I still have my first gen Sony DiscMan. 4 AA batteries that would last about 6 hours. Thing would skip if a fly farted on it.
I still have my first gen Sony DiscMan. 4 AA batteries that would last about 6 hours. Thing would skip if a fly farted on it.
I saved and saved and saved and then lined up to buy the Sega Genesis when it came out.
Other than that, I'm a total luddite.
My first digital camera that I can remember was a Kodak DC40 in 1995. I had one before that, but can't remember the name. The ones with the floppy were released in 1998. I had an odyssey game system and a trs80 computer too. My Nintendo system had the robot, not sure many had them.
Smartphones. I had a Treo 300 right when it hit the store. I'd actually had a phone for a few years at that point.
Smartwatches too. I had a Fossil WristPDA that ran Palm OS.
WiFi. I was the first person I knew with it in my toilet seat iBook.
I had a Sony Aibo at one point, but I don't think that ever panned out as a thing everyone did.
I kept the electronic ignition on my first Harley, back in the 80's when everyone else was converting theirs back to points, 'cause they didn't want to worry about the brain box leaving them stranded!!! Spare points/condenser cost less to carry. I took the chance, and stayed lucky.
I have a Gmail account that dates to the second round of invites.
Sony MiniDisc, I've got the sport oriented Mini Discman, MZ-S1, still have it and the discs in a box in the closet. I used the heck out of the thing, I used it an entire summer working in upstate New York and a few years later flew to Scotland with it. Spent 10 days in Great Britain, and listened to it on the trains. I had an Alpine headunit with an aux-in, and used the Mini Discman with it for years too.
Anyone else have an Nvidia DualTV setup?
This was before TiVo, at least before I was aware of it. I was sure this was how we'd all be watching TV soon. It's just an AGP TV tuner and capture card, but it's got S-Video (remember S-Video?) in so you could record from other sources, and an external remote dongle. Could even do picture in picture, playing TV in a window ontop of whatever you were doing on the computer screen. While recording raw video was doable, there was zero compression, and I'm not sure I even knew what a codec was back then, but whatever it was doing maxed out my 733 Mhz Pentium III, and it didn't take very long to fill a 60 Gb hard drive with recorded video files.
It seems that while I'm not always an early adopter of technology, I continue to use it well past its prime.
I was a Windows Mobile phone user, before iPhone was a thing. I had a flip hone (I think it was a Motorola) that had Windows Mobile on it. Then I had pretty much every generation of HTC Windows Mobile phones, but only after they were a year or two old and available second hand for cheap on eBay. I spent a lot of time on XDA Developers monkeying with my phones, getting every last ounce of performance and life out of them. I used a very modified HTC Touch Diamond until about 2013.
I accidentally joined the book of faces really early after it left Harvard. I had a friend email me a link to a video he took on the autobahn. With his racing history I knew it would be good so I signed up real quick to what ever it was to be able to watch it. About 3 years later I get an email from a person with a familiar looking name asking if I was the jgrewe from Toledo?
I did some quick digging back through links in the email and found out it was a married ex-girlfriend. I logged on for the first time since I watched the video and quickly deleted my account.
Home CD player in 91
Discman in 92
CD burner in 96
Banned by Metallica from Napster
MP3 player in 98
In-Dash DVD Video and GPS Nav in my 2002 F250
Had a Blackberry or 3, Original HTC Evo 4G on Sprint, then got busy with life and stopped caring so much about latest and greatest.
Oh one other thing: I'm sightly embarrassed to admit this but I stood in line so I could buy a copy of Windows95 at midnight on August 24th 1995.
486DX2 80mhz it was a clock doubled 40mhz chip. It overheated several times before I found out that thermal paste was a thing.
ISDN which was 2x 28k lines in parallel. My company paid to have it installed and the monthly fee. I worked from home in 1998 (only after normal business hours).
I bought a 3DFX Voodoo2 card the day it came out. $300 and worth every penny.
We had 20" Sun monitors at work but I had a 13" at home. I wound up buying a 20" refurbished monitor for $1200.
I threw a few LAN parties at my place in the 90's. we played Quake, TF, etc. My friends worked in the IT group so they provided 20" monitors and a switch to network us all together. After the last party the switch was left at my house. I got a panicked call one day from one of these guys. Apparently they were doing inventory and a $50k switch was missing. I told him it had been sitting in my hall closet for at least 6 months.
I replaced the 20" CRT with a 28"(?) Dell LED monitor/tv. It was a decent TV but it sucked to use as a monitor. It was so bright that it hurt my eyes. I had to return it. I exchanged it for a $1200 Dell 24" flat panel monitor.
I bought a $200 4x DVD drive for one of my PC builds and barely used it.
I work at NVIDIA. I bought a GTX460 and GTX1070 when they came out. We get $100/year to use in the company store so you can buy a new card every three years or so basically for free.
My grandfather bought a VCR in 1977. It cost $1000 in 1977 dollars, blank tapes were $20. The VCR lasted forever and those old tapes were of VERY high quality, recordings looked like store bought cassettes. He also bought a ColecoVision, and he bought me a Timex Sinclair. (A neat little POS computer that I wasn't old enough to appreciate)
My Mom had a digital camera that DID use 3.5" floppies.
Me, I've never really had much to be able to adopt any technologies early, but I did start rallycrossing in 2004.
We used to do LAN parties just about every weekend. Lots of RoTT. We couldn't afford any of those fancy hubs so we used coax. I was able to get a bunch of 10Base2 cards that work was throwing away. In a couple instances we didn't have enough Ts but had plenty of extra cards so I'd solder up a second, unpowered card to the one in the computer using some telco cross-connect wire. It worked better than I expected as long as we could remember where we put the terminators....
