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.

But there are people on this thread claiming they first heard of the internet in the late 90s and mobile phones were like bricks, I think they are mistaken.

I also saw a news item in the USA where the bloke was claiming we would all be able to download recently released movie blockbusters to our TVs. Also we were all going to be able to watch our favourite shows day or night on demand. It all sounded a bit "Back to the Future" to me and very nerdy.

WereYouHareWhenIWasFox there were fairly brick like phones in 1997 if you were on a basic contract - this is what I had: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_6110

I remember being asked to send a fax in my first job, my mind was totally blown and as it was being explained I misunderstood and thought you put the paper in and the same piece magically appears on the other machine ☺️. I also remember being shown email in the 90s by our IT guy at work but wasn’t half as impressed as I was by sending a fax

Brick phones I remember in the mid 1980s.

A dollshouse brick? Yes they were thick but they were much smaller than the iPhone X. I had that one too. In gold! Classy.

Oh no BlueSkies brick phones were massive and as heavy as bricks. You carried one glued to one ear and carried a huge ghetto-blaster with the other.

Episode of 2 Fat Ladies cooking show and Peri Peri Sauce - amazing stuff, but you have to import it from Portugal

We definitely had internal email at our insurance company in 1990 but our American marketing manager had to explain the concept to the entire staff as noone had ever heard of it.

Newbies kept pressing "Send All" when new to the office email and sending dirty jokes to the entire company including the Managing Director and the entire Board.

I worked in tech, there was a tiny department (one lady) doing market research in "handheld devices" it was a dud job, handheld devices would never be a thing, oh no, we all wanted to look at PVs instead.... I was all about "servers" (big beasts)

Same with "voice over IP" ("that'll never take off")

I worked in tech in the 90s and we knew NOTHING

I seem to like the word entire 😂

oh Ida, you have your decades mixed up!

IdaBWells you mean like this? m.youtube.com/watch?v=27aVPqpnL7Y

I remember asserting that video calling would never take off because it just wasn’t necessary. I now use it all day at work and then at home when I’m calling my family in the UK. Shows what I knew!

I also remember hearing a rap on the radio and thinking it was obviously some kind of hip hop song. It was the rap bit of Spice Girls’ Wannabee.

Back in fashion brick phone

WereYou how do you mean?

I know those phones were from the 80s as a bloke brought one to my dad's funeral in 1987 and it started ringing! Plonker.

Lurleene, oh yes, renting the movie and the (massive) vhs player! And lugging it back to the shop before midnight

In the 80s and early 90s

My dad's friend had a record store in the 70s and 80s and refused to stock CDs (pointless novelty that would never take off). His once very successful store went bust, so sad. He was never the same after...

Text messages around 1996. I was flipping through the settings on my Motorola Graphite and found it in a random menu. Opened it and eventually sent a message to my friend saying 'Hello. Can you see this?' Her response was 'Hello! Yes!' Much excitement ensued.
Spent the next few weeks telling all my mates about it. No one had even heard of it!

WereYouHare - is there really any need for the sneery tone? Especially on a fun thread

I got my first mobile in 1994 after nurse training and it was a brick and weighed a ton - and it was a modern model at the time. My 2nd that I got in 1999 was a bit smaller but still very clunky. It was 2002 when I got a Nokia 3310 and 2005 a flip model (which was shit!)

As for Internet - it was bloody expensive initially. Then as now not everyone has spare money for such things, especially when it was still very much a luxury and not particularly useful. I first got internet in 1999 and my then husband and I were both in good, decent paying jobs with no kids at the time and we still hesitated due to the cost. The price has really come down - not just due to proliferation and inflation meaning cheaper in "real terms" I mean cheaper in Figs than it was then! I pay just over £20 for unltd bb now, back then it was over £40 and you risked a crazy high bill if you went over your allowance! Plus there were additional costs to the phone bill too depending who you were with. And the costs were hard to predict

See pic for very similar to my first phone.

I went to Uni in the USA in 1994/95 and when I came back told everyone they needed to open a bookstore with a coffee shop attached. Everyone thought I was mental. A relative told me coffee shops were big in London in 1950s and 60s but would never come back.

In about 1981 ish I recall my mum watching her favourite show, St Elsewhere, an American hospital drama, they were talking about AIDS. I asked what it was, mum (a scientist) said it was a type of blood disease.

A similar sort of time I heard about Ebola too ... which scared me a lot - always thought I was going to die from Ebola (I lived in Hampshire 👀)

In the mid 1980's my dad got a car phone from work ... cool! But also a car fax machine ... wow! (Albeit my dad always just said it was an excuse to give him work and contact him when he was busy driving between offices .... his 'thinking time'

I worked in a uni library in 1980 and we were changing the whole system over from pieces of punched card in each book to barcodes. The tiny holes in the cards had to be “read” by passing them through a machine at the desk to issue your book. The holes often broke and we learned how to read the code ourselves.

I remember demonstrations of Prestel and early BBC computers and actually brought some of the very early computers into the school library where I worked in the early 80s. Teachers were quite sure that they wouldn’t catch on and change their teaching methods. I was also one of the early adopters of the internet in a school library and introduced the students and staff to this amazing new search engine that no-one had heard of - Google!