Do you remember reactions to new inventions?

- CD's & DVD's: I remember on the first few being sure to hold it by the edges because touching it might make the information magically disappear.

- GPS: We were still taking a regular map...just in case she really doesn't know where she's going.

- cell phones: There was a rumor that it caused a wart like tumor to grow out of the top of your ear.

- internet: When it first became popular, I remember everyone being paranoid that ANY personal information put out on the internet would get you in all kinds of problems, from people stealing your identity to being implicated in some kind of bomb threat.

Bottled water is still a terrible idea. It's the fastest growing type of plastic waste in the world. I heard once that if you put all the bottles of water thrown out in a year end to end you'd have a string of bottles to the moon and back seven times.

GPS is still a long way from infallible

Most of the reactions have been 'I don't need it' and 'it won't catch on'

Drachen Jager said:

Bottled water is still a terrible idea. It's the fastest growing type of plastic waste in the world. I heard once that if you put all the bottles of water thrown out in a year end to end you'd have a string of bottles to the moon and back seven times.

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PET is recyclable. I don't know for somewhere else but in my country there're people earn the living out of finding water bottle and sell it for recycling.

Fruitbat said:

people thought it was ludicrous and swore they'd never pay for water. (I haven't heard that in a long time now).

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Consider it heard. It's still ludicrous and I won't pay for bottled water when I'm already paying for city water.

I remember when answering machines first came home and you'd mention in the message that this was the answering machine.

More on microwaves: at first, they were sold as actual cooking devices, not just a convenient way to heat up leftovers or packaged frozen food. Like, "You can cook a whole chicken in thirty minutes!" The first thing everybody did when they got one was nuke a marshmallow.

VCRs: Tapes were incredibly expensive, so you watched the few you had over and over. A girl I knew in high school had "Life of Brian," and it was a regular thing for a group of us to grab a pizza and some Riunite and go over to her house and watch it.

I remember when my high school got its first computer. The whole school filed through the room to look at it. No one was allowed to touch it. The teachers didn't know what to do with it.

DVDs: I remember thinking, "Why would anyone want to skip around scenes in a movie?"

Many people thought text messaging was pointless since you could call someone.

I didn't. I was a teenager and loved it.

I feel rather old all of a sudden...

I remember the first calculator--my dad, an engineer, didn't get why anybody wouldn't just use a slide rule, which made me laugh. Now, of course, lots of people (both kids and adults) never really add, subtract, multiply, or divide without one, and plenty of them couldn't if their lives depended on it.

I remember my first digital watch. It was amazing, and only cost $35. Now you can get them for a tenth of that.

Computers intended for home use, god, yeah. This colleague of Mr. Maryn's had one on which he was writing his dissertation. It could not show a full screen of text and he had to scroll from side to side on every line to read what he'd written, and he still loved it.

Dishwashers were also a biggie. My mom, a careless housekeeper to put it mildly, got one of the first ones in our city.

My husband remembers when only one family in his neighborhood had a TV, and they generously invited all the kids over to watch Walt Disney every Sunday.

Maryn, ancient

I remember watching TV in color for the very first time. All the children clustered around the TV set, staring in astonishment at all that color. On a TV! It was an America show. One of the kids said, "so they have color in America?"

*joins Maryn in the retirement home*

Re: Microwave ovens... When they first hit my end of suburbia I think that the first things in were whole eggs or metal objects, not marshmallows--with predictable results.

There are people still think that ionizing radiation comes out of microwave ovens and that the things are inherently evil.

My dad used to tell of reading the comic books that showed man landing on the moon/mars/etc. As young boys they thought that was a riot and would never happen. He was in his 50's when that became a reality.

He also told of having their first 'electric light bulb', just one, hanging from the center of the ceiling in the living room of their family home. Just the bare bulb. They all thought they had really arrived in the big time then.

I remember when cassette tapes came into vogue. My hubby started buying them and I had a fit. There was nothing wrong with our 8-tracks. No way were cassettes ever going to replace the tracks.

Only the very rich had micro waves in the beginning as they cost so much. When the price finally dropped so the average person could buy one that was a big deal.

It was the same with dishwashers. No way could you trust getting dishes as clean as a hand washing.

To think you could have a washing machine/dryer that did all the work. It meant no more using the wringer washing machine and spending all Monday doing the 'weekly' laundry and then hanging them outside to dry.

I was lucky and had a neighborhood kid/friend that got the first black/white TV and we would sit on his porch and look through the screen door and catch Micky Mouse. We were the second family to have one, and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. It only came on at 4:00PM and went off the air at about 10:00PM to start with.

Who would never think of buying/using air conditioning in a house? Only if it was like 100 degrees outside we were allowed to turn it on. Nothing but good. old fresh air for us. (Illinois, with 80% humidity.)

I remember my dad and the time he first drove over 60 PMH. According to my mom, there was no need to ever go anywhere that fast.

