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

309 replies

CormoranStrike · 06/01/2019 20:22

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.

OP posts:
lunicorn · 07/01/2019 11:22

We booked our hotel online in 1997. It was small independent hotel in the Costa Brava, which we'd never have known about otherwise. We went to an internet café and paid for an hour to browse.
The other guests were really impressed because they'd booked the traditional way.

lunicorn · 07/01/2019 11:28

I was on the train in the 80s or 90s and a woman got a large phone contraption out of it box and started speaking really loudly. I sat there absolutely flabbergasted that someone was talking into a phone in public and I could hear the words she was saying. It was the same feeling I got in the 1st series of Big Brother: the shock at hearing a private conversation in public.

paslamer · 07/01/2019 11:31

I remember my dad getting a "pocket" calculator in about 1973, and my school saying they would never catch on.
I got my first mobile phone in 1998 when I was pregnant, it cost £40 via an offer that my work was doing. Prior to that my DH had one through work from about 1993 - it was a Nokia with an aerial you pulled out.
Used to buy cans of the new hair mousse in the early 80s - essential for the hairstyles!

The first time you ever heard about something that is now commonplace
sheepsheep · 07/01/2019 11:48

I remember in 1999 reading a magazine that had an ad for a website, and telling my friend about it. So we went to IT club after school to look it up but we didn't know if we had to put www or .com or where to put them. I can't even remember the name of the website.

That was my first year at secondary school and before that my experience of computers amounted to a crude game about Ancient Egyptians that a teacher in our primary school made. That same friend had dial up but it was so slow I just couldn't see the point at all.

A year later and another friend had been given a flip phone with games on it, including snake. He told me that one day we would be able to make video calls and I laughed at him.

In maybe 2005 my cousin wrote on her Bebo page that she was leaving Bebo and we could find her on Facebook and I remember thinking she was a pretentious idiot just declaring it like that and that Facebook would never catch on. I don't think I had a profile until 2009.

I spent a lot of time on WAP chatrooms as a teen, and for a long time had some kind of hack to get it free. I am horrified at what went on and at what age I was. I was definitely talking to some really questionable people, and my parents had no idea my phone even had internet access.

strawberrisc · 07/01/2019 11:52

Do they still make Blackberries?

purpleelk · 07/01/2019 11:53

I was out of university in the early 90s. We didn’t have computer labs when I started but did by 2nd or 3rd year. No internet. I remember when we got our first computers at work mid 90s. I was one of a few, and it was a Mac. Oh the jealousy of when admin departments got windows pcs and suddenly they were all “working busily” at their desks and no one chatted to each other anymore. Then suddenly, like in some sort of a sci-fi flick, they’d get up from their desks one by one and meet at reception for secretive lunch plans.

Yes, they got email.

We were all terribly jealous they could be chatting all day long but it looked like important typing work to the rest of us.

No internet access until 1997. So bollocks to the person claiming everyone had it.

I got my first mobile in 1999. Didn’t need it before then as most people didn’t have them and still used landlines and answering machines.

purpleelk · 07/01/2019 11:54

Oh and this was in Los Angeles, so hardly some backwaters.

DisgraceToTheYChromosome · 07/01/2019 12:00

In the 70s, a fellow geek and I designed an colour LED TV, from a proof of concept article in one of the electronic magazines. We decided to future proof it, so we went for 800 vertical and 1280 horizontal. Just the screen layout, and the timing circuits. Signal processing was out of our league, as we assumed it would still be UHF.

Took about 30 years for the industry to catch up.

SlippersForMyFeet · 07/01/2019 12:04

I can remember the first time I saw the spice girls wannabe video on cable and my dad pointing and telling me they are set to be the next big thing. And me thinking "as if u have a clue"

DisgraceToTheYChromosome · 07/01/2019 12:04

strawberrisc: Oh yes. Go into a phone repair shop in a dodgy area, and they sell nothing but £10 burners and Blackberries. It's the encryption.

