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?
I can’t remember when I first googled, but I do remember it involved a switch from Altavista, which had previously been my search engine of choice.
I learnt to type on a computer in 1990 (at school, actually – go Typequick!), and got my very first e-mail address in 1998. My parents had one sooner, I think. First own mobile was 2000 – once again, parents had one first. First digital camera was 2004, and I am still on neither Flickr nor Youtube.
Windows 95 – pah. It was Windows 3.1 that changed the world!
it must have been 2000 – I was an early adopter. We were working on a joint project with an American institution and their programmer told us about this amazing search engine that just found things. He was particularly tickled by the ‘I feel lucky’ button.
I suppose the last few years have all been about mobile internet but the way I drop, lose and break things I’m stuck with a dumb phone so I haven’t joined that particular revolution.
Cobal?! If you wanted something useful, you should have studied FORTRAN.
In 1989, I was the first one in my (small) company to work on a PC (3/4″ diskettes, Windows 3…)
I think I first googled around 2001, at that time I had a very poor 256 K connexion and a 2 hours/month package I mainly used for emails, which had been THE revolution for me since I had just moved to the countryside, far away from friends and family. Now I couldn’t live without my MacBook, but have not made the move to smartphone yet.
+1 for Altavista
I don’t remember when I first used google. I got my first email account and started using computers and the internet regularly in 1995 when I went to university; I remember I had several different search engines bookmarked, including Altavista and Yahoo. My family are late adopters so while various schoolfriends had had home computers my family were using an electronic typewriter (!). But my primary school, back in the eighties, was very proud of having a computer in every classroom. One of those loaded from a cassette tape.
Lauren – typequick? A mystery, a technological revolution that has passed me by.
TM, feel locked out of mobile internet revolution. Sigh.
BroLo, you’re telling me.
Viviane, diskettes, diskettes, I’d forgotten diskettes.
Sarah, vaguely remember this alright.
Dot, you are a babe in arms. Hadn’t realised that you were so young. V. impressed by your primary school kit though.
For the full chronology, see my blog, because I started using computers in
1983 Working for Texas Instruments, Inc, as a tech writer, wrote the manual for the TI-99-4 home computer’s version of word processing software — TI-Writer. ( http://oldcomputers.net/ti994.html — you should look at this thing!) You had to type the formatting codes in yourself. Most of the manual was a list of the formatting codes, what they did and how you used them. Used 5-1/4 inch floppy disk that actually “flopped”.
1999 Worked for a national transcription service with accounts in 8 states. Used a dialup modem so I had to have 2 phone lines. Read about Google in Discovery Magazine, gave it a try and never looked back. Got my first email addresses.
2001 Went to DSL modem.
2003 finally got a cell phone.
2009 bought a new E-machine + flat screen monitor for work that runs windows Vista and has 2 gigs of RAM. Now working for an outfit out of California for accounts in 10 different states. KVM switch switches one flat screen monitor, keyboard and mouse between my “play” computer, a Dell (Pentium 4, 3.0 HZ, 120 gig hard drive, Windows XP)and E-machine, which has a second monitor attached to it. Switched to ATT U-verse and now have WiFi capability, which I use with my Kindle. I have 5 email addresses now including 4 personal, 1 professional, (my blog has its own). I have never used anything but Google as a search engine as it is the best all round engine for my several (personal/professional) needs.
Actually, it appears I’m a smidge younger than Dot, but I clearly went to inferior schools – we had a computer room (hence the learning to type), but never had a computer in an actual classroom.
Oh, and I typed my first assignments on pre-Windows Wird Perfect.
WOL, 1983 – you clearly know everything about computers. I am very impressed.
Lauren, a computer room is better than us. I think that the authorities must have felt that investment was pointless as nuclear destruction was imminent.
The primary school with the computer in every classroom was a tiny little country school with only three classrooms; a computer room might have meant more computers, in fact. I remember there was a word-game we played on the computer that involved guessing a word from its meaning and initial letter; we also had a ‘turtle’ that drew shapes on the floor following a simple set of instructions we had to compose. Once the headmaster (also the teacher of the third class) decided to teach the boys about computer programming, and took them off for a special introductory session. Yes, just the boys. Think what a whizz I could have been if only I had been in that class:-)
Hmm. That’s a strong argument for single sex schools, isn’t it?