Hmm. okay. *cracks knuckles*
6. When did you get your first cell phone? What was it like? (Did it have a screen? Could you text? Was it a brick or flip?)
I got my first cellphone in… 1997. My ex’s work gave him 2 and so I got the other one. Most people I knew did not have cell phones. Instead, we relied on those little wallet-sized pagers with a ring repertoire of a newly hatched screech owl. My first cell was a Motorola. It was neither a brick nor a flip, but kind of an unnatural hybrid combo thereof:
Reception was for shit. It had a battery life of a gnat. And let me tell you, your conversations were short out of necessity. 2/3rds of it was battery. You could fry an egg on that thing if it was on for more than 20 minutes. You knew if someone had been on the phone because their ear was bright red.
15. Did you or your family own a Betamax?
I did not. By the time VHS/Betamax war was hot and heavy, I was already in college. My family were early computer adopters, but slow to adopt TV innovations.
My early computer history is more interesting. My dad is one of the original computer nerds. He bought a TRS-80 (Tandy-Radioshack 1980) one Xmas.
See those black slot-like accoutrements on the right side? They may look like floppy disk slots, but they are not. No. The only way to play a computer game was to get a BOOK and TYPE in the BASIC program LINE by LINE into the computer, and save it to a cassette recorder. One of these:
Now, I want you to imagine the tape slooooooowly unspooling as it loads your game into your computer’s memory and never ever complain about how slow your computer is ever again.
The upside is that you inevitably made typos when you were transcribing your 4 page computer game. So, you got good at programming in BASIC, too. It made coding incredibly accessible.
Imagine a day when college students were intimidated by computers. Let me repeat that: College students. Were intimidated. by computers. I taught advance stats and programming when I was in grad school. The very first thing I did on the first day of class was take the students all down to the computer lab and make them push random buttons until they had locked themselves up with errors… and then figure their way out of it. We had a lot of fun, and learned a lot about how the operating systems worked.
Hearseeno 