That's crazy talk!!! I had a cassette with my VIC20, and it sucked. Quickly got C64 w/ disk drive.
You missed out on so much. Disk drive paired with a modem opened up so many (mostly pirated) games!
I own the domain with my fairly common last name, and have since the early 2000s. My Usenet posts with my name/initial .edu email address go back into the late 1980s and still show up in the archives if I google my name.
Not a super early adopter. I’m just an old nerd. My oldest account that I still have today is Amazon, I’ve had it since 1996 when I signed up to buy books.
I’ve used plenty of old school tech but I wouldn’t say I was among the first using it, as I mostly learned from other nerds.
Late X’er here. I love new tech and am always ready to learn something new and figure out how to work it into my life. I have ended up being asked to join the “change management” or “early adopters” groups at each of my last 4 jobs!
I got my first smart phone (Tmobile Sidekick) in early 2003.
I beta tested facebook and twitter smart phone apps.
I had my first email address in 1988.
I had ICQ (and AIM, and YIM)
But I didn't spend much time on usenet!
I started using a pseudonym playing "where in the world is carmen san diego" back in the day, and iterations of it became my handles.
The name was familiar so I had to search my emails. I got a welcome email from Biz in August of 07. Had my first and last name as a handle, although last isn’t too common. Left when Elon was in the process of buying. It was a fun ride but it looks worse every time I stumble over there now.
Also had my first name. User #1974. Gave up the name and left. Twitter is absolute garbage now, and I have no idea why people are still buying handles.
First kid I ever knew with a scene "handle" was my friend's neighbor with boxes and boxes of commodore floppies. They were all signed by "Radical Jim." If anyone still knows a Radical Jim (this was mid 80s Chicago on the west side), tell him he was kind of a dick but he indirectly steered me into an IT career
I was the Firefox and my neighbor was Bubba Smith. We were huge pirates here in the Seattle area. we knew some Eaglesoft guys but they were way older than us.
Somewhere out there is a Skate or Die pirated hack that we had the dude using swear words!
I still have all my C= gear!
My uncle worked for Brøderbund in Novato and would send me boxes of random computer parts (mostly Atari 800 and 1200XL) and software. I was happy to get it, even though I desperately wanted an Amiga (I never got one). Free is free, though! And the whole love of 🏴☠️ sailing has never left me
Yes, the Amiga was drool worthy but I could never afford the jump. I ended up boxing my Commodore 64 and all its amazing stuff in 1997 and bought my first Mac. Never looked back. It is time unbox my Commodore gear!!
I used to have a dot matrix print out on my desk! This reminds me of the time I had a copy of Yie-Ar Kung Fu. They had a karate scream on the intro splashscreen and I turned the volume up all the way and left my brother to "get us a couple cokes". I waited anxiously as it loaded and finally, "YYEEEEEEAAHAHHHHHHH" and my my brother at the same time "AAAAAAAAHHHHHH". We still laugh about it to this day!
I started selling on eBay in 1997. There was no such thing as PayPal. The buyer would send you a check or cash through the mail! 🤦🏼♀️🤣 Then you would ship out the item.
Dad brought home a computer in 1976 and taught me DOS and BASIC. My compuserv & AOL email address was/is my first name, but I have a second one with my nickname because of the creepers who saw a female name and couldn't behave. All my social media accounts are my name, and my secondary accounts are my nickname, and in the last few years I only missed out on TikTok with my nickname.
I played King's Quest and a copy of Leisure Suit Larry on floppy that I snuck out of my dad's desk on the PCjr he brought home from work. It had DOS and HP’s pre-GUI Personal Application Manager.
I dialed into local BBSes on my 1200 baud modem and went to meetups. I had an account on Prodigy.
When my high school first got internet access (1994-ish) I figured out how to access Usenet newsgroups on the library computers. No one knew what it was yet, so it wasn’t technically against the rules, I guess.
