Do you ever think back to the first time you were introduced to something that is now standard?

[Anonymous]

1993. First job out of college. My boss asked me to run some files across town and to take his cell phone. I had never talked on a cell phone and never wanted to.On the way back, sure enough he called. I was mortified. I actually ducked into an alleyway to get out of the busy street. When I answered, he asked me why I was whispering. I told him people were giving me dirty looks because I was talking on the phone in public!

[Anonymous]

Believe it or not, I still remember my first new car - a 1982 VW Rabbit, and it didn't have power windows, power locks or A/C. The A/C in a car is something I really take for granted now. Recently the A/C broke on our Honda CRV and we were forced to drive to North Carolina with the windows rolled down on I-95. THE HORROR!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I remember coming home from a few days with my grandparents and Mom and Dad had bought a VCR. Our first VHS tape was The Princess Bride, which I can still speak along with from memory.

Heh. I don't remember getting the VCR, but I do remember my dad taking the VCR to the repair shop a couple of times in the late 80s. This was before it became cheaper to just buy a new one, obviously. And when my roommate bought a TV in college I was amazed that it had a VCR built in. This was 1999 so it wasn't even earth-shattering ... but my parents had the same TV and VCR forever and I'd never gone shopping for one myself, so I was completely unaware of the technological improvements.

Got my first laptop when I went to college, fall of 1998. The big debates then were laptop vs desktop and Windows vs Mac. It was Windows 98 (I think) and had 3.4 gb of memory, which seemed enormous at the time. Now I can buy a flash drive with 10 times that amount for a song. And no one has desktops anymore. And I hear now kids don't even have laptops anymore, they have pads. I always wonder how you can write a term paper on a pad ... but I guess I will find out when my own kids get old enough!

[Anonymous]

So many!

I had a kick-ass slumber party for my 14th birthday in 1984 and decided that it would be so cool to show videos and kind of do a dance party. My parents did not own a VCR, so we drove to Erol's (locals will remember) and RENTED and enormous, heavy VCR that was encased in bright red plastic. Rented Duran Duran VCR tapes and a few more I can't recall.

My big brother hooked that VCR up to our equally enormous Montgomery Ward Airline television (the kind that was a piece of furniture) and we had our dance party. That Christmas, just a few months later, my parents sprung for a family VCR!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My friend took me to a coffee shop to get cappuccino for my 18th birthday present. We had to drive about 45 minutes to the "hip" town near where we lived. Coffee shops were still a novelty then, at least in the Midwest where I lived. This was 1990.

Yeah, I remember when coffee shops with acoustic guitar started opening up on my campus strip (Syracuse U) c 1991. A friend suggested going to one instead of a bar one snowy night. I was like "WHY?" I was so confused about them. Still am.

What place? I was a senior in high school in syracuse in 1991, and loved going out around SU.