In spring 1993 I was finishing my senior year of college, and working part-time at Lechter’s (a now-out-of-business kitchen supply store in the local mall). One Sunday morning I opened the store with the manager, and found that the cash register had printed out a message from the regional office on the receipt tape! I asked my manager how that was possible, and he said, “There are computers inside the registers; this is called electronic mail.”
So, even though it was a hard copy, I consider that my first encounter with e-mail. I didn’t hear about/see the internet until 1995 (I started with just Compuserve), and it was 1997 when I got my first e-mail address (Rocketmail, baby!).
I’m just glad no youngsters have come along to bum us out by telling how their first encounter with something that was once new to the rest of us came post-obsolescence – as in, “Yeah, I remember the first time I came across an Atari game console. It was in a museum.”
Okay, young’uns, tell us! Have you ever seen an 8-track tape actually being using and not just sitting on a thrift store shelf? Have you ever used a 5.25" floppy? How many of you have actually played an LP or a 45? Have you ever watched a black and white TV? When was the last time you used a rotary dial on a telephone? Do you remember AM only table radios? Or vacuum tubes?
When the school principal announced over the intercom that John Glenn had completed his third orbit of the Earth, my fourth grade class broke into a spontaneous cheer. I remember going out on to the front lawn at night with my father and brothers to look for the first Sputnik. Nowadays, space flight is routine and even mundane. But I may be drifting off topic. Apparently the OP wants consumer technology.
In 1997 I bought a Gateway 2000. The biggest fastest mostest computer they had. A Pentium II/300 with Windows 95. Wow and gee whiz were my friends envious. It had a DVD player. The day I got it the DVD player didn’t work, I called the 1-800 to Gateway. The tech dude’s answer;
“Your what?”
My Dad bought a microwave in 1978 or 9. It was the first one anybody saw with the built in rotary plate. It’s still in my kitchen today. Whenever you see directions to cook for say 10-12 minutes, I go with 9 and it’s smoking hot.
I got my parent’s old TV when I was a teenager in the 80’s. I was the only kid to have a remote control TV in their bedroom. The change channels the dial went all the way around. So from channel 2 to 4 you clicked twice. To get from channel 4 to 2 you had to go all the bay around the dial.
The look of awe on the faces of anybody under 25 when I show them the inside of my mechanically operated 45 playing jukebox is amazing.
My mom, the tax accountant, got an IBM PC in 1982. It was a monster (10 mb of hard drive!!). With the pretty orange screen (or was it green?) I cannot tell you the number of times that she “cleaned” the computer, then called me when it wouldn’t work. Mom, [B]c:\del . ** is evil and you should never *never * do that. Bad mom!
Vinyl: A good friend of mine used to listen to Motown records with me when we were FOUR. Of course, we listened to them (probably 45s) at 78 rpm. And jumped on the beds in an early impression of “moshing”. Later I listened to Anne Murray’s Hippo in my Bathtub album, and the Return of the Jedi storybook album (when R2-D2 beeps, turn the page!).
8-tracks: my great-aunt had one, which I was allowed to fiddle with when I was seven or so. I found a Roy Orbison tape I liked, and an Elvis tape I liked. I seem to remember you could switch tracks in the middle of a song, and go from “Love Me Tender” right into the middle of “Hound Dog”, which made me laugh.
Cassette tapes: a cousin made me a mix tape with the Ghostbusters theme, some Weird Al, and some Beach Boys on it. He side A from vinyl records and side B from tapes he owned. I thought this was the coolest tape ever. I played it on my tan-and-brown Fisher-Price tape player OVER and OVER. When we got a car with a tape player in it (1987) I insisted on playing it in the car, because it was the only tape I had.
Computers: this is blurry for me. I remember that in second grade we had a TRS-80, and by third grade the computer lab had some Commodore 64s. Around that time, dad picked up an Atari 800 from a friend who was upgrading. I remember being half-asleep in the back of the car as dad loaded it into the other seat next to me. He woke me up to show it to me – “Hey Jurph, look: it’s a personal computer. They’re new. You’re going to love this.” “I wanna sleep.” I remember it came with two 5.25" floppy drives, two cartridge bays, a tape deck, and four joystick ports. When I got the 300-baud modem hooked up to the telephone and was able to dial up a BBS… well, that sealed it. Watching the ANSI characters scroll by, first in FFUULLLL DDUUPPLLEEXX and then in a more normal fashion… it was magical. I won a “programming contest” in third grade – at the state level! – by teaching the LOGO turtle to draw a seascape.