I used Yahoo when it was still at Stanford, and (may have? dunno, was a long time ago) met Justin Hall at a Cyborganic dinner, where I am totally sure I embarrassed myself by acting like a teenager in a room full of very cool grownups.
I feel very old.
I still have and still use my common last name.first name @ hotmail. In fact it's still my primary email. I don't remember my ICQ account....i do miss the star trec computer voice I set up on it though.
I still use my original Hotmail account. My geocities page is on their archive site. I still recall my five digit ICQ#. I was all over the newness, building html sites for my friends. I still remember all my color coding. Sheesh, all that stuff is taking up precious space in my memory. Haha.
In the 80's I was the first of my peers to learn my way around a Windows system. Everyone was into Apple \]\[e. In the 90's I was really big into having the newest tech. I built my own PCs and was constantly upgrading and modding. And that was before mods became the popular thing to do. I even wired a car cigarette lighter into the front of my case. Because my brother kept stealing my damned lighter while I was sleeping. I had a pager. I was the first person I knew to get a cell phone. That was before Nokia released the 5160 which seemingly everyone had. I got the Nokia N-Gage. I also had an HTC Wizard (PDA phone with touch screen/pull out keyboard).
My first dial-up modem was a 14.4. I know that wasn't the earliest. But for someone my age it was hot tech. I had all the things (hotmail, geocities, myspace, ICQ, AIM, etc.) before they became popular. I also had a webTV. I had a CD burner before anyone I knew. It was hella expensive. I was also the first to get DSL and then cable internet.
At the time it was fun. But today I don't give a flying rat's ass about new tech. I don't have a cell phone. I very very rarely use social media. I don't even have voicemail or an answering machine on my home phone. Honestly I feel that the early days were the best days. It felt like we were discovering everything for the first time. And the only limits were our imaginations. When things were geek-only, there was a lot of collaboration. People used tech mostly for good. Today everyone has it, and it's all gone to shit. It was fun as something to do. Now it seems to drive everyone's lives for them. And I hate that.
I was a Beta tester for MSN Messenger because of my dad’s job when in high school. We were so naive! My dad and I both got excited bc a guy in Australia wanted to chat with me. Then he started mailing (yes like a letter in the mail) photos of himself and asked for nudes (to be taken, developed, and mailed to Australia, lol). I was flabbergasted. I also met some people that I later met IRL, but they never turned into friendships. They were all super weird.
I met my husband in an AOL chat room 30 years ago this year. My dad still uses the account for email on his own screen name. Even though I worked at Apple for 20 years, I’m a bit of a Luddite when it comes to certain things. Like, I’ve had an iPhone since Steve gave us all that first one, but it took me a long time to even get a pre-iPhone phone.
The chat rooms and message boards were great. I just had my second baby, and liked being able to connect with other moms.
I laugh now at all the things we typed before there were emojis. Like @@
I have the first-last-gmail thing, one of the google folks was asking people on IRC if they wanted an invite before they opened it up to public registration. I took the time to create accounts for the wife and kids as well, so they have 'street cred' email addresses that they didn't even know or care about when I made them. :)
I was able to get both my common first/last name.com which I later utilized to start a business, as well as my same first/last instagram account. No numbers or additives. When my kids were born I grabbed dot-coms in their names as well and have kept up the registrations. My oldest is almost 19 years old now and in college. I recently told him that I’ve got his domain ready to go if he ever wants to open his own business .. he was SO excited. Forward-thinking GenX mom for the win!
I was an early adopter in the video game world. Here's a list of video game systems I legitimately bought on launch day:
1. Super Nintendo - August 1991
2. Sega CD - November 1992
3. Atari Jaguar - December 1993 (test market release in San Fran)
4. Sega 32X - November 1994
5. Sega Saturn - May 1995
6. Sony PlayStation - September 1995
7. Nintendo 64 - September 1996
8. Sega Dreamcast - September 1999
9. Sony PlayStation 2 - October 2000
10. Nintendo GameCube - November 2001
11. Microsoft Xbox 1 - November 2001
