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.

Oh, and duvets. Felicity Kendal had one in Solo (TV series) and my mam said ooh, that's what you need for your bed. Except they were called continental quilts back then

@CormoranStrike - you mean Locard's Principle for the transfer of DNA etc - every contact leaves a trace.
Occum's razor is to do with the simplest explaination usually being the right one.

My mum remembers seeing Velcro on the TV programme Tomorrow's World. She is 60 this year.

Music streaming - being introduced to Napster and the idea that you could download any song (so long as it was on someone else's networked computer) was mind blowing.

I spent hours on dial up amassing a collection of music which then had to be downloaded to another device or CD to listen to later.

Now I pay Spotify for the priviledge, have it across all of my gadgets, and the time/effort input has decreased dramatically.

youreallabunchofbastards ha! Yes I remember the ‘continental quilt’!

Ah thanks @BlueUggs

Ooh, I remember my neighbours over the road getting continental quilts when I was about 10!

And ChikiTIKI, I'm 3 years younger than your mum, so reckon we were watching the same episode of Tomorrow's World!

pager. must have been 1984 or 5. friend had one and we phoned it to send him a message when he went to the offie. hilarity.

I had a continental quilt in the 70's. remember dad bringing them home from work and being told it was a new thing.

I also remember our first tv arriving, getting a land line installed and tv's you put money in like a meter.

When DVD players were becoming more popular I remember thinking that I didn't care if the picture was "better", it was clearly a worse machine because you couldn't use it to tape Friends if you were out.

(and if you missed Friends on a Friday night you'd have a looooooong wait before the video was available to buy in the shops)

My friend explaining email to me in early 90s.
Her: So you send a message to the computer and the other person can log on and get it.
Me: But how would they know they needed to turn the computer on and get the message? I mean they could go weeks and weeks and not need to!

@SoMuchToBits that's cool :) I remember watching it once or twice as a child... I think driverless cars were on it but very much in their infancy back then, more of an idea really. I was born in 1989.

This may have already been mentioned but VCR’s were the latest thing at one stage - you hired either VHS or Betamax video cassettes to go in them, from the local video shop.

I can remember brick like devices that played reel to reel tapes but they were enclosed in their own cartridge. (Walkmans) the first one we had could record sound and play radio too. It was the first on our street to have such an amazing contraption. It came it its own leather pouch and had a strap for snazzy carry on design.
I also had my first job with a company who delt with apple just as the iMac came out. The portable pc with a built in cpu was incredible. Then after all our promotion apple cut its ties with us as it had made its next big thing work and no longer needed the little guys.
I also loved my first mp3 player with a whopping 125mg of music play back.
I also was at school when we got internet. I spent my lunchtimes downloading the lyrics to the latest REM album or The Levellers. Fun days of dial up.

@ChikiTIKI does your mum also remember non-stick pans on TW? I think Teflon came about from the space programmes in the 60s/70s and am sure I remember them being on TW before our family actually had a non-stick pan!

I was living in Seattle The Seattle Times had an interview with local entrepreneur Jeff Bezos who owned Amazon and was having great success selling books online. He explained he was expanding and his plan was eventually to sell everything just like a department store but online.

I thought ‘hmmm unlikely, why would I go to Amazon for anything else other than books, that’s all they’re known for...’

I also remember some sort of experiment when we only had black and white tvs. It was some sort of thing where you put your tv on at a certain time one day and they did something which showed in colour. My dad did it, as he was interested in this sort of thing.

I don't think we had colour tv until I was about 10 or 11. My uncle and aunt had it before us and I remember going to theirs and being amazed by the weather map being in green (for the land) and blue (for the sea).

1993 an ex-boyfriend had a chunky looking mobile phone and him telling his parents that this expensive new fangled gadget was a necessity so that he could 'keep in touch'.

He was living at home with his parents ....

My mother grew up in a very remote village in Spain. One of the girls in the village emigrated to Paris in the 50s to work as a maid. She came back after a while and told everyone that " in Paris, they had cabinets in the kitchen where you could put your food and it stayed cold" (fridges). She was labelled a liar by the whole village

Re Walkmans and later discmans

The ads frequently showed people jogging while using them - yet anyone who had one knew this buggered them properly! Stopping play or even meaning you had to use a pencil to disentangle and reassemble cassettes!

In 1964/65 our maths teacher teaching us binary numbers, she also told us that in he future we wouldn't need cash but would have plastic cards to pay for things. And that we would be able to buy food that was ready cooked off the shelves in shops. I would love to meet her now and talk to her, but she would have died a long time ago.

I remember when microwave ovens started making an appearance in the home back in the mid/late 70's. My parents got one and we all stood gawping at a bowl of soup going round in it. We couldn't believe it was cooked. No standing over a stove stirring a pan required. It was witchcraft surely? 😱

I can also remember ATM starting up on the high streets. My father was convinced that his pay would be lost on the moon or something between his work and the bank, so we were all stood rooted to the spot in amazement when he put his card and number into this machine and it slid money out of the slot to him. I thought we must have a bottomless pot of money 😂

Ifangyow there were similar concerns about contactless a couple of years ago - I remember a checkout guy telling me never to use it because it was too easy to be charged twice and also that once it was activated if you stood near a machine when someone else was paying your card could be accidentally charged instead.

I also remember free music downloading and went nuts with it - what you young folks don't realise is that before Napster and kazaa there was literally no other way of listening to music other than buying it or randomly hearing it on the radio. You could go years between an instance of hearing a tune you liked.

I still have the old Amazon 020 number on my phone from the early days, for historic nostalgia.

Mobile phones - my parents got them, I didn’t see the point.

Internet shopping - a mate showed me how to buy a book on Amazon. It was a bit of a hassle back then. I didn’t think it would catch on. Now I use it for almost everything.

Camera phones - I thought why the hell would you need one. Now I love my iPhone and take photos of all sorts of things just as a note (where I parked etc)

GPS - speaking of parking, I was with a friend, in late 80s maybe early 90s, and.they were playing with an early sat nav. No maps or anything like that if I remember correctly. Just coordinated. They had dropped a pin(or whatever term they used back then) to the dining table in their mum’s house and were proudly showing it off because they were going home for dinner.

Fuck me, I am old!