1970s – That tennis game where you moved a cursor up and down to bounce a tennis ball to your opponent at very low speeds. Also, my cousins’ very exciting video recorder. You could make people go backwards. At speed.
1980s – A pointless course on COBAL in school. My sister’s acquisition of an Apple MAC.
1990 – My first job. The partner with a computer the size of a house on his desk who the other partners all laughed at. The phone that needed its own suitcase when you lugged it on business trips.
1993 – Traineeship in a large organisation. We had some kind of convoluted internal email. All of our usernames consisted of first four letters of surname followed by first two letters of first name. This led to some amusing nicknames. Look, we were trainees.
1995 – Real email in a real job. Windows 95 – Where do you want to go today?
1997 – The boyfriend who said that his Finnish ex-girlfriend said that everyone in Finland has a mobile phone. Complete refusal to believe this was so.
1998 – Become aware of internet shopping and the intranet is hot.
2000 – Marvellous new search engine called hotbot.
2001 – Online travel booking. Put directions to my wedding and other stuff on a website (arranged by technically gifted brother-in-law). Feel like the bees knees.
2002 – First googled, I think. Apparently, Arthur C. Clarke said that trying to get information from the internet was like trying to get a cup of water from a waterfall. He meant before Google.
2003 – Buy a computer for home use. Set up blog. Buy a digital camera.
2004 – Discovered the joys of RSS, I think.
2005 – Joined Flickr.
2006 – Joined Youtube.
2006 – Got my own domain name as my blogging host sinks beneath the waves.
2007 – Joined Facebook.
2007 – Joined Twitter. Gmail, maybe.
2008, 2009, 2010 – Nothing that I can think of. I may be getting old or else I don’t notice the new things any more.
Do you remember when you first googled?
