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I can't say exactly when we got a cassette player, but I listened to enough Wee Sing Silly Songs and Disney Read Along tapes to remember it fondly. I always was intimidated by that red button.
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The Little Mermaid was the first movie I saw in the theater. This lead directly the many home video technologies I invested in later.
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This is rough estimate. My family got a VCR when I was very young, and another when that one broke, and one more after that. I watched a lot of videos on those machines.
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My brother had a Super Nintendo and I regularly watched him excel at Mario Bros. Being 4 years old, however, I did not play much or well.
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In '92 my dad got his first laptop. It was, at the time, mind-blowing. I spent minutes and minutes playing hangman, the only game it had.
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In kindergarten I told some third-graders taking a survey that my favorite song was "Thriller" as sung on the original record. The strange looks I got should have been a hint to a young me that my tastes in music technology would lag behind the mainstream for many, many years.
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Dad's second laptop had enough RAM to run "Where In the USA is Carmen Sandiego?" in six, sometimes seven colors. Again: mind-blowing.
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My dad got a camcorder shortly after they stopped being enormous, but before they became particularly convenient. As a result there are few videos of my childhood.
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The first CD my family ever got was the Lion King soundtrack. For a long time, it was our only CD, so I can sing it all by heart.
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My brother traded for a Sega Genesis in elementary school, and I had a lot of fun playing the one level of Sonic the Hedgehog that I could beat.
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Sega Saturn was the first platform I saw 3D games on. This marked the death of my gaming career, because to this day I cannot successfully navigate a character through a 3D world. I run into a lot of walls.
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That year's big present was a computer with a TV card. I occasionally used it for homework, but I spent much more time watching TV, because on this amazing device you could freeze frame and print the image. Whoa!
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The Casio My Magic Diary was hours of fun. You could find out who you were most compatible with, get your daily horoscope, store phone numbers, and watch an 8-bit dinosaur make six different facial expressions.
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It was pretty cool in 1997.
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I'd heard about this "internet" thing, but it wasn't until 1999 that 1) my dad got an internet-capable computer and 2) I had a reason to surf that web. My interest in a certain fandom gave me hours' worth of reasons to tie up the phone line.It turns out there were all these people online who liked the same things I did!
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It took ten minutes to log on, sounded like a duck choking on a kazoo, and it was AOL, but I finally had the internet in my own house. I participated in chat rooms with real live other people and played primitive internet games involving cute imaginary creatures.
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I got a portable CD player just about five years after everyone else. I used it about five times.
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I got a DVD player as a sophomore in high school and never looked back at VHS.
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For my 16th birthday I got a cell phone (this had a lot to do with my navigation skills). Suddenly, I could talk to people I wasn't standing next to!
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My family got a digital camera the size of a horse when I was in high school. We still have it, but rarely use it, given that 1) it's only 3.2 megapixels and 2) you hurt someone with it.
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I got my own computer for college. It was new and amazing and all mine. If only we hadn't still had dial-up....
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The day I moved into my freshman dorm was riddled with little sadnesses and difficulties, all of which I forgot immediately upon realizing that I now had 24/7 access to high-speed internet.
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I got my first flash drive shortly after my first computer. $30 for a whopping 128MB. My current one is 8G. They're handy little things.
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A more tech-savvy friend had been telling me for months to join The Facebook. I joined without understanding why. I figured it out sometime in the next six months.
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I joined LiveJournal as a freshman in college. Talk about fandom central! (Extremely accurate date brought to you by LJ)
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For all the fun I made when they first announced the name of Nintendo's new console, I ended up liking it a lot. It turns out I can navigate in 3D if the game takes control of at least one dimension for me.
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My second cell phone was also a camera with a zoom function and everything. It had a 1G SD card and could text. Unfortunately I couldn't.
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My first laptop got old fast. I got a new one in 2007, and it's getting kind of slow itself. It's still nice enough to let me type that, though. Thanks, Gadling.
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I didn't send a text message for a year after I got a text-capable phone. The T9 keyboard didn't even bother me at first.
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My family got a WiiFit in 2010. Having a game talk back to you is pretty good motivation to work out. Plus, I'm killer at the hula game.
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I got an iPod Shuffle. I use it constantly while driving. Less so while walking, because I don't want to die. Earphones kill.
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My third cellphone was my first smartphone, acquired in March 2011. It was worth every dollar for its physical keyboard alone. In retrospect, I should never have spent 4 years trying to type on a T9 keyboard.
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I got a Blu-ray player for the holidays. It plays movies, sure, but its most important function is putting the internet on my tv without the use of an intervening laptop. My smartphone is the remote control, so I can use the keyboard.
