What's the first "Newest Technology" you remember?

[Fishslayer]

I remember the laser disc players.

I worked at Sony when HD was fairly new. I'm not a "latest & greatest" kinda guy but the first time I saw HD on a top of the line flat panel CRT I knew I had to have it. When we took it to trade shows we drew crowds in front of our booth!

I was told the laser disc player we were using was around 10 grand!

 

[Gamecock]

I worked at Sony when HD was fairly new. I'm not a "latest & greatest" kinda guy but the first time I saw HD on a top of the line flat panel CRT I knew I had to have it. When we took it to trade shows we drew crowds in front of our booth!

I was told the laser disc player we were using was around 10 grand!

Dang. You just reminded me of my expensive Sony Betamax!

 

[raljr1]

I started working in a machine shop my sophomore year in high school and the in 1974, a year after I graduated they bought a numerically controlled (NC) lathe. I was chosen to learn how to program and operate it. A four function calculator that cost two day's wages didn't come along till several years later.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

 

[Watchdog]

A couple of my friends didn’t have indoor plumbing until they were 12 or so.

For the first three years of my life, we lived in an old mill house in a small South Carolina town. The "bathroom" was an attached back porch that was enclosed for half its height for what I now believe were privacy reasons. The top half was screen wire. Flushing the toilet involved pouring x-number of buckets of water into the commode. Several buckets were always on hand. I have a very vivid memory of my dad chipping ice out of the buckets to flush the toilet. Now, I have no idea what happened after the toilet was flushed, no idea of where the stuff went. Thinking about it now, I guess there must have been some sort of septic tank or cistern, but I have no recollection of it.

It's always amazing to me what we remember from our early lives. We moved when I was three, so all those memories stem from before I was three-years-old.

 

[Fishslayer]

Dang. You just reminded me of my expensive Sony Betamax!

Superior technology but they didn't cotton to no pr0n!

 

[Gamecock]

Funny story: My first wife (the Good One), insisted I copy her records on to cassette tapes for her to use in her car. When challenged to do it herself, she complained - in her delightful Southern accent - "It's too complicated!"

When I got the Betamax, she was rather indifferent. When I told her she could record her Soaps, then watch them when she got home from work, she DEMANDED I teach her how. Way more complicated than taping records on to cassettes.

She was motivated!

Technology has given us an asynchronous world.

 

[DWalt]

Speaking about calculators and personal computers, when I was working at Hercules back in the mid-late 1960s, the closest we had, at least where I was, were mechanical calculators and slide rules. I remember we got in a programmable electronic calculator that was about the size of a small suitcase. Tough to say it was a computer in comparison to any PC today, but in a way it was, as you could set up formulas in it and it would crunch data numbers, do repetitive calculations, and produce an answer. I think they paid something like $20K for it (in 1960s dollars). It was considered too high-tech to let just anyone use it. There were only two guys in the whole facility who were trained on it and allowed to operate it. If you needed to use it (I never did), you had to put in a formal request and go on the waiting list.

 

[rubiranch]

The one that really sticks out in my mind was the first time I saw a microwave.

I was at a friends house and she said, "you need to see this". Her dad worked for GE at the time.

She cut a slice of apple pie, put a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top, put it in the little box and turned it on.

When she took it out the pie was hot and the only ice cream that had melted was the ice cream that was in contact with the hot pie.

I thought it was magic.

 

[Murphy's Law]

Another old fart for color TV. I believe it was NBC that was the first broadcast station to do so. I was a young kid but also remember all the hoop-la (in Detroit) with several big spot lights aimed in the sky so folks all around the area could know something "big" was happening and to follow those lights.

 

[Gamecock]

10-4, DWalt.

We had a "calculator" in a fan room in the factory, ~1973. Size of a desk.

Been 47 years now, but I can still recall the technical assistant hovering over it, and the NOISE it made. Within a few years, I had a pocket size device with the same power.

