When was the first time you heard of a certain groundbreaking technology you now take for granted?

[Sheets of Easter]

For example, in my case-

e-mail: 1993. I was working a fast-food job before I went to college, and the place where I worked just got a new computer for the management to use. That is the first time I ever heard of e-mail.

mp3- 1997. I was reading an article somewhere about how it was supposed to revolutionize the music industry (for better AND worse).

Stereo television- 1985. When I was a kid, I remember a lot of the NBC shows showing a little "In Stereo" graphic on the screen at the start of a program.

[TZ]

1. The only ones I can think of right now

Is 1992 I think, when I was introduced to both the concept of e-mail and some strange computer thing that was called the world wide web...

[realisticphish]

2. email was a vague reality when i was a kid

but i sure as hell remember cd's and dvd's coming into being. It was huge, as i was in middle school at the time

[KansDem]

3. Microwave oven...

I remember the first one I ever used was at a community college I was attending. It was located in a food court. I would select a (cold) burrito from the vending machine then put it in the microwave oven to heat it up. I was amazed at how quickly it heated.

There were no revolving trays in the ovens then and I would select the setting by turning a dial. Most times the burrito would come out half piping-hot and half still cool, but it still fascinated me!

[PeaceNikki]

41. Ah yes.

I vividly recall the whole family standing around watching water boil in amazement when we got our first microwave.

It was magical.

[CreekDog]

4. you're old if you said "pneumatic tubes"

:think:

[u4ic]

5. Colour tv

We got our first colour tv in the very early 70's; I remember the news anchor from ctv news, who I did not like (I don't think I was even in school yet, but just hated him; he gave me the creeps) was green for a while. :D

[Sheets of Easter]

6. Growing up, my family had a big, old tube TV, and the red & blue tubes crapped out.

We had to settle for green TV for many years.

[Richardo]

7. "The following program is brought to you in living color - on NBC"

Hence the peacock!

[KansDem]

8. Yeah, I remember my parents saying, "Wait till the bugs are worked out"

I remember the news anchor from ctv news, who I did not like (I don't think I was even in school yet, but just hated him; he gave me the creeps) was green for a while.

I bugged my parents for years to buy a color TV but they would just shrug it off and say, "Let's wait for the industry to work the bugs out." My grandpa had one (mid-'60s) and I would watch it when we visited him. True, the sky was green and the grass purple, but it was such a switch from B&W. I think we got our first color TV around 1970...

[Iggo]

12. Yep, color TV was the kind-kind.

Or, using a word I dusted off yesterday: BOSS!!!

[Richardo]

13. Welcome to the 'Boss!' revival movement

:pals:

It's been a crusade of mine for several years :)

[Iggo]

19. I'm in, dude.

I said it today at work, and all the young white-hairs turned around.

It has begun...

[DarkTirade]

24. One of my teachers told me about the first time he saw The Wizard of Oz...

he didn't know about the change into color near the beginning.

Because his family still had a black and white TV. :)

[intheflow]

30. My father told me he was surprised at that too...

but he saw it in original release as a nine-year-old! :)

[Richardo]

9. The market research department where I worked was tech central

Our department got our first IBM PC in 1984. A 10MB hard drive - how could you POSSIBLY need anymore than that?

The suits were very reluctant because of the 'P' in PC. The idea that an employee would consider company property to be somehow 'Personal' hurt their brains too much.

[Sheets of Easter]

11. When I was in 2nd grade, my school scored an Apple II. That was in 1981.

I'm a young'n. :)

[DarkTirade]

25. In the late 80s my elementary school got a COMPUTER LAB... full of Apple II Es.

:)

[Lethe]

31. and they all had Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego on them

incidently, you can play all your old favorite apple games for free at http://www.virtualapple.org/

Oregon Trail is still a bitch if you play it on the hard part where you don't start out with any money

[DarkTirade]

35. All I needed was a BASIC compiler and I could make my own games.

:)

[KansDem]

10. "Instant replay"

I remember this coming to fruition during the late 1960s. Before you had to pay attention so you wouldn't miss something. Then, with instant replay you didn't have to pay attention any more. If something amazing happened during a sports match, you could sure they'd show it again. And again. And again.

I think "instant replay" contributed to the general decline of attention spans...

[yellowdogintexas]

14. 1969 I was told about ATM machines as the wave of the future and I just stared

at my boss like he had 3 heads.

