I have had my third cell phone for less than six months.
#latebloomer

That early? Got my fist home computer and Internet service in 2005. Can’t remember when I got my first cell phone, but it was at least as late as 2001.

I mean that I suspect many such memories are created once the events in question are far enough in the past to convince yourself of what they are.

We had a home computer when I was born in 1982. I remember when it got upgraded from dual 5.25" floppies to one and a hard drive... 8 meg possibly? Before that you had to use a boot floppy that loaded DOS 3.1 into RAM and then you could use it. Good times.

Internet came later of course, on a state-of-the-art 386.

I got it in 6. :foo:

Got boosted yesterday and feel run down. No riding.

Tomorrow, I hope.

My memory is factually accurate back to about age 6. I have verified it.

My first "computer experience was on a Wang word processor in the early '80s.

I've had about 25.

#conspicuousconsumption

My first experience was on the college's IBM 360, on a newfangled terminal with a SCREEN!!! This was a big step up from the Teletype terminals people had been using. Or worse - punchcards!! Mrs. GeneJockey took a Computer Science class a couple years earlier, and had to use both.

I took a programming course in ‘86 while at U. Penn. I remember those 5.25 floppies. They were prone to crashing. Constantly had to back them up.

I was a summer associate at Alcoa in ‘89 after my first year of law school. They had Wang word processing.

I can remember punch cards.

in '81-82, I worked for a firm writing appellate briefs in plane crash cases. I would write them out by hand, give it to a typist, and she would type them on a IBM selectric. If I made a revision on page 5, she would retype the whole thing from that page forward. They were typically ab 50 pages long.

Times have changed for sure.

My wife started out on punch cards, in the early 70s. When I started hanging out at her house, in 86, she had a desktop with monitor, and 5 1/2" floppies. She was a computer whiz in those days, and had a small business trouble-shooting and teaching at Communiversity. D-Base 3 was it? I remember she taught me some dos commands so I could get around with Netscape. The wild wild west of the internet. I'm glad I was able to experience it in its infancy.

I first worked at a dealer doing diagnosis in 1989. There had been computers on cars since 1979 and hand held devices to read data were available but GM came out with a machine (CAMS) to do more. It had a small CRT screen atop a big metal cabinet that rolled around. When you hooked it up to read data it would prompt you to splice in diagnostic cables to the circuit in question. There was a huge cabinet full of these cables. It could then tell you which leg of the circuitry was suspect.

This was all something you could do with a DVOM in a couple minutes so the machine was never used except as a curiosity. Dealers were forced to buy them with all the cables and discs to update them. In the mid 90s they came out with a 32mb hand held device which was a good tool.

Back then (1989) all service bulletins were on paper. When a service bulletin was released a paper copy was sent to the dealer and it was (hopefully) filed correctly. There were thousands of these pages in a huge catalog like they used to use for parts. Researching a bulletin for a car was a daunting task and if the last user took it out and didn't put it back you were out of luck.

The other thing was technical support. It was so bad before computers we didn't call unless we were desperate. You could count on a 30 minute wait and then when they did answer, they had to search paper copies of everything. By the time electric cars came out the tech support was pretty good. Actually it was pretty good in the late 90s.

I used to type on a manual typewriter for 10 miles uphill each way in the snow with no shoes on.

Did you have to cut yourself for blood to ink the red ribbon too?

LSS wrote her PhD thesis in some ancient EMACS on a VT100 connected to a PDP11 via 300 baud modem and that was some big power back then. I think she had a DEC Rainbow 100 on her desk at work.

I have no recollection of ever being cool.

#justsayin

I'd say I'm through being cool...

I didn’t have to do that. We had people that did that type of thing. 😜

what’s a punch card?