“Real” Computers: I remember the 286 he got from work, and how the “main screen” was an ANSI graphic shell. When I figured out you could hit BREAK and go to a DOS prompt, I immediately began to have some real fun, with things like DOSSHELL (the precursor to Win 3.0, I think). It came with a 2400 baud (!!!) modem, so I was able to download software like SOPWITH.EXE onto its built-in hard drive. The first time I played a video game that hadn’t come with the computer, I think I blew my dad’s mind. I know it blew my mind. I remember telling my dad that we needed to go out and get some “hard floppies” because our machine came with a “B-drive”. I even remember opening the case to install a sound card that I had gotten for free after touring the Ensoniq factory – I was terrified that I would breathe on the chips and short them out, or that I would accidentally touch a charged capacitor and fry the motherboard. I can probably go on and on about seeing each major advance: CGA, EGA, VGA, 486, Pentium, removable RAM, etc.
MP3s: I downloaded one of these, and a player, from a BBS shortly after we got our 386 (with a 9600 baud modem). It was a ZIP of several very scratchy voice clips of someone telling Groucho Marx jokes. Ugh. Maybe it was just an MP2? A WAV?
Compact Discs: when I got to high school, I had seen CDs used in tray-loading computers, but didn’t own any music CDs. Portable players were more than $100, and I didn’t really even know what music I liked. I went to a boarding school where a friend of mine had a foot locker full of CDs. My first disc was a present from a friend: They Might Be Giants’ Flood. I still own it and still love it. Not a scratch!
Rotary Phones: the phone I used with our modem was the second-to-last rotary phone in the house. I do remember manually dialing the number for the BBS and then just telling the modem to ATA (I think ATA is the right command, but it’s been… almost twenty years?). The fact that I could dial any number I wanted and then just tell the modem to “open the line and listen to the squeal” was really cool.
Digital Calculators: from HP, I think. Third grade, maybe fourth, we had a “calculator contest” where the answers all “spelled” something when you turned them upside down (e.g. 0.7734 = HELLO). Being baffled by the new technology, I flipped them about their long axis, and looked at the back of the battery cover for some aspect of the back of the calculator that would change. When shown the “letters” properly, I humphed in derision: “that’s dumb. It would be cooler if the letters just showed up.”
Back in 1973 my parents took me to Disneyland. We stayed in the Disneyland Hotel and off in one corner of the lobby was a Pong machine. Every morning we walked past it to get to the monorail and every morning I begged for quarters to play it. I would have been quite happy to skip Disneyland and play Pong all day … .
I’m too young to have experienced most of the things here (although I do play records and originally had a B/W TV), but I remember the dawn of mp3s.
I was a sophomore in high school (1997), and over hanging out with some friends. One guy’s older brother was back from his first semester in college, and was talking about some new music file that would let you put 100s of songs on one cd. He burned me a disc (which was amazing in and of itself) with a player program and a bunch of Beatles albums on it.
I remember seeing the Echo I satellite pass overhead many times in the early 60s. It was basically just a huge aluminized Mylar balloon, but it was really cool. Now you go to a website and get the exact time you can see the Space Shuttle or see an Iridium satellite flare brighter than Venus.
It was just a couple of years ago that I got a broadband Internet connection and could watch the live NASA TV feed of the Earth from the Space Shuttle. I watched the Earth pass underneath for a full orbit. I’ve always been interested in high-tech, so I’m a bit blasé; but when I reflected on what was happening, it struck me as near-miraculous.
I remember the earliest arcade video games, all B&W - Pong; the original Breakout (stick figures jumping on a seesaw to break overhead balloons); and Death Race, where you drove around in a car trying to run down stick figures who would turn into tombstones when hit.
I remember from the mid-70s the first desktop computer I used - the IBM 5100. 6-inch screen, 24X80 B&W character mode only, hardware BASIC or APL that you selected with a switch, tape cartridge storage. I was working at a small insurance company, and the actuarial department bought a couple of them. They did most of their own programming, but I wrote a couple of programs for them, and they let me use the PCs after hours. I got a copy of “101 BASIC Computer Games” and put the Star Trek game on the PC. It was a bit of a pain because the PC used a version of BASIC that was different from the original game.
