What technology were/are you an early adopter of?

My office got a Sony Mavica digital camera in ~1998 or 1999.  I just threw away a box full of floppy discs from that thing a week ago, I don't think we even have any computers left with floppy drives to read them anyway.  

I have a STACK of 3.5 floppies that are all labeled with pictures I know I took on my Mavica.  I scavenged a 3.5" drive from an old tower at work... now if I just had something I could hook the drive to.

OHSCrifle said:

In 1998 I had a Desktop PC with a Cyrix P166+ Processor because it was $50 cheaper than an Intel

I had a Cyrix 5x86 133 

I used fire to make meat more palatable.

Oh, I was (or my mom was for me) an early adopter of at least one vaccine. I got the chicken pox vaccine the year it came out. Not sure about any others.

Streetwiseguy said:

I used fire to make meat more palatable.

Dude.  You're OLD.

My family got the first model of Macintosh in 1984 (for their word processing business).  Until then, and for a while longer, they used Burroughs machines and daisy wheel printers.  I had only some limited experience with Commodore 64 and Apple //e computers until then.  WYSIWYG text editing was a revelation.  When I took a word processing class 8-9 years later, it was with DOS machines, with WordPerfect, using the split screen to see formatting.  Pretty sure I actually said “What the hell is this E36 M3?” out loud.

In 1987 we got got the first Apple Laserwriter with Postscript.  That caused the Burroughs machines to be put out to pasture.

I used to be big into new tech during college, and shortly after, but between getting burned a few too many times, and seeing how the sausage is made (I’m in QA), I tend to wait for things to get a bit more stable.  I did buy an iPad 2 on the release date, but that probably doesn’t count, since it was the second gen.

eastsideTim said:

 WYSIWYG text editing was a revelation.  When I took a word processing class 8-9 years later, it was with DOS machines, with WordPerfect, using the split screen to see formatting.  Pretty sure I actually said “What the hell is this E36 M3?” out loud.

Going OT, but WYSIWYG formatting is one of the worst things ever if it has any complexity.  Especially as you get a larger document - the various tables, numbered lists, etc. get very unwieldy.

There are many writers who specifically use software that is NOT WYSIWYG so that they can focus on content.

Then there are softwares like TeX editors that allow those who do want to really control content to have absolute control over it.

I need to learn TeX, because I hate word.  Its interface is terrible.  Its so difficult to understand why certain sections end up formatted they way they do.

ProDarwin said:

OHSCrifle said:

In 1998 I had a Desktop PC with a Cyrix P166+ Processor because it was $50 cheaper than an Intel

I had a Cyrix 5x86 133 

Greetings fellow cheapskate.

In reply to eastsideTim : I learned Lotus 1-2-3 and had the same general experience.

Despite my agreement with ProDarwin regarding MS Word formatting I would never chose to go back in time and abandon WYSIWYG apps. 
 

Apologies to the OP since this topic seems more like "who is old"...

OHSCrifle said:

Despite my agreement with ProDarwin regarding MS Word formatting I would never chose to go back in time and abandon WYSIWYG apps. 

I wouldn't for small, simple stuff.  Email, forum posts, etc.  For serious documents that can range from 2 to infinity pages?  Yes, absolutely.

Alternatively, they could make a view that exposes the formatting rules in a visual, understandable way.

I was using Windows before there was Windows.

Geos on a C64.

Adrian_Thompson (Forum Supporter) said:

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.

 

My dad bought "me" a Timex Sinclair 1000 when I was in middle school. At least that's what he told my mother. It was really for him. I fooled around with it for a few days, but I got bored with it fairly quickly, and it was really frustrating trying type on that terrible keyboard.

Around the same time, he also bought the first mountain bike that I had ever seen. He had go to three bike shops before he could get them to order one for him. The first shops said that it was just a fad and they didn't want to get involved. I was actually embarrassed to ride it out on the street because I thought it was so goofy looking at the time. And damn, was that thing heavy!

Dad was never afraid of new stuff.

