The first time you ever heard about something that is now commonplace

[CormoranStrike]

I have two.

I was chatting to a guy who had an audio company in the early 90s I reckon and he mentioned Bluetooth, which confused me. He raved about this new tech and said he was sure it would be massive.

The other was interviewing a forensic scientist on his retiral from the police. He had been the most senior of his speciality at Lockerbie.

He was explaining transference (Occam’s razor) and I can remember sitting on his couch in his living room in the small village he lived in and saying, “wait, do you mean evidence of me having been in your house is now indelibly here, I’ve left traces?” - totally fascinating.

There started a fascination with crime novels, too.

Jamie Oliver championed prosecco back in his BBC The Naked Chef days, so would that be late 90s? He mentioned it quite a lot as being a budget, but just as good, alternative to champagne.

I worked in the bakery section at Safeways when American style muffins first came out. We did them in double chocolate, chocolate chip, cherry and ginger.

MorrisZapp he he he

treaclesoda i think it was 2005 i first heard of it
am actually sick of it now

Fleeces.

Went camping in the Peak District with DH and friends in the early 90s and one of my trendier, richer friends bought one from an outdoorsy things fair. It was so soft and warm and I desperately wanted one for myself.

When I was at university we had access to this new fangled thing called email - only to other universities mind you as it was the U.K. academic network rather than the internet but we were amazed that you could send messages without going to a fax/telex machine. I also used this thing called a mouse for the first time and the very first version of Windows which my university was trialling

Oh and my dad was a cub leader and his assistant had a phone you could take into field - the size of a lunch box with a handset attached, we were truly astonished by such amazing tech.

My friend showing off her new camera phone and predicting nobody would need a camera in a few years.
I still use my digital camera for holidays!

I remember asking a friend what her iPod was. When she explained it was an mp3 player I asked her what that was 😁

Ps to those saying it wasn't around, I had internet access at work in 1994 - it's when I started and only worked there for 6 months so I can pin point exactly. I did work in tech publishing though.

Looking back as well the last big event that all my friends PHONED each other about was 9/11

Since then it's all been exchanged on internet apps like Facebook, Twitter and What's App And people rarely actually phone for anything and never for a world event

About 15 years ago I was trying to encourage my undergraduate class to join in a national competition. Part of the incentive was that winners would get iTunes vouchers.

Once I'd finished my announcement I had to ask the students what iTunes was

@Thankssomuch I still have a CD changer in my car (haven't used it in years though) 😂. On that subject I remember seeing my first CD as I had a friend who worked at the research establishment that invented them. It was pretty mind blowing at the time when all I'd known was vinyl. For some reason people kept standing their cups of coffee on them !

Bitcoin, around 2008 when the whole credit crunch thing happened. It sounded like a daft idea that me. Stupid stupid idiot, I could be rich now if I'd bought some

Annuehm I remember that too! It was called JANET (Joint Academic Network) which later became part of the Internet. In the late 80s I was working at one uni and DP was doing his Masters at another and I would message him on it asking him to pick up something from the shop on the way home. I thought it was amazing!

A bit later on in the mid 90s when mobile phones seemed to become a thing outside London I'd often think that people talking to themselves was becoming more prevalent, must be caused by the pressures of modern life or something. Later on it clicked that they were just on their mobiles....

It was 1999 and I decided to get myself an email address. Went to internet shop, had no idea what I was doing, but managed to register...on Australian yahoo site. For long years afterwards my email address was '[email protected]

Other funny thing I can think of, happened to my friend, not me:
Her Mum was visiting her daughter from Russia back in 1996. Daughter needed cash so they went to a cash point, where she got some money out. They were walking away, when mother asked: 'Tania, how did you get this money?' My friend explained that you need bank card and pin, and you can withdraw money from the cash point anywhere. Few moments later mother asked: 'Tania, so why do you need to work?'

Aged around 14, poring over Kerrang magazine with my best friend, we read an article about the Super Information Highway. It said we would be able to go to a cafe and converse directly with our favourite bands via typed messages on a computer. A short while later, an internet cafe opened in town so we bought a couple of hot chocolates, switched on the computer and waited for Eddie Vedder to find us on the highway. We were pretty disillusioned by the whole thing and decided it would never catch on.

A few years earlier, I had been on holiday in America with my parents where we saw lots of shops selling "laser discs", effectively the forerunner of dvds - they were a movie on an LP! They never really caught on, at least I never saw them on this side of the pond but to this day, my dad refuses to watch/buy or discuss DVDs because "they will never work - they tried putting films on discs before!" I haven't tried to explain that dvds themselves are pretty old currency now. The concept of streaming would blow his mind.