I kid you not he said to me..
"one day people will take their credit cards and just walk up to an electronic teller outside the bank and be able to get cash"

I did not believe him.

in about 1976 or77 a different boss was telling about how the whole way business does correspondence was about to explode..how IBM pre programmed typewriters and templates were about to go extinct and computer letters were going to change everything. sounded like a fairy tale to me.

Oh me of little faith.

[mwooldri]

15. World Wide Web... 1993.

First year at university, the university computer labs (the PC ones at least, I didn't get access to the UNIX labs till later on in my courses) rolled out Mosaic. In the meantime, Email, Usenet and Gopher were ways to get information online. And then there was the library.

Mark.

[PeaceNikki]

16. Yeah, MP3s...

I remember FREAKING out about the 1st MP3 players. I shelled out like $250 for an RCA Lyra with 16MB memory and thought I was the shit. This was before CD players played MP3s and before USB. It had a freaking parallel interface.

It looked sorta like this:
http://di1.shopping.com/images1/pi/4f/19/08/3064-177x150-0-0_RCA+Lyra+RD2204.jpg


Shortly after I bought it, CD players started to come out that played MP3's. And since you can fit about almost 50 times as much data on a CD than you could on my stupid Lyra, I was pissed. x(

Oh, and DVD players. Again, being a techie geek, I had to get one ASAP. I waited until they came down to about $350 before I jumped. Like a year later you could by an Apex for under $100 that played about 1000 more formats than my $350 paperweight.

[Symarip]

17. Great Topic

Early 90s - a friend calls me from the Del Mar Fair from one of those exhibition booths. "Hey, I'm on a cellular radio phone?!?!?!"... What's a cellular radio phone?

1997 - my high school friend who worked at the PC Club (he was in college, I was in the Navy) showed me 2 computer related items. One was a 'webcrawler', allowing people to access webpages, and the other was a downloaded movie clip entitled 'jesus vs. santa claus'.

1999 ish - (I still don't have a computer) my buddy is listening to music on his laptop computer. Everyone is in awe that a complete album can be listened to in this 'mp3' format, on a computer no less. He informs us, he downloaded it off of this program called "Napster".

Here's some other random shit I think about:

Remember when there were no debit card machines at cash registers? And remember when ATM machines would spit out fives?

Remember tapes? or LPs?

Remember when all TV's were cathode ray tubes? And Pay Per View was new?

This always trips me out - 18 year old adults and younger probably don't remember a world without the internet.

486's were supposed to be the end all, be all of computer technology.

People used to wear watches. They don't anymore (due to cell phones).

Speaking of cell phones, when was the last time you saw a payphone?

What ever happened to 1800collect?

Did those two characters on the Folgers International Delights (or something like that) commercials ever bang? They sure seemed to have a lot in common with that coffee.

[Doc_Technical]

18. microprocessors.

Found out about these wonder wafers that could take the place
of dozens of transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc..
This was at Keesler AFB in 1971.

[Mutley]

20. The internet.

'92-93ish. I was at a summer camp and they used some sort of private server or something (I really don't remember what they called it) to create a chat room. I had only really heard stuff about the "information superhighway" but had never paid attention to what that was.

It was so cool. :D

[Lydia Leftcoast]

21. I first used an ATM in Japan in 1977

I'd never even seen one before. I told everyone what a great idea they were.

In 1979. Yale announced an experimental project in which a select group of Ph.D. students would be allowed to word process their dissertations.

We worked on terminals of a mainframe computer using a word processing program that depended on dot commands inserted in the text. In order to see the printed form, we had to send a command to the one printer in the computer center and stand in line to receive our printouts, which were on those joined sheets of paper.

I first learned of fax machines when my department chair told me that his wife and daughter, who were traveling in Europe, had faxed him a copy of a pamphlet from a museum. This was in the late 1980s, I think.

[Celeborn Skywalker]

22. Internet

In 1995 I was in 6th grade and my best friend had the internet. I thought it was so awesome that I could actually connect to people all around the world.

[ScreamingMeemie]

23. MrG's very first "Windows" IBM, with the "funny little picture windows"

He bought it through work for a whopping $3500 and we sat and played Solitaire for about 4 hours, amazed by the wonder of it all.

[DarkTirade]

26. Not so much technology but it has to do with computers...

my first experience with BASIC. The fact that I could make my own computer programs was so amazing to me at the time.

Now? Meh, I'll whip up a 2d game now and then. I've dabbled in 3d a little bit. :)

[Malikshah]

27. 1989-- Working Front Desk for Courtyard Marriott-- we had Electronic Mail

in order to contact other properties-- it was large/clunky, but e-mail nonetheless.

