In 1995 I got RK surgery. Woo, hoo! Laser surgery hadn’t been approved by the FDA yet.
The internet. My brother was showing how cool it was, using Unix commands to access all these remote databases. “How incredibly boring,” I thought. But still cool. A couple years later I got my first computer and there was this program, First Class that you could use to navigate BBS’s graphically! Now that was cool. Then there was AOL, blah, blah, blah. Everything becomes a blur after that.
My first encounter with the microwave:
My grandma decided to try out my aunt’s microwave when she cooked some hot dogs for my cousin and me. Not realizing that it would heat the things up faster than conventional methods, she set the timer for 12 minutes.
The end result was a hard, dry, wrinkled brown log, resembling a fossilized turd. But dammit, we ate it… Because we didn’t want to hurt Grannie’s feelings. MMMM- crunchy hot dogs. ::ralph::
Electronic calculators. In 1972 I started 8th grade, and could expect to start needing a slide rule probably the following year. But wait!.. What’s this? In December 1972 I saw my first electronic calculator in a department store. It was being demonstrated by one of the first guys from India I ever met. (There’s another for the OP… Indian people…) The calculator had a red LED display and, what, 8 bytes of memory. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, mathematically. Even though it was as big as a novel and had to be worn on guys’ belts because it was too big to fit into a pocket. It cost something like the exorbitant rate of $100, and that was in 1972 money.
It only took a few years before calculators shrunk to the size of credit cards, could fit into your wallet, dropped the price to $5 and were sold with the gum in checkout lines, and then were given away free, and even became solar powered before evaporating into technospace. Now we have virtual ones installed with Windows and hardly even think about them any more. But in 1972 they were the latest techno rage. Mindboggling how fast things appear, evolve, and then evolve themselves out of existence.
My mother worked for a large insurance company in the 1960s. we were invited to an opening ceremony for their new regional headquarters, and they were giving out pieces of magnetic tape as freebie gifts to the visitors.
Yes, I had a piece of computer tape (from one of those old big tape drives) as a nifty gift because it was still pretty new in the early 1960s.
(Yeah, I know they had tape earlier – I’ve seen it in 1950s movies. But it was still so new to most people not specifically working with computers that there were a lot of takers for what, today, would simply be garbage.)
My first encounter with a calculator was in the 60’s when my father brought one home from his work, where he was a chemical engineer. It was one of the first hand held calculators from HP and cost around $500. It came in a fancy leather case, but all it would do was add, subtract, multiply and divide. You also had to hit enter after every number:
1 [enter] 1 [enter] +
and it would respond with 2. Not much, but it sure beat using a slide rule.
I used to like going to the office supply store when I was a kid, where we could see such neat gadgets as electric staplers and electric pencil sharpeners. They weren’t all that new, I suppose, but nobody I knew had one.
I was just thinking about when my family got our 1st VCR back in the 80’s. What was astonishing to me was that I could watch a movie I wanted to see… ANYTIME I WANTED! Young’uns today may not realize that back in the Triassic age before DVDs and VCRs we could only watch a movie when the TV or movie theater decided to show it.
The first time I tried to make a call from a cell phone I tried to figure out how to go offhook and get a dial tone… My sister had to tell me what to do. This was quite embarrassing because I’m the techie of the family, and a professional telecom engineer to boot.
The first thing I thought of when I saw the thread title was calculators. I remember seeing the first one some time in the early to mid seventies, at a friend’s house. I had lurid fantasies of using one under the desk in Maths. It wasn’t long before they were allowed in Maths lessons, even exams. Who would have thought!
I still use my calculator if I have it to hand, as opposed to the Windows version.
Notable mentions:
Colour TV - 1976
Video - 1979
Walkman - 1980 - I was wowed. Even crappy music sounded great.
Digital watches - mid seventies
Car phone - mid eighties
Cell phone - early nineties
PC - mid eighties
TV Remote control - late seventies
CDs and CD player - early nineties
Microwave - early eighties
Color television. My grandparents were living high on their social security checks and my grandfather’s small railroad pension and splurged on a color TV, so I got to see the third season of the original *Star Trek * in color.
FM radio. Not exactly a radical new technology, but it first made a real impact in America in the late 60s. They played album cuts!!! Sometimes as long as ten whole minutes!!! (I seem to recall FM had already been widespread in Europe before this time. Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong.)
I recall the explosion of 8-track and cassette recorders in the late sixties. Except maybe for a few open reel machine, there basically wasn’t any recording equipment for the consumer market prior to the mid-sixties. I rememer getting friends to make tapes of their LPs for me to play on my cheap cassette boombox.
Quadraphonic hi fi. I was all in a tizzy over quadraphonic sound when it first came out in the early '70’s because all I could afford was a beat up, used compact system and I felt I was being left behind. I was green with envy when a friend bought a quadraphonic 8-track system. Little did I know how quickly this new technology fad would blow over …
A bud bought a VCR sometime in the late '70’s. We spent a whole night setting it up, drinking beer and smoking dope, and watching old horror movies on it. I’d seen them in stores, of course, but it was the first time I’d ever seen one in somebody’s home.
