What technology were/are you an early adopter of?

I usually wait a few years after tech comes out to adopt it, but there have been a few exceptions:

The LG VX-6000


This was one of the very first Verizon cameraphones. I was the 1st person I knew that had one. A lot of people thought it was a gimmick, but I found it useful and awesome, even though the picture quality was terrible.

Toshiba GigaBeat F40



While it wasn't one of the 1st portable music players, it was one of the first high capacity ones to use a HDD that was not made by Apple. That "plus" pad on the front was the touch interface, and it was awful. After a while, it just stopped working. I had this in my 2002 WRX on a dash mount hooked up to the AUX imput of my Kenwood EZ-500 stereo, and it was amazing at the time (2005). Microsoft apparently liked the design, because they brought on Toshiba to help them create their own portable player, the Zune.

Bluetooth

Back in early 2004, I got my first fancy laptop when I was at the tail end of my college studies. It was a massive 17" Dell Inspiron with all the bells and whistles: Windows XP Pro, 80GB HDD, DVD-RW drive, multiple USB ports, built-in WiFi, external monitor support, and it even had a built-in subwoofer! It also had this little blue icon I had never seen before: Bluetooth. I didn't even know what that was until a few years later, when cell phones started to come with it for those early earpiece headsets. This behemoth has Bluetooth 1.0 or 2.0, so it's basically for communicating with printers and peripherals. And yes, I still have it!

Man, that silver aesthetic in the early 2000's was everywhere, huh?

We built portable car phones in 1988 ,  a car phone in a bag with a battery and antenna !

But about 1990 Motorola came out with a portable phone and killed that business , 

LA free net in the late 80s , text only "internet"

Then a Prodigy  shared account  with a magazine I wrote for , 

Then AOL 

never had the money for Compuserve !

Early all in one Mac 512 computer ......

Ooh... I forgot!

Nailgun. I was one of the first crews to adopt the widespread use of a pneumatic nail gun. 
 

In those days, the gun was FREE.  They'd give you a nail gun so they could sell you the nails.

I still have a bunch of free Senco nailguns.

SVREX, wonder if that's why my dad had so many Senco nailgun belt buckles? He was outside sales for a few lumber yards back then, couple million in sales a year in the late 80s.

Nokia...something. It was the first actual  color screen cellphone available, not just blue or green but actual colors.

Weirdly it could receive picture messages, but not send them, and had no camera. That would have been umm 2004.

In reply to RevRico :

Ask him if he remembers the SN4. 

In reply to Woody (Forum Supportum) :

Wow...that Ross brings back some memories; looks like a Mt. Shasta? My dad bought one in the early days of production mountain bikes when I was in elementary school, and believe it or not, still has it, only with many of the original parts replaced. He doesn't ride it very often, but keeps it around as his trailer bike for hauling so he doesn't have to use one of his nice bikes like his Merlin for pulling the trailer.

I've always been a bike geek, and although I may not have been the first person ever to do so, in the 90's I built up a Bianchi cyclocross frame with wide file tread 700c tires, a wide slightly-flared drop handlebar, a single front chainring paired with one shifter, a mountain bike rear derailleur, and the widest-range mountain bike cassette I could get...and I used it for exploring, riding on paved roads to get to the gravel roads, and then on the gravel for the joy of exploring and so I didn't have to deal with car traffic. I find this humorous in light of the trends of the past couple years towards gravel bikes. Of course the modern interpretations are way better than what I cobbled together. Can't find any pics at the moment, sadly.

Then in '99 I ordered a custom frameset with much the same brief as the above bike, only with mounts for disc brakes. Many frame builders shut me down and wouldn't even discuss building such a thing. Once I found one, I had to send it back a couple times before the brake caliper mounts finally got to be in the right location. You should have seen the gawking, the derisive comments, and the head-shaking among cyclists at the time. Hehehe! This one had a front derailleur, with a crankset that used an MTB bolt circle so I could run a sort-of an early version of subcompact...I think it was 46t/36t up front, with an XTR 12-32 on the rear.

In reply to Tony Sestito :

When I met my wife in 08, she had just bought that exact laptop... I'd have to check the specs, but prolly the same. She just bought hers as a leftover model for the low price. Still runs, as well.

In reply to 03Panther :

Mine still works as well! I put that thing through hell, and all these years later, it still fires up. It even drank a big glass of wine once, and one of the keys had to be taped back onto the keyboard, but it will still boot up.... eventually.

I got an Atari as a gift when they first came out. 45ish years later I have about 6 consoles under my TV.

way way way back in the 70s, we were the first family in the neighborhood to have a home computer.  A commodore Vic 20, but still a computer.   I was also one of the first to adopt LED lighting into the house.  My big problem is I do not upgrade or replace until things have totally broken, so most of the time I am behind the curve a bit.

Let's see:

1. I got the public beta of Windows 95 - "gave props to some, but others, I dissed 'em"
2. I was prevented from getting the Nvidia NV1 (wisely); I wound up with a S3 ViRGE (unwisely)
3. I got internet access in 1995 I think
4. Would Linux in 97 or so count?

I had a beta XP copy

Early Gmail, but not sure how early

Broadband internet, it was Roadrunner back then, in like 1997

I leased a 2015 Leaf

Not much else. I slow.

scardeal said:

Let's see:

1. I got the public beta of Windows 95 - "gave props to some, but others, I dissed 'em"
2. I was prevented from getting the Nvidia NV1 (wisely); I wound up with a S3 ViRGE (unwisely)
3. I got internet access in 1995 I think
4. Would Linux in 97 or so count?

Heh.  Here's my Linux root filesystem floppy for 0.95a circa May 1992.  Apparently I'm not just an early adopter, I'm also a packrat. :)

I would run SLIP ('Serial Line IP', the precursor to PPP) to connect that machine to the campus network later that year over my 2400 baud modem.  Not sure if I still have the modem or not. :)

We were at a Datsun Roadster meet at Road America in 1992 and the leader was making announcements and mentioned some address with "ampersand" in the middle to get ahold of him - what?

Circa 1978.  Home built, wire-wrapped Z-80 based microcomputer running at 4MHz in S-100 bus format with 48K of static memory (2102's), 8" floppy (186Kb capacity), running CP/M and Wordstar text editor.  User interface was over RS232 to an ASR-33 teletype with punched tape reader.  All code was written in assembly language.  Memory boards would heat a small house!  In retrospect, it didn't really do much, mostly used to experiment with various types of I/O and rudimentary data acquisition, but I sure learned a lot.   First commercial computer I had was a Columbia Data Products MPC1600, the first IBM PC clone.  I still have it, complete with a massive 10Mb Seagate hard disk.  I think I maxed out the memory at 640K, but I can't recall for sure.  I'm pretty sure I have a floppy with MS DOS 1.0 on it, although the last time I tried to read an old floppy disk the head peeled all the magnetic material right off the disk.  I've been playing with computers for a while now.

I had a mp3 player in my car in what must of been late 99 or early 2000.  I was really a full desktop PC in the backseat powered through an inverter.  The screen was a 4 line serial LCD and it was controlled by a numeric keypad.  It ran a DOS mp3 player that it booted directly into. That only lasted a few months until I got a Archos Jukebox 6000, one of the first HD based MP3 players before the iPod.

IBM PC 1982 (my mom bought it)

CD player in 1985

Mosaic internet browser 1994

Linked In 2002

Gmail 2004