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.

One of the regional directors brought a laptop into work 1989? 90?. We were transfixed. At the time don't recall any mobiles, people were still using Walkmans and computers were mostly hefty affairs lacking Windows operating systems so it was like magic.

I bought a first-generation Ipod for my husband's birthday in.... 2001? I presented it to him at dinner, and our friends were amazed.

That story really makes me smile. I still have it, can't bear to part with it.

First generation iPod

The first time I worked somewhere that allowed me internet access was 2008.

My sister still isn't allowed to access the internet in her workplace. If she needs to Google something she has to ask her manager for permission and then use one dedicated desktop pc to look the thing up. And she is management herself!

The first time I worked somewhere that allowed me internet access was 2008.
I w

The first time I worked somewhere that allowed me internet access was 2008.

Oops. Really? Do you work in a high-security field? That's bonkers.

Another one - around 1986 - I was working in an NHS Finance team. We had computerised payroll and ledgers but all budget etc calculations were written out on A3 analysis paper with pre-printed rows and columns. A new accountant joined us and started using some functionality he'd found on the shared computer - something called a spreadsheet - the chief accountant told him off and said it would never catch on.

Mention of CDs reminds me of the first one I ever saw. I used to work in a relevant field and our workplace had got hold of one of the first CD machines and some discs. It had been set up in the boardroom on a sort of plinth and staff were allowed to file in reverently and examine these wondrous new objects like holy relics

And yes, we were told that they couldn't be damaged, were indestructible etc etc.

Strange to think that they're classed as hopelessly outdated technology now.

In the schoolroom bit of our local museum a couple of years ago, 8 year old picked up a slate, turned it over and asked "how do you turn it on?" . Explained what it was and how used. "Oh. I thought it was a tablet".

Around 2003 when camera phones first came out (well this is when I first got one aged 12) I remember saying to a friend how cool it would be if they made a phone you could watch TV on. Also a couple of years later my friends and I all had phones that you could record about 30 seconds of music on and we would send them to each other via infrared. I remember the first time a friend sent me a full MP3 file through Bluetooth I was amazed.

Also reminds me I was watching an episode of Two and a Half Men last week and they created a robot thing that was basically like Alexa "Computer, turn lights on". I'm sure at the time it was supposed to come across as far fetched and people watching would be thinking how amazing it would be to have such a thing and now we have it.

Oops. Really? Do you work in a high-security field? That's bonkers.

No, just a bog standard job with the usual confidentiality. I did however work for a huge employer where company policy was to micromanage everything and assume that people couldn't be trusted. I assume they thought that if we had Internet access we would spend all day in chat forums or something.

CDs, a friend got a CD player about 87/88. We thought she was well posh,

I remember telling our CEO about TED conference in 1990s and trying to convince him we needed him to be invited (back when it was an invitation-only event in California). He dismissed it.

When TED talks were posted online a decade later, I felt like Buddy the Elf...
I KNOOOOOW HIIIIIIM!!!!

@rosy71 yes I do!

I used to work for BT and we had this super fast internet connection called home highway. This was before broadband too. Speed was 512k if you were lucky! I took two phone lines to deliver it!

there are people on this thread claiming they first heard of the internet in the late 90s

It depends on your age. In the late 90s I’d recently left school where you got one IT lesson per week and there was no other access to computers. Some kids had gaming pcs at home but certainly not internet. It’s not surprising that school kids didn’t have internet access in the early 90s. I didn’t have internet till I went to uni in about 98.

I don't think we had the internet at home until the late 1990s either and it was dial up, and at first you had to pay for the time you were on, so you couldn't go on for long or else it cost a fortune.

It also tied up your phone line and people generally didn't call mobiles even if you had them, because that was even more expensive.

My sister definitely didn't have it until a little while after then because she used to come to my house to use ours.

I also remember that our first desktop computer cost £1500 at about that time. I can't remember the specifications but they were tiny compared with today. Something like kb of RAM and MB sized hard drives.

i still don’t understand fax machines. dark magic.

as for the internet - i first used a Windows desktop at work in early 1998. Excel blew my mind, and i learned it inside out in about a week.

email, though? and the internet? i remember a friend emailing me a Flash thingy of a little man dancing and you could click his arms and legs to change what he did. this would have definitely been in 1998. my boss would email me his diary, but we saved Excel workbooks on the network and shared them that way, as emailing attachments crashed Outlook.

in 1998, i was fascinated with Windows, and spent my days snooping through every file and folder on my work PC. 1998 was also the year i sneakily installed a screensaver (one of the mind-blowing undersea ones), having figured out how to do it ‘behind’ the IT Department’s back.

the next day, i realised i shouldn’t have done it, panicked and used the handy ‘Uninstall’ file in the screensaver folder. except, i was in the System folder and i uninstalled Windows. completely gone. the horror. i talked my way out of it, and never used an uninstall again.

such simple times.

In early 1985 I travelled to the USA with a man I'd fairly recently met (we've been overhear ever since). We went into a computer store and saw a 'Macintosh' computer. It was amazingly wonderful compared to the Sinclair Spectrum we had at home!

About 1990/91 I remember a pullout sheet from a computer magazine apparently showing a map of the entire WorldWide Web - all the sites you could go to and how they were linked together! I occasionally think how utterly impossible that would be now, and how we had absolutely no idea how big this thing was going to get!

I worked at a solicitor's office and around 1991/2 we were discussing upgrading the computer from 20MB to 40MB. It seemed a ridiculously large amount of storage space.

Video recorders! Probably around 1977/78 we visited family friends and they had this machine you could record TV programmes onto and watch them again. I was utterly astonished but also ecstatic because I got to watch an episode of Starsky and Hutch 3 times!!!

Actually the map of the WWW could have been later - I was thinking of where we lived and we were there from 1990 to 1996.

"We" certainly didn't "all" have mobile phones in 1997.

In Scream (1996) it's a plot point that it is very suspicious and noteworthy that an 18 year old has a mobile phone.

"We" certainly didn't "all" have mobile phones in 1997.

I was in the US in 1997 - this is just about the time that I got my first, as were at least half or so of my friends/classmates.

I was in grad school at the time, so I felt the pinch of the cost, but they were well on their way to ubiquity within the next year or so.

Oops. Really? Do you work in a high-security field? That's bonkers.

To be fair, I worked in a local council role until about 2006 and I wasn't allowed full Internet, only their 'intranet' and the BBC website!

I was on a teacher training day course and the leader said he'd tried a search engine called Google. I'd even a devotee of Altavista to that point.