Sort of an interesting topic, myself and my father and uncle had an interesting conversation last night.
They were talking about when my grandfather had bought the first family color tv, and how the neighbors would come by just to see it in color. Then they went on to tell me about other similar stories.
That got me thinking, what am I going to tell my kids about tech stuff when i was growing up. Feel free to add yours here it could be a very interesting thread.
When I was younger, my parents would actually go to a movie rental place and rent a VCR and get some movies to watch. I remember this goddamn thing, it was in a suitcase, and it was a big event for my father to hook the thing up to the TV Set.
I remember the first microwave that we had in the house. It was amazing to watch it cook food. It was a small one given to us by our aunt for christmas or something.
I remember when we got our first “big” TV. My father bought this 27 inch Philips TV, we had it hooked up to cable, and my mother was just saying how ‘beautiful’ the picture was, and how modern the TV looked because it had a black case instead of the wood one. We all couldn’t get over how “big” the picture was. It was like having a movie theater in the house, even turning it on was a joy. (I swear to god).
The first time i seen a DVD I was in school. The teacher was showing us some educational bullshit movie. I remember her showing us the disc, and she passed around and told us not to touch it, we could damage it. Then she made a big scene of taking the disc out of the case, not to damage it, then holding it by the edges.
The first computer I owned had a AMD PR75 processor. It ran at 66mhz, and had 8mb of memory. We played tons of dos games that my cousin pirated onto floppy discs for us to share.
The first time I was on the internet, was in school as well. The teacher would go around and sign us onto prodigy, so that we could check out some smithsonian bullshit. We then switched to AOL, and my first phishing experience came along. I would watch the teacher enter the user name and the password into the machine, then I would use the schools AOL account at home. The password was the last name of the principal. I remember that shit to this day, my brother and I would be tooling around the internet at 14.4kbps. He finally changed the password after we were logged onto it all the time, and he couldn’t login from the school, lol.
So my dad still wouldn’t pay for internet, so I ended using the modem to sign onto juno email. It was weird as hell, it was a email program, that you had to dial into juno to download email, then it would hang up right after it downloaded your email. We thought it was a sweet free service.
Then I found buffalo freenet or something. It was this lynx based text internet service, you could surf the internet in text only format, and access local buffalo BBS.
When netzero came out, I was amazed that you could get internet for free, so long as you had this banner on top of the window at all times. I shortly found myself downloading hacking programs to remove the window, and still use their service.
The first time I seen a CD burner in action was at my uncles office at ub south. He’s a scientist, and he brought me and my cousin into work with him so he could record a couple CD’s. I was amazed by it. It took like an hour to burn two cd’s.
Then my first CD burner was an iomega external usb burner. It took me hours to figure out how to get the drivers to work on windows 95osr2. When i finally got it working, my dad was so amazed. It was like we had a record studio in the house now. The iomega burner was this purple contraption, huge in size, and weighed alot. I bought it for 149 dollars online, and I had to beg my dad to get to use his credit card online.
Ha, i have so many more…