We had Pong in 1975 - does that count? 
wae said:We used to do LAN parties just about every weekend. Lots of RoTT. We couldn't afford any of those fancy hubs so we used coax. I was able to get a bunch of 10Base2 cards that work was throwing away. In a couple instances we didn't have enough Ts but had plenty of extra cards so I'd solder up a second, unpowered card to the one in the computer using some telco cross-connect wire. It worked better than I expected as long as we could remember where we put the terminators....
Wow, I forgot about Rise of the Triad! That was one of those games I never played but watched a friend play for a few minutes until we got bored and went back to DOOM.
Around that time, a bunch of friends, and their friends, and their friends, basically took over a whole pavilion in the Cleveland Metroparks for an all night outdoors LAN party. Technically the park closes at midnight and opens at 6am, but a park ranger came by around 1am, dumfounded by a couple dozen people with computers set up (no laptops, just towers and CRTs) and cables strung all over the place, scratched his head, and said "Well, you're not causing any trouble, so just make sure you tidy up the place when you leave"
Games included Carmageddon, Grand Theft Auto (pre-GTA3 open sandbox), Quake, etc.
Lots actually...
And not sure if this counts but I've pre-ordered the Tesla Cybertruck
Me/my parents, with the first people I knew to have a home computer. A month after it was launched in March 1981 we got a Sinclair ZX 81. Came with 1k of RAM.
I added 32K external ram.
Other kids at school were jealous and thought I was cheating on homework as I had a computer which could tell me all the answers.
A year later I saved up, sold the ZX81 to buy a ZX Spectrum with colour, moving keys rather than a membrane keyboard and....wait for it.... 256 x 192 pixel graphics capability!!! Cost then was £175 which was equivalent too $266USD at the time allowing for inflation that's more like $700 that was a huge amount for me at 14.
In 1992 I installed the TPI from a 1986 IROC onto my 1972 Monte. That's the closest I've ever been to early adoption of any technology.
I did the Lan party thing back in the day. Good times. I miss those. I guess Discord + a good group of people is roughly the modern equivalent. I actually did one in ~2011 or so that was mostly my roommates friends. I thought it would be just like old times. Quake1/3 rocket arena or some other FPS with a 3ms ping.
Well his friends basically just wanted to play League of Legends - which is an online based game anyway. I tried it for 1 round then was like 'screw this' and went to bed.
I was a super late adopter of SMS texting. It frustrated me that people wanted to communicate that way and it cost extra $. When I had a smart phone all I could think is "We all have data connections, why should SMS cost any extra vs. text charachters over data. Why doesn't everyone just use What'sapp?". Prior to that I used to communicate via email to SMS people because I hated doint it from a phone and I wasn't about to pay for it.
wae said:We used to do LAN parties just about every weekend. Lots of RoTT. We couldn't afford any of those fancy hubs so we used coax. I was able to get a bunch of 10Base2 cards that work was throwing away. In a couple instances we didn't have enough Ts but had plenty of extra cards so I'd solder up a second, unpowered card to the one in the computer using some telco cross-connect wire. It worked better than I expected as long as we could remember where we put the terminators....
I remember getting a stack of 10Base cards from ebay for a low price. Then when I got them I realized they were HUGE. Like the size of a modern GTX3090. They wouldn't fit in any of our computers 
Our first home computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99-4A. It was basically a keyboard with a monochrome graphics card that output to an antenna adapter. We had our hooked up to a 9" B&W TV. About your only choice for input device was a tape recorder. We had one guy locally who made games and you could buy tapes from him for $8. You would put a tape in the recorder, hook up an RCA to the keyboard, and press play. It would squawk and carry on for the whole side of one tape. When the squawking stopped, you had to quickly flip the tape over and hit play, otherwise it would "lose" it and you'd have to rewind and start over. Once the game finally opened, you were rewarded with pretty much the worst games ever. No joystick, just E, S, D, X for controls.
I went to college during the "computer lab" years. You got DOS-based servers with 8mhz processors. The dot-matrix printers at the end of the row didn't have spooling, so you'd have to announce when you're printing or everything got mixed together. My roommate finally got his own computer that was 12mhz with an internal modem... what?. Blistering. I remember copying the GUI software from the computer lab's servers so we had the same fancy DOS interface they did. Dial-up was 1200 baud. I could read my emails faster than the computer could put characters on the screen.
I remember having an Atari 2600 and saving for WEEKS to get Pac Man because it was $36 and I couldn't afford that. We sometimes hosted Atari parties with other kids so we had a chance to play the games we didn't have.
In reply to ProDarwin :
SMS should be free, because it is just piggybacking on leftover space in cell tower pings
In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :
$36 then is @$100 now. Crazy when you think about it. Figure the console itself is @$800 in 2020 dollars!
In reply to Steve_Jones :
No wonder I'm broke :)
Mr_Asa said:I have a Gmail account that dates to the second round of invites.
Still waiting for the day Alphabet decides to announce they want $19.99 per month for that and another $29.99 for YouTube
In the 80’s I watched *orn through a giant back yard satellite TV antenna - still remember Satcom 4 channel 24 LOL
Dad bought a commodore Vic-20 then a Commodore 64
Around 1997 I had a Series 1 (and then Series 2) TiVo
In 1998 I had a Desktop PC with a Cyrix P166+ Processor because it was $50 cheaper than an Intel
Also 1999 I had a client who paid $30k for a 50” Pioneer plasma TV. He was a cool guy - partner at Goldman Sachs.
I almost bought a Microsoft Zune
used AutoCad v. 2.6
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