Personal Technology Use

By jgarzamcc

  • 8-bit Computer Games

    Around 1989, we had a computer at home running MS DOS and a dot matrix printer. Though it was solely for my father's programming work, there were a couple of 8-bit games such as Snake (aka NIBBLES) and Pong. Not a lot of families had home computers at that time. At school, we had a Macintosh computer lab that I remember playing Oregon Trail ("YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY") and spelling games on.

  • More Games

    A lot of the technology I grew up using regularly in the 90's were Walkmans and portable CD players (with the 6-second anti-skip buffering technology); game systems like Nintendo and Gameboy; portable games like Tamagochis and electronic notetakers; kind of like a Blackberry that didn't connect to the internet and just stored all of your notes internally.

  • Page Me

    I bought my own pager in about 2000 and my friends and I would send each other coded messages from a nearby phone. These were kind of looked down on by parents and teachers as they were sensationalized as drug culture, but it was a novel way for our friends to stay connected when we weren't allowed or couldn't afford cellphones.

  • T9 Smartphones

    I got my first smartphone in the early 2000's. Texting on these phones was time consuming as there was no keyboard. Instead, they utilized the number keypad to cycle through letters. For example, to type "c" you had to press the 2 button, three times. That's why we used so many weird shortened words, like "gr8 2 c u". We got so good at it that we could text without looking at the keypad. Smaller cellphones were becoming trendy, as referenced in 2001's Zoolander.

  • Touch Screens and Laptops

    Around 2008 or so, I got my first smartphone with a touch screen. Smartphones had started to get bigger again as the displays got better. In 2015 I sprung for a Samsung Galaxy S6 to show off my fire photos and videos to clients. About this time, my job gave me a Dell laptop so I could work from anywhere. It was really exciting because I was able to work partial days while traveling, thus reducing the vacation time I used.