Back in the mid-'80’s I published an amateur magazine and was involved in several round-robin letter circles. One of the participants in one of the round-robin circles started using a computer and an inkjet printer to produce his contributions, and I was awed. It looked like it had been professionally typeset, while all the other contributions had been typed and mimeographed or photocopied.
About the same time, a cousin bought a compact stereo with a CD player in it. Again, it was the first time I’d seen one in a private home. This was a big thrill because he let me use it to make tapes of CD’s I borrowed from the library.
I wandered into a software store for the first time some time in the late eighties and saw an Amiga (or maybe a Commodore). Color me green with that envy crayon again. Some weeks later a relative gave me a used Apple //c. I was so happy I was practically turning cartwheels.
Getting on line for the first time in the early '90’s with the GEnie and AOL services. I was still using the aforementioned Apple //c, already obsolete when I’d gotten it. People were astonished when I told them I was chatting online with them on an 8-bit Apple with only 128k of memory.
Saw my first laptop on the train going home from work, some guy catching up on office work. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The guy using it realized I was staring, looked up and gave me a big toothy grin.
Being just a youngin’ (not that young, though, mind you) I don’t recall never having a color tv, VCR, micorwave, or calculators not being super-common. However, I do recall my first internet experience.
I was in seventh grade, and as part of one of my classes, we were familiarized with the high school’s computer system (junior high and high school in one building.) There were two computer labs, A and B. 90% of the computers were these old, crappy IBM dealies designed for the sole purpose of being on a network. They had no hard drive. Basically, jsut a motherboard, monitor, and floppy drive. They were really ancient, and had a menu of the apps on the school’s network. Wordperfect 5.1 (Man, I still miss the white on blue,) MS Word (2.0 or 3.0, I think), Turbo Pascal (don’t write a program too big, it will take a year to compile,) the school’s email client, and aome kind of internet thingy. Now, mind you, this was 1994. It was when the WWW and internet were not the same thing. The WWW was a part of the internet, it was desinged for fancy-schmancy computers and had picturse, but older computers (like the ones we were using) could only access the text-only internet. So there I was, looknig at a page of a light blue background, with white text, and yellow links. It was boring and not useful at all.
By the end of the year I had figured out how to use Netscape on those few machines that had Windows 95 on them (which was brand-spanking new at the time.) What did I do with my new found internet (and WWW) freedom? What every pre-teen does when the first discover the interet…chat rooms. (Although chat rooms are almost a thing of the past, thanks to instant mesasging.)
Vacuum packed coffee. I was on a Med Cruise in 1988, and a guy n our division got a care package from home. In it was a brick of coffee. I thought it was great, how you could cut open the top of the foil pack, and let the air in. By the time we got back friom the cruise, it was available everywhere.
Cassette tape. In the late '70s, my friends and I all used 8-track player/recorders. One of the guys went and bought a Harmon -Kardon cassette deck for about $1000. We all laughed at him, saying that 8-tracks would never be replaced by cassettes because you never had to get up and turn the 8-track over to hear the second side of the album.
I’ll have to chime in with another CD player story…
Early 80’s, my mother is in charge of the computers at a local electronics store (I think it was before there were seperate stores for PCs, at least in rural PA). She brings me into her work to show me something. Takes me over to the stereo section, fiddles with something, and out pours the 1812 Overture so crystal clear that I think I’m sitting in front of an orchestra. It was heaven. (the 1812 is my single favorite piece of classical music) They had just had their first display model installed the day before and she knew I’d love it.
Oh, and I just remembered when I first learned about portable cell phones…
Late 80’s, I was running a Champions campaign (super hero role playing game) and one of the players wanted to spend points to have ‘portable phones’ for each of the members of the super hero team so they could stay in contact. We argued over how many points it should cost. I said it would cost a lot because they didn’t really exist. He claimed that car phones were real, so carrying one around without a car was possible and they should only cost a couple points. He actually called the phone company and asked about it and was told they were working on exactly that item and would have them on the mass market in the next year no bigger than a small walkie talkie. … I thought they were exagerating, and made the players carry around something the size of a shoebox for 5 points (less than my original cost of 10 but more than the 2 he thought it should cost.)
Another person whose life was changed by the handheld calculator. It had a lot bigger impact on me than the computer, at least up until the point I started making my living off computers.
When I was in college, there were 2 practical ways to do calculations (excluding the adding machine, which was of limited usefulness):
Do it all by hand, which was nasty for arithmetic, and totally sucked when you got into using trig tables, log tables, and the like.
Do it part by hand and part with a slide rule, which could multiply, divide, do roots and logs and the like, and had maybe 3- or 4-digit precision.
There were mechanical calculators, too, that looked like a small cash register, had a million keys, and went clickety-clack for a really long time before they gave you an answer. The less said about them the better.
So when I saw my first handheld calculator, it was like I’d hunted with a spear all my life, and then got my hands on a rifle.
I still have my first calculator, an HP-45. It cost $425.
I also remember my first exposure to CDs. I thought they sounded like shit, and that records sounded better. I no longer think they sound like shit, but I still think that records sound better.
Truly, a novel experience.