Almost 25 years with an insulin pump...youngest person in the province when I started. 
It was the greatest advancement in diabetes management until the new round of continuous blood glucose monitoring tech came out. 

ProDarwin said:

OHSCrifle said:

Despite my agreement with ProDarwin regarding MS Word formatting I would never chose to go back in time and abandon WYSIWYG apps. 

I wouldn't for small, simple stuff.  Email, forum posts, etc.  For serious documents that can range from 2 to infinity pages?  Yes, absolutely.

Alternatively, they could make a view that exposes the formatting rules in a visual, understandable way.

OK I may actually be down with that. I do hate when Word bugs out in the middle of stuff like outline and table formatting. No amount of viewing the hidden paragraph markers can unberkeley it.
 

..or when this here website's iPhone text editor suddenly and irreversibly changes the font size. 

Atari 2600. I remember trying to explain how we had a game system that used cartridges. (My dad worked in the toy store industry.)

I started on-line stock trading as soon as it became available.

If memory serves, Schwab was the first major brokerage firm to offer it and I was their 12,000th customer to establish an account.

I was pretty early in smartphones. I had a bunch of PDAs and then Blackberries, then the early Sidekicks and Windows phones and Blackjacks. If it had a cool flip-out screen and/or keyboard, I probably tried it. Mostly, they sucked until the iPhone, and I still have one of those.

I bought an Apple watch the first day that I could. And an Apple TV. I'm was a bit of a fanboi, but their hold on me is slipping.

I had a CD player in college and was one of the only people to have one, let alone one that could shuffle 3 CDs.

I was using a Hi8mm videocamera when everyone else was still on full-sized VHS. I used to have to mail-order tapes because they weren't in stores yet.

I bought things on Amazon when they only sold books, not sure if that counts.

I was an early adapter of cell phone. I started in1985 with a car phone and when the portable brick came out I had one of those too.

eastsideTim said:

My family got the first model of Macintosh in 1984 (for their word processing business).  

Back then I was working for a semiconductor firm that decided to go with Apple for office computing.  They produced their first catalog on an Apple Lisa, and worked out a corporate discount for employees to buy Macs, so that was the first computer I owned personally.  Kind of wish I still had it, it would be something of a collector's item today.

As far as that goes I first used a computer in 5th grade, back in 1966/1967...my school had a timeshare agreement with a local college so we could log on to their mainframe with a teletype and a 150 baud modem.    I learned how to program in Basic on that thing.

CD player in 1986 ...or maybe it was 1985.  That player is long gone, although I still have and listen to the first 3 CDs I bought to play in it.

When I went to college in 1988, Drexel University required every student to buy a Macintosh. I got the Mac SE version with a 20MB hard drive and 256k of RAM, which I upgraded myself to 1MB a few months later.  I seem to remember it cost around $2200 at the time, or just under $5K today.  I ended up giving it to my father about 5 years later when it became obsolete.

Along those same lines, I bought one of the first Mac laptops in 1992 when I went to journalism school and the school paper used Macs (and...  Quark Express) for doing page layout.

I bought my first CD changer for the house in early 87, but definitely was not an early adopter by then!

I missed the bag phones, but was one of the first adopters of digital (2G) cell phones around '97.  It was an odd little phone that the ear section slid up to talk.  This was up in Dallas at the time and I was doing sales.  On more than one occasion, I'd have to ask the person to hold for a moment while I pulled over to talk and their reaction was always, "You're on a cell phone?" because the quality was so much better than analog.  IIRC, it was $75/mo for unlimited calls (text hadn't really kicked off yet).

-Rob

I was talking to a friend about this thread and talking about my old Sinclair computers I mentioned on page 2.  HE reminded me I was an early adopter of PDA's as well.  First I got a Psion Organiser II in 1986.

Then I got a Psion series 3. in 1991.

Final PDA was an early Palm Pilot in 1997.

Last Friday during my weekly car group Zoom meeting, we were reminiscing about old phone and one of my friends brought out his old bag phone from the late 80's.