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.

Beerflavourednipples are you me?!!

McDonalds

I remember in the early 80s seeing my first car with remote locking. I was so impressed that the car flashed it's lights at the owner as he approached. I have a feeling it was a bmw. I was really envious of such amazing (at the time) technology.

Oh God, yes McDonalds. It was a trivial pursuit question when I was about 12.

What is the world's biggest fast food chain or similar. We had various guesses about Burger King but were just totally confused and baffled by the answer on the card, as none of us had ever heard of them.

Netflix for me. I remember Chris Moyles banging on about it now available in the U.K. so was intrigued and thought I'd see what all the fuss was about. Well I never looked back, I've had a Netflix account since I think 2012 now.
At the time I worked in a call centre selling o2 broadband and I would tell customers all about it, I honestly could have made more money from all of the people I talked into signing up for Netflix than signing up for broadband if I had gotten commission for that

I also remember Facebook, I'd just started uni and a few people there were all discussing it and asking everyone else if they were on it yet, so I joined up and found it so fascinating. The pass the hot potato thing was my fave, you'd share it with your friends who would share it with their friends and so on, and you could track how far across the world it had been shared, which amazed me to see . I remember telling all my family about it and acting like friends were so old school and out of date for still being on MySpace instead of Facebook

The first time I ever saw a Satnav, I was traveling on a motorway and I said "OMG, I can't believe that person is watching a DVD whilst driving!!"

Pizza - what a novelty! Pitta bread, which neither my mother or I realised had to be toasted and hence both declared ‘a bit boring’; dry roasted peanuts (quite sophisticated); and a boyfriend got a car phone and phoned me on it! He was laughing and saying “I’m going round a roundabout, and I’m talking to you on the phone!!’ How we laughed!

Anyone remember cars that had CD changers? They were literally the nuts.

Pesto at university for me too. Some German exchange students were cooking it and I thought it sounded disgusting!

1990. Business studies class textbook gave a definition of email - about 2 lines l long.

Well how I laughed that such a ridiculous thing as sending a letter from one computer to another would ever take off! That is what the post was for......

I remember trying to explain the 'pause live TV' function to DM. She couldn't get her head round the fact that if she pressed pause so she could answer the phone, door etc that the entire country wouldn't be waiting for her to unpause the TV so they could all get back to Coronation Street.. This is gold!

A friend telling me how she used a 'mouse' at work. I had no clue what she was on about.

Queuing for North Sea Ferries at Hull, I got chatting to a chap in a nearby car. After a while I said I would have to go back into the ticket hall as I wanted to phone home before boarding.

He rooted about on his front seat and passed me a thing about the size of a breeze block, saying, "Call them with this".
My first close encounter with a mobile phone!

Watching tomorrows World. They explained bar codes on items would be available and make them scannable at the tills. No need to use pricing guns anymore and no need to tap the price into the till.

I also remember the first time I accessed the internet in around 1998 in the school library. The most mind blowing bit was being able to access Encarta online 😆

I remember seeing CDs on Tomorrow's World. Apparently, they were indestructible. I always think of that if I come across a cracked one!

I remember thinking that email addresses were really ugly sounding - all those dots, the @ and they tended to have lots of numbers in. I was also a slow adopter of the Internet - I had no idea what to look up.
I remember being amazed by digital cameras and laptops. And computer monitors and other hardware when they went black rather than being computer colour (beige).
I couldn’t believe that people would spend £50+ on a child’s scooter when they first came out.
Underfloor heating sounded like something you’d have in your dream house.
I remember satnavs being a bit of a joke, couldn’t see that taking off.
And I remember when budget airlines first came out and flights were ridiculously cheap.
I was quite glad that I never bothered learning text speak, it’s pretty redundant nowadays. I think I’ve slightly missed the point of the thread here but have enjoyed thinking of these!

I won the opportunity to visit Hewlett Packard’s office, not far from my primary school, when I was seven or eight. They showed a working mouse (cool), and then some very early facial recognition technology. It must have been about 1987.

My first close encounter with a mobile phone

My first encounter with a mobile phone was on a work night out, it would have been in 1992/3 and the senior on call person was lugging what looked almost like a normal telephone attached to a car battery around with him.

Anyone who's done my job for less than about 10 years can't believe that we found our way to all sorts of unknown places using paper maps and road signs only. I did get lost a lot.

Halloumi. My Boyfriend's mother knew a Greek family, they found out i was veggie and cooked me some. They told me it was squid, saw the horror on my face, then explained what it really was, and i fell in love. It was 1987.

During the 90s, i knew of one shop who sold it and would buy one packet on each pay day. Now i can afford it every day if i wanted it.

In October/November 2007 my sister coming back from work and asking me if I knew what Facebook was? That all her colleagues were on it and she needed to sign up to it. Apparently it was like MSN. Then I was asked every week to sign up to Facebook as it was really cool. I held out until 2008 and finally made an account.

There started 10 years of hurt, pain, jealousy and constant head fuck over how people and family are complete arseholes/show offs/ materialistic/rude/obnoxious.
I deleted the shit app last summer and now I don’t have to worry about anything anymore. To think I wasted the most vulnerable years of my life when my kids were babies to show how “happy” and “perfect” we were (I had post natal depression and suffered many miscarriages) to keep up with the Jones’ makes me so angry.

Long message. But I really hate facebook.

I remember when the first McDonald's came opened in my country. Around the same time a work friend of my dad's visited us from America and brought us a Game Boy. We'd never seen nor heard of one and neither did anyone else we knew get one for at least a year after that.

I know they're not commonplace now but they were pretty cool back then.

Email in 1988/89. Only my fellow students had addresses and were not interested in exchanging messages with me after we'd tried it the once. And nobody else I knew had it, obviously. I recall an instance where another student got into trouble after sending one to the US. Apparently it attracted a charge of some sort.
Amazon helped me track down an obscure book in 1999, ditto first forays into eBay auction buying.

First experience of the internet in action:
Teachers' exhibition in Islington c. 1998. Massive stand with a screen, with a man spouting about the endless possibilities of the global staffroom. We were all rather dismissive of it...

I-pod. I tried calling a work colleague, he didn't answer then rang me back a while later saying "sorry I had my I-pod in".

I literally had no idea what the hell he was on about and had visions of him walking round with something like an eye patch on...

I had a WAP mobile phone: I tried to use it to look up train times, but typing "Southampton central" using the numeric keyboard was tedious!

When computers had "Adlib" and "SoundBlaster", so they could make proper sounds such as bicycle bells, instead of the tinny one-note-at-a-time PC speaker.

I thought inkjet printers were awkward and slow: at the age of 8 I thought dot matrix was better, because they could print anything, not just the characters provided on the daisywheel.

As for Facebook: when I was at university, I remember advice never to use your real name on the internet. Facebook actively encourages you to share not just your name, but every detail of your life!

Speech recognition being very primitive and slow. In about 1990 I remember a kid's computer which could just about tell the difference between "yes" and "no"; and an Usborne book about computers explaining that although computers could speak, getting them to understand speech was much more difficult.