BartonHollow · 07/01/2019 12:10

My Uncle who was techy, had dial up internet in either 96 or 97 but was literally the only person I knew with it and would go on about how great it was/was going to be to much

Aye, ok, then.. GrinConfused

My Dad bought me a modem in 97

After that I had a temporary free internet service from "Clara Net" which lasted me about two weeks Grin

We didn't get at home internet til 2001ish but definitely had it then as I was fully on MSN Messenger by 2000 first year uni . Ah, the memories

Rockbird · 07/01/2019 12:23

Plugging a mouse into a Universal Serial Bus port. Wtf?

Beerflavourednipples · 07/01/2019 12:43

I can remember the first time I saw the spice girls wannabe video on cable and my dad pointing and telling me they are set to be the next big thing. And me thinking "as if u have a clue"

Does anyone remember the band 'Deuce'? I remember they did a review feature in what must have been Smash Hits and one of the songs was Wannabe and they said the name of the song was very apt and basically that the Spice Girls would amount to nothing. I remember thinking 'oh I quite like that song actually'...

Ifangyow · 07/01/2019 12:48

When digital cameras first hit the shelves.
My head scrambled at the idea that I didn't have to buy a camera film and then wait for it to be processed.
No, you can see and delete any pictures taken instantly.
I had to lay down in a darkened room to rest my spinning brain.

Same with MP3 players. How can it hold hundreds of songs and have no moving parts? Well it's got a chip in it. A chip was still something I ate with ketchup back then!

jenthelibrarian · 07/01/2019 13:13

Seeing the earliest online information retrieval system in use, must've been late 1970s.
You had to dial up to a 'hub' in Frascati in Italy via a modem with an acoustic coupler and interrogate the data base using a huge teletype terminal.
We were so impressed and looked forward to not searching endless print issues of the first indexing publications like Index Medicus.
Also a demonstration of the first version of the CD/DVD, a huge shiny metal disc the size of an LP. This was at Hatfield Poly, now Univ of Herfordshire.

Yep, I'm ancient.

Toddlerteaplease · 07/01/2019 14:07

I remember my dads electronic word processor. We were amazed by it. My friend had a new jaguar in 2003 with a built in sat nav. I couldn't get my head round that!

Toddlerteaplease · 07/01/2019 14:08

My sister had a WAP phone. I don't think she ever got to grips with it though!

TakemedowntoPotatoCity · 07/01/2019 14:25

Walkmans. I couldn't believe that I was listening to something nobody could hear except me.

CD's - my dad raving on about them being 'just like being in the same room'.

I'm 44.

twilightcafe · 07/01/2019 14:30

A lecturer in 1990 told us that in the future we would not need to buy music from a record shop.
You would use your computer to type in what you wanted from a 'global jukebox'. The songs would be transmitted down your phone line.
We were all like this Confused Confused Hmm

WhatNow40 · 07/01/2019 14:32

22 years ago as a student at an interview for a internship with a TV production company in London. I had studied Media at Uni and started learning video editing using digital technology on a computer rather than on tapes.

I said in the future we will be consuming TV programmes and films on computers and laptops, that the future of entertainment lay in the digital world.

I didn't get the job, or any job in media. I got a job in a call centre and at least I went on to run them! What a waste of a vision!!!

KaliforniaDreamz · 07/01/2019 14:32

Prosecco. About 10 years ago a friend from down under kept banging on about it (because i guess actual champagne is very expensive there (or was then))
anyway everyone drinks it now.
sorry about thsoe brackets.

MorrisZapp · 07/01/2019 14:39

When I had my first one night stand aged 18 the lad made me a cup of tea using a....

... round tea bag!

Quite a few firsts, that night :)

HoldMeCloserTonyDanza · 07/01/2019 14:40

This is considerably lower-tech than a lot of examples, but I vividly remember the first time I had sweet potato fries. It was in 2006 in California and when we moved back in 2008 we couldn’t get them anywhere. DH used to make his own for us to have with steak. Now they’re everywhere!

MorrisZapp · 07/01/2019 14:42

Also I remember buying new oven trays on a shopping trip with my gran. She needed them so she could get on board with these new oven chips she'd been hearing about.

twilightcafe · 07/01/2019 14:43

I remember having macadamia nuts when I went to New York for the first time in 1989. Could you get them in supermarkets back here? Nope.

In fact, I used to travel to Selfridges food hall to buy caesar salad dressing in the early 1990s.

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