 

[Gamecock]

Speaking of which, around 1989, I saw - and sat on - a Cray computer at one of our subsidiaries locations.

In the early 2000s, I bought a home computer. I called it, "Cray I." It had as much power as the Cray, which only a decade earlier cost $10 million (!).

In the late 70s, I had the company spend $10k for an RK-05 disk pack. Storage capacity: 2.5 megabits.

You can now buy dozens of gigabits on a stick for $8.

 

[DGNY]

A forced air gas furnace with a filter in it, which my dad was proud to show me, in our new house, when we moved in - early December, 1941, just about coincident with Pearl Harbor.

 

[meaneyedcatz]

I suppose the thing that impressed me when I was young was a gadget on our 66 LeSabre.
On the speedometer there was a needle that was set at whatever speed you did not want to exceed.
If you set it at 70 mph and went over it made a high pitched squealing noise.
It was very irritating but I thought we had the fanciest car because of it.

 

[carpriver]

Flint and iron. pointed stick. My shadow. about six years old I was introduced to my first flush toilet, that's a fact Jack.

 

[BC38]

I suppose the thing that impressed me when I was young was a gadget on our 66 LeSabre.
On the speedometer there was a needle that was set at whatever speed you did not want to exceed.
If you set it at 70 mph and went over it made a high pitched squealing noise.
It was very irritating but I thought we had the fanciest car because of it.

HEY! My dad's '64 LeSaber had the same thing!
IIRC it had a 305 V8 with aluminum heads.
Really revolutionary for its day...

 

[Bob L]

The Sputnik when my Dad took me out on the street one night to watch it go over and then the transistor radio that you could actually carry around. Then of course the development of the spinning real for fishing.

 

[Engineer1911]

One night long ago, Perry Como had a show on tv and the audio was also broadcast on radio. If a radio was placed on the other side of the room, you had stereo sound in your living room. The tv and radio sound broadcasts were not the same. TV was right channel, radio was left channel.

That night was a big deal on NBC. We only got one TV channel, WEAU channel 13.

Now where did I leave my drink or car keys?

 

[kraynky]

Probably the microwave over here too. Born in '58 TV was nothing special, but baking a potato in less than 10 minutes, and popcorn in half that! Wow it was a monster. I still remember Dad unboxing it and us playing around with it, just heating a cup of water, warming up a plate of food in 3-4 minutes! I also recall being told, "Don't stand in front of it! You're too close, back up!"

Everybody was afraid to be the first one to eat something with "micro waves in it." Especially after what happened to that egg! (no, Dad didn't read instructions either)

Second was probably the Commodore 64, although I was out of the house by the time Dad bought one of those. (and a dot matrix printer) But I remember being amazed at playing TV pong on the living room set as a young teen. We've hit it in high gear from then on.

 

[Gamecock]

Speaking of cars . . . 50s Cadillac with an Autronic Eye, automatic headlight dimmer.*

I still wonder why it was so streamlined, even though it was INSIDE the car.

*Bonus: dimmer switches were on the floor then, operated by the left foot.

 

[DWalt]

While there were various electronic calculators on the market in the early 1970s, they were all fairly expensive and a little too large to be called "pocket" calculators. The first one to hit the big time was from Texas Instruments, the SR-10, in around 1973. It sold for about $150. It was advertised heavily on TV and in various magazines. I had a friend who bought one and I thought it was really neat, but $150 was beyond my budget limits at the time. A little later, maybe 1974, I did buy a calculator, but it wasn't a TI (Japanese as remember) and it was too big to fit into a pocket. I had a friend who worked at K-Mart, and he bought one for me at his employee discount price. It was less than $100, but I don't remember the exact price. It would do only the basic four functions, but maybe it also had square and square root buttons. One nice thing about it was that the display had large glowing green numbers so you didn't have to squint. I used it a lot. It finally died on me. Compare that to today. You can go to Dollar Tree and buy a full featured scientific calculator for a dollar. And it works well. I have one.