A good analogy would be the cell phones of today which can fit in the palm of your hand vs. the 1980s version (the size of shoe box...)

[Critters2]

28. When I was in seminary, I lived in a house with a bunch of starving grad students.

Money was tight, so no newfangled gadgets like cable TV or microwaves. I remember one January we had all been to our respective parents' homes for Christmas and sat around at dinner marveling at the cable TV the rest of the civilized world had. We were amazed that they were watching channels from Atlanta and Chicago in all parts of the country. We would've sounded like cavemen to almost anyone else at the time!

Then, we finally got a microwave. One morning some of us decided it would be faster to use it to toast a bagel than wait for someone else to get done with the toaster. One guy said that his parents cooked everything in the microwave for 3 minutes on high. So, we microwaved a bagel on high for 3 minutes....and set it on fire! :rofl:

[Evoman]

29. Cell phones.

I remember when only rich people had them and they were about the size of your entire head. Or they had....lucky bastards...car phones.

Now everyone and their grandma has one. They give them away like candy.

I still don't have one though...but they are very common place. Even though I'm only 29, I have never sent a text message.

[conscious evolution]

44. First heard about them in the early 80's

My first thought was who would be crazy enough to pay $3.00+ a minute to make a phone call.

[Sheets of Easter]

47. A friend of mine had one in his parents' car.

I remember him begging us not to use it, because it was $2 a call.

[Alexander]

32. The Internet, when I used Prodigy in the early 90s.

At the time I was a really young kid, and I thought Prodigy was the Internet, not realizing that it was just a gateway.

[DU GrovelBot]

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[coyotespaw]

34. I was 4 when my dad got me an Atari VCS...

I could play Adventure (the game where your character is a yellow square) for hours on end. Now I'm getting sick of my PS2 because the graphics aren't HD quality...

Maybe I just need to hit Ebay and get re-aquainted with Yar's Revenge.

[Sheets of Easter]

36. I bought an Atari Flashback console at Tuesday Morning for $10.

:D

It has Adventure, Yar's Revenge and about 20 other games, in all their 2-bit glory.

The games are so primitive, they're almost tougher than modern video games.

[tigereye]

37. Kurzweil scanner - I first saw one in the early 80s when I worked at the

Library for the Blind here. Now the industry is huge. The speech synthesizer seemed amazing at the time.


Kurzweil Technologies, Inc. (KTI) is a research and development company developing and marketing technologies in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, evolutionary algorithms, signal processing, simulation of natural processes, and related areas. The principals of KTI have founded, developed, and sold four successful companies in artificial intelligence technologies. Kurzweil "firsts" include the first omni-font optical character recognition (OCR), the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the sounds of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition, and others.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

38. Pay at the pump

We were vacationing down in Florida in 1992 or so. My dad pulls up at a gas station and is amazed that you don't have to walk into the gas station and pay the cashier. All you need to do is swipe your credit card and go.

[SteppingRazor]

39. Slight tangent, but I do remember back in 1985 or '86 when all the stores pulled records off...

the shelves and CDs completely took over. I was too young to really be into music yet, but I remember that being a big story.

[Sheets of Easter]

43. On a related note: remember long boxes?

Yes, they were a waste of cardboard, but I used to hang them as art every time I bought a CD.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

40. CD Player.

I think it was 1988 or so. My parents bought me a CD. I had no idea how it worked, but thought it was cool looking in how it reflected like a mirror.

[Sheets of Easter]

42. I have a few more:

Polycarbon eyeglass lenses- 1985- when I was a kid, it was a pretty big deal. Used to be you had your choice of glass lenses, which were heavy and highly breakable, or plastic, which scratched like crazy.

video games- 1980- the first one I remember playing was Galaxian. I'd play it at the mall while my mom shopped. This was in the good old days when a parent could turn their back on a child for a few moments without worrying about the consequences.

scratching in music- 1983- Rockit!

[KG]

45. indoor plumbing!

actually, in 1976 in my HS shop class the instructor had some freinds of his bring in and demonstrate a forerunner to the PC. it took so long and did so little that when they asked if anyone wanted to sign up for a class in useing those things, i rolled my eyes and said to myself 'riiiight. that shit will never fly'.

oh well.

[LeftinOH]

46. The answering machine in the opening credits to "The Rockford Files"...

that was the only one I ever saw or heard of for a few years.

[conscious evolution]

48. Pop tops on beer cans

I found an old church key on jobsite today and it reminded me of having to punch holes in beer and soda pop cans.