I bought my first VCR late, about the time 80% of households already had one. I remember the feeling of control when I could rewind to catch a line that I missed. And I also remember reaching for the remote to rewind and being annoyed when I realized I was watching live TV.
Hah, you’re a kid yourself. 5.25", indeed. In my first job at HP, we used eight inch floppies.
Do you remember Heathkit? When I was in high school, my Dad built a color TV by Heathkit, with tubes sticking out all over the back. A bit later, I built a Heathkit AM/FM receiver. And I used it for years.
I don’t think we need to be confined to consumer tech. The space shuttle may not be exactly “commonplace”, but it’s certainly well-known. Well, way back before it had ever flown, I had a summer job at the Nasa/Ames center. My boss took me for a tour of some of the facilities, and in one building he showed me this stack of odd bricks that looked like grey-painted styrofoam. He told me that they were the heat-shielding for the new space shuttle (that NASA was building a shuttle was publicly known). Being a normal, curious kid, I reached out to touch one. The guy almost had heart failure. “Don’t touch them!” And went on to explain how very fragile they were.
I’ll never forget my near-brush with greatness: The first space shuttle flight almost went up with my fingerprint in one of the tiles…
I’ve never even *seen *a slide rule or 8-track. How’s that?
But then again, I know about most stuff. My mom likes old stuff. Not for the nostalgia, but because she says she honestly doesn’t see why a computer is better than a typewriter. I think she’s nuts. But they still have records and a record player, had a rotary phone and an electric typewriter into the 90’s, and other such stuff, so I know more about older tech than most 24 year olds. (They also had AOL for two years after they got cable internet…but that’s another thread.)
Now, for a nice 180, most of the new cool up and coming stuff I first saw in my very own home. My dad is a total techno junkie (even though he needs the boy and me to help him figure stuff out) and his income allows him to buy cool stuff when it first hits the market. Of course, this also means he gets an overpriced product that hasn’t had the bugs worked out yet, that in about a year you could buy for a fraction of the cost at much better quality…but if that’s how he wants to spend my inheritance, so be it. (This could be why my mom insists old stuff is better; all their new crap is buggy!)
I was way too young to understand what was so cool about the first microwave we bought, but my parents were really excited about it so I remember it clearly. We got it at Sears, and the outside looked like wood, but it wasn’t.
First camcorder–it had to attach to the vcr which you wore like a backpack. Very little battery life so we mostly got around the house footage where you could stay plugged in.
First CD player–cost a jillion dollars. Mom said vinyl sounded better. Dad heard that it was only reasonable to buy classical music on CD; the excellent sound quality would be wasted on rock. Once I tried to play it, but it was hooked through the stereo and I forgot to turn some knob or flip some switch and it was silent. I freaked out thinking it was recording over the CD and my parents were gonna shoot me.
First cell phone–I was probably fourteen or fifteen. Dad got it so when he and the boy went camping they could use it if they got in trouble. Unfortunately it was a giant in-a-box type one that got no reception because there were no towers in our area yet. Oh well.
First DVD player–I remember this one clearly. He got it for himself for Father’s Day. I was probably about sixteen or seventeen and had recognized a pattern in my father’s purchases, so I wasn’t gonna get my hopes up for this new gadget to work properly. I was not disappointed. It was a GIANT black box, but the remote had a joystick, so that was cool. It kept screwing up and pixilating out and we had to unplug it and plug it back in to reset it. It cost three hundred dollars.
In a different vein, I remember the first time I heard rap music. I was at the roller-skating rink with my elementary school class. I asked an older kid what it was; they seemed to think “RAP” was an acronym or abbreviation for something. I predicted it would go no where, then requested GhostBusters! Yeah!
I didn’t realise that our TV was black and white until I saw my first colour TV in the early 70s.
We were on holiday in the US and when the TV was turned on I got a real shock to see the colours and realised that at home we had been watching black and white.