The first Mikie D's and another, Henry's, opened up and sold a burger, fries, and a soft drink for $.25. My dad thought that he was in pig heaven with that idea. I thought it was great as we could go out to eat.

Panty hose. What a great invention. No more snags/runs like with the real silk hose. I was so happy.

Hair conditioner. I had very fine, naturally curly hair that tangled so badly. As a child I would always end up in tears when my mom combed out my locks. Now I could have hair like silk.

TV dinners/Pot pies. Who would have thought they would have ever made it? What a treat. One whole meal without all the dirty dishes.

Massed produced furniture. No more having to live with the same stuff that your folks/aunts/friends got rid of. No more painting more coats of paint to freshen them up. And they were made with 'real wood'.

Wall to wall carpeting. Not having to turn the rug around for better wear. You knew you had it made if you had wall to wall.

Water beds. Who would have ever thought that sleeping on a water bed could/would have been so neat?

Cable TV. What in the world would anyone need with 150 channels? Three or four was more than enough. You can only watch one at a time anyway.

Perma pressed clothes. Just wash and hang up. No ironing. W00t!

As you can see.......I could go on and on.

When CDs first came out, they were touted as being undestructable --a permanent medium.

I remember being told that you could drive your car back and forth over one and it would still play.

Sony Walkmen. I was in college when I first saw one. All of a sudden you could strap something to your waistband and cruise through the world and even learn to read lips. It opened up a whole new world of random danger. But, the thing held my sanity in on the subways of Tokyo.

In 1969, the summer of my seventh year, I was in a special summer school program.

The local university brought in calculators--digital calculators--that were the size of a small microwave. They could do basic single-operation math.

They told us each one of them cost the same as a new VW Bug.

When the first iPod came out (October 23, 2001) the general public reaction from journalists was "No one would want that, and certainly not for that money ($399.00). It's stupid."

My generation 1 iPod still works. It holds 5 Gigs of data (about a 1000 songs) on a tiny hard drive. I bought it with the intent to use it in teaching, which worked fabulously well for me.

Medievalist - I remember thinking the IPOD was stupid and overpriced. Guess I was wrong about that one.

The Diamond Rio. The very FIRST Mp3 player. (1998)(Still have mine) They fought the legal battles, and Apple profited on their backs.

CheyElizabeth said:

Medievalist - I remember thinking the IPOD was stupid and overpriced. Guess I was wrong about that one.

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Just a bit over a year ago, the iPad was first announced.

Remember all the jokes about the name, and people pointing out that it was going to be the death of Apple?

Or the first TVs. They were huge, and expensive, and had tiny screens. And you would invite the neighbors over for "TV Parties."

WriteKnight said:

The Diamond Rio. The very FIRST Mp3 player. (1998)(Still have mine) They fought the legal battles, and Apple profited on their backs.

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Actually, it wasn't the first.

The first commercially available MP3 player was Saehan's MPMan. It was initially released in the Spring of 1998, in Asia (you could even buy it from vending machines in Tokyo) and then a couple months later, it was released in the U.S. as Eiger Labs MPMan F10/F20, two months before the Rio.

It was one of the problems in the RIAA's lawsuit against Rio that they completely ignored the prior devices, even those with prior patents that predated both the Rio and the Saehan device. But Rio was a U.S. company, and much easier to sue because of it, and the RIAA was relentless in their efforts to destroy Rio.

Their were patents for digital solid state audio playback devices that were filed in the 1980s--one of them came out of JPL research.

CACTUSWENDY said:

Panty hose. What a great invention. No more snags/runs like with the real silk hose. I was so happy..

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My mom was stationed oversees for 7 years at the tail-end of WW II.

When she came home, some of her stuff from overseas was stored at a relatives house, in one of those big steamer trunks (she came home via a ship) that you could use as a wardrobe, with a hanging rod and some drawers.

In the 1990s, she finally got the trunk back, still full.

She had brand-new silk stockings, which she bought in Europe or Asia to bring home for family members, that she had forgotten about.

They were still just as good as new, and gorgeous. Unfortunately, I'm about a foot too short to use them, so they went to a tall cousin.

I was watching the Young One's recently, not Cliff's film but the comedy from 1982, and an everpresent tag in the episode was - "you've got a video?" (Meaning a VCR machine itself.)

And that was the reaction at the time. VCRs were A BIG THING.

Regards

Whacko

Jean said:

PET is recyclable. I don't know for somewhere else but in my country there're people earn the living out of finding water bottle and sell it for recycling.

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But, less than 30% is recycled. The point is, even if you recycle it is a complete waste. Bottled water is barely different from tap water, certainly from a health perspective there is no appreciable difference in most of the world. In England one major brand of bottled water was even banned because it had dangerously high levels of heavy metal.

Twenty two BILLION water bottles are thrown into landfills every year.

2.5 million plastic drink bottles are thrown in the trash every HOUR in the United States.

There is a patch of floating plastic in the Atlantic that is, depending on which report you listen to, either twice the size of Texas, or larger than the entire continental United States.