Tech adoption questionnaire

[sonia]

1. Did you have a cell phone prior to your thirties? Juuust barely. A brick. But I was a relatively late adopter, at least for Bay Area techies.
   
2. Did they exist? Yep.
   
3. Did you have cable when you were a little kid? No TV at all. (Cue gasps.) My parents hated the advertising. I came to agree with them and still don't have one. I do have cable Internet now though.
   
4. Do you know what 8-track tapes are? Yep. My dad was an audiophile. I never owned any though. Anybody know what a reel-to-reel tape player is? Like a huge cassette tape with more parts exposed. Really cool.
   
5. How about cassette tapes? Yep. Still have a bunch I recorded from my dad's vinyl collection, although I have a lot of them on mp3 now and haven't played the cassettes in many years.
   
6. When did you get your first DVD player? Must have been with a computer. Not sure when they went from built-in CD players to built-in DVD players. I don't sit and watch things much, so I wasn't trying to watch movies.
   
7. Did you learn to type on a typewriter? My parents had an old manual, and I had an electric one at the end of college, but I got good at typing on keyboards.
   
8. What was the first computer you owned? An Amiga. For email and chat and Larn, and probably grad school homework, although that's not what I remember doing on it.
   
9. What age were you when you first got e-mail? 1985, through my college, when you had to know which machines talked to each other and what their names were, and string a path of them together in your to: line.
   
10. Was the Internet around when you were a kid? Nope.
    
11. What age were you when Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal, and Dreamwidth started? Dunno. I connected with Dreamwidth in 2009, which was pretty early in its beta.
    
12. What was the first printer you owned like? A pleasingly compact inkjet printer. Now I have a comparatively enormous and much faster printer/scanner/copier/fax. The fax part is recently no longer functional since I got rid of the landline.
    
13. Collegiate papers: typewriter or computer? Computer at the computer lab, or a couple on my roommate's tiny original Macintosh. Each page of the paper had to be a separate file. Deleting a paragraph was bad news.
    
14. How old were you when streaming came into being? Dunno.
    
15. What age were you when you got your first MP3 player? I guess that would be my first iPhone a few years ago. No, wait, I got an ipod touch before that for my massage practice, and I'm still using it for massage music. Something like ten years ago already?
    
16. Did you own a record player, cassette player, CD player, or MP3 player as a teen? Never owned a record player, although I currently have custody of my neighbor's for the occasional transfer of LP to mp3. I did own a double cassette player and portable CD player as a teen. I got the nice multi-component stereo system I still own when I was 21.
    
17. At what age did you start blogging on the Internet? I posted on Usenet as a grad student. I don't remember if I ever posted in college. I read some news groups, but liked to keep my head down.
    
18. What age were you when the e-readers came out? No idea. I don't keep track of these things.
    
19. How do you listen to music? Mp3s on the computer, sometimes plugged into the good stereo speakers. And polyphonic singing with other folks.
    

(Seen around, copied from silveradept)

Comments

[silveradept]

I have seen and listened to a reel-to-reel machine, as my parents owned one when I was small. Pretty good fidelity.

[sonia]

I remember my dad saying something about the fidelity too. I didn't have the refined ear at that point.

What I thought was cool was the way you have to wind the end of the tape in and out and through to start it off. I was about 4 years old, so I'm having trouble finding words for why that appealed to me. Something about it being a little esoteric, and also having your fingers right *on* the music. For some reason LPs and CDs don't give me that same sense.

[silveradept]

I don't remember threading one at any point. Playing with the knobs and such, entirely, but not threading one.

Most of what I had to deal with after that was on LP, on a machine that was good enough that you could listen to the record without amplification of you are close enough to where the record was being played. It wasn't the full range of possibility, but it was a fun trick.

[sonia]

Yeah, I remember that too, bending close to the record. It felt so *real*, like there were tiny musicians in there somewhere, an imprint of them, a connection with them.

Interesting how visceral and alive those memories are for me. Thanks for bringing them up!

[silveradept]

You're welcome. The think I remember most about the LPs was the soundtrack to what is now Episode IV of the Star Wars Nonilogy. It is one of those albums that's meant to showcase a good sound system, and it certainly did good things for me.

[jesse_the_k]

Oh! I vividly remember the day I learned there wasn't a tiny orchestra inside the radio. I was so heartbroken.

My father had a tiny reel-to-reel player--perhaps it was for dictation?--up in the attic. I was fascinated by it. Something like this TK-1 Grundig, with 3in reels

re: 4. I worked and lived with a blind woman who'd gone to university in the 70s. She had so many tape recorders! There were the players loaned out by the Library of Congress National Library Service (for the print-impaired), and then for both reel to reel and cassette she had personal equipment as well (and the Talking Book players for the disposable books on floppy plastic records.)

[sonia]

Cool! (I had an image of little elves running around taking mail from blue mailboxes to where it was going, but I did kind of know that wasn't how it worked.)

I searched around but didn't see an image of the one like my dad had, with bigger reels. It was encased in wood if I remember right.

Our house got broken into and they stole it, which was much more of a loss for him than a gain for them, since it wasn't replaceable but had no resale value. I see both things have changed with the advent of ebay...