On that same American trip, I became obsessed with this ice cream called Hagen Daaz. I came home, telling my best friend all about this amazing stuff only to be told that an HD parlour had opened on our high street while I was away.

"it was called JANET"

I wonder if that's why Janet is called Janet on The Good Place 🤔

Also, although I'd heard of email before, I hadn't seen or used it until I went to uni. Before being let loose, we all had to take a seminar on the dangers of email/internet addiction. Then we were randomly paired with someone in a neighbouring lab room to send messages back and forth to ensure we were getting the hang of it. In my final year of uni, handwritten essays were disallowed and we had to submit electronically so special training classes were laid on to teach us how to attach a document to an email.

Also within my uni days, someone recommended google as a reliable search engine but I scoffed at the boring interface (not that I knew that word!) preferring to stick with the trusty and whimsical Ask Jeeves. I also remember peers starting to talk about Amazon. At first I thought they were planning a trip and thought it was funny that everyone seemed to be going to the same place. When I was eventually enlightened, I again laughed at the idea that people would buy books online.

It's funny though, I remember being very young and asking my grandmother questions like "do you remember the day the tv was invented?" thinking that one day it was just like - "ta-dah! - here is a TV" which would have been headline news. I didn't really understand when she said that she just gradually became aware that tv existed. Now I have Dnephews asking me about the invention of the internet in the same way.

1994 when I started using email. It was a program called elm (electronic mail) on a UNIX system. There was another system called PINE (Pine is not Elm) which was also on UNIX but a bit more like the modern system in that you could click on things - Elm run entirely on commands you had to remember

I remember our first microwave in 1984. We called it Sid after the character in the adverts for privitisation of the electric companies

I remember a Chris Tarrant tv series in the early 90s where he showed clips of the ridiculous and outrageous things people in other countries watched on tv. They included Japanese people eating revolting things in a game show and lots of nudity on Italian tv.it was genuinely surprising and shocking. Now we have I’m a Celeb, Naked Dating shows and Game of Thrones.

When I worked in a supermarket cash office in the very early 80s I remember talking about payment methods (it was all cash and cheques back then) and the manager explaining to me that supermarkets would never accept credit cards because the profit margins on food were so low that the supermarkets would lose money if they had to pay the credit card companies commissions.

I remember being in my media and communications lecture during my art foundation course in 1994 and the lecturer talking about the World Wide Web with a big computer in the sky that would talk to all the other computers in the world. It blew my mind. I had NO idea wtf he was on about

Surely everyone had the Internet from the mid 90s? Yes it was dial up, but I cannot believe that some of you were only hearing about it for the first time in 1997-98, fucking hell

I had heard of it. Went to an internet café in 1993 but had no clue what I was doing. Next used the internet again in 1996 when our school went online. Our Deputy Head asked for my help in getting it up and running as I was a clever girl. I still didn’t have a clue and we both admitted defeat. Parents were completely disinterested in technology so we had no computer at home. I only knew one person with a computer/internet at home in our whole year group. We were all in awe! Started uni in 1997 and as mentioned above received classes in how to use email and internet but from there on, I was up to speed pretty quickly and used it every day. Left uni in 2001 and had no easy online access for a long time. I couldn’t afford a home computer nor the bills that went with an internet connection so I would go to internet cafes most days after work. Eventually bought my first PC in 2003. Admittedly I would have been among the last of my friends to do so but on the plus side, I completely bypassed dial-up and went straight to broadband although it was still very slow. First proper job was 2002. Our office had a shared mailbox which we would man on a rota system. When it was your day to check and respond to emails, you were allocated an hour in the morning to do so, 20 minutes after lunch and 30 minutes at the end of the day. Woe betide you if you were caught looking at email outside those times. We were told that internet access had been switched off on our PCs and we blindly believed this until one day, when my boss was on holiday, I was bored and started clicking around, soon realising I could open a web browser and get online. I then drunkenly gloated to my boss during a night out that I had figured it out and got into loads of trouble.

Texting. I remember having a little flip phone. A colleague taught me how to type predictive text. Most of my messages were really short messages....unlike long conversations on whatsapp groups that go on days just to organise meeting up when a simple phone call would have taken minutes!

Oh and talking of old iPods, I still use my original iPod when I drive in America so that I don't have to store music on my phone and use up space which is much needed for the photos or use data roaming or waste my phone battery. iPods should make a comeback.