I remember the first time I saw an Indian. I was in Montessori kindergarten, and the year must have been 1964. The teacher told all the girls to gather at the front of the class for a visitor, and all the boys to go in back and amuse themselves with something educational. So I positioned myself at the edge of the girls’ area and watched. An Indian woman was explaining how to wear a sari — and even demonstrating how to wrap it! I was entranced.
When I actually attempted to wear a sari myself, some 40 years later, I got it right on the first try! So I actually did learn something valuable in kindergarten, like that book says.
Around '82/83 I was at a computer show, and Apple had this new system out called the “Lisa”. It had this wild, non-text, user interface, where you pointed at things by sliding a little box on the table and tapping a button. The Lisa sold for around $20K, and all those fancy graphics made it run really slow, so while it was a “cute” idea, everyone was sure it was too expensive, and too low performance to ever catch on.
In 1984 I was a job fair, and a guy had a hand-held laser pointer. It was roughly the size of a 3-D Maglite, and had a HeNe tube in it. WOW, a laser that could run on batteries!
I remember seeing a 3.5" floppy disk on an early production of a HP engineering workstation around '82 or 83. At that point there were plenty of 8" floppys still in use. The hard sleeve and shutter were fantastic innovations. It was 3-4 yrs later that they became the standard on PCs, which might not have happened if the Mac (came out in 84) hadn’t featured it. OP asked for “common now” and these are already becoming obsolete…grrr.
In '85 I interviewed at the McKinny, TX TI plant. They had developed a GPS reciever for tanks, jeeps, and such. It was a little more than half the size of an army footlocker, and this was the second generation of receivers.
In '86 I took a chance and bought a car with the new-fangled electronic fuel injection, instead of a “reliable” carburator. Still have it and only one minor and easilly diagnosed thing ever went wrong with the EFI. Oh yeah, it was sold as a 4WD “station wagon” because nobody knew what an SUV was yet.
Around 1989 I was working on a “multimedia” (quotes because we’d never heard that term) system for a military training program. Today it would be trivial, but we were integrating early video overlay cards, pre-soundblaster audio cards, and one of those big freakin’ video disk players others have mentioned. I had to route a bunch of analog signals around in a custom LAN, so an instructor could have an AV link to the students. If you pull up a web page with a basic video clip you are way ahead of what we were doing back then…except we had touch screens too, which haven’t really become mainstream. (for good reason, IMO)
Around '87 I landed my hang glider in a rural area and walked to a farmhouse. They had one of those cellular bag-phones. I knew a contractor who had one, but that was the first time I ever talked on one.
Remember when nobody ever thought of a notebook computer, and the luggable Compaqs were the height of portable computing? I went the doctor to get patched up after a skiing accident, and afterward he took me to his desk to show me his new compaq.
I was in middle school in the mid-eighties, and I remember seeing a watch with a calculator on it! The watch face was small, and it had a set of 10numbers and the normal plus/minus/divide/multiply options. It was the coolest thing ever!! Only maybe 2 kids in the school had them at the time, and it shot their popularity way up!
Way back in the early 50s, we were the first family in our neighborhood to get a tv (of course b&w). It was a Zenith, and had a round screen. We got it just before Halloween, and instead of handing out candy, my parents invited the kids in to watch tv for a few minutes, since it was such a novelty. I remember it didn’t take long for the living room to fill up with kids; no one wanted to leave.
My earliest musical memory was my father playing his 78s. That’s when an album was really an album, containing several records. I still have his collection in my basement. Several years later, we got our first stereo hi-fi that played LPs. What a difference!
When I was eight, my mother let me stay home from school to watch Eisenhower’s first Inaguration and Queen Elizabeth’s coronation on tv. These were the first international events I remember seeing.
I remember when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik.
I watched, live, Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald (JFK’s assassin).
In 1970, I started doing typesetting on a keyboard that punched paper tape that had to be fed into the typesetting device. This was about a decade before floppies.
I had one of the first handheld calculators, just basic math with LEDs, made by TI. Before that, I used a little metal gizmo with tracks and notches and a stylus, that worked on the same principle as an abacus.
There was a time when I had both 8-tracks and cassettes, and the big debate was over which format would render the other obsolete. I think it was Dolby that tipped the scales toward the cassette.
I’ve got a few player-piano rolls, but they’re **way **before my time.
(This could be why my mom insists old stuff is better; all their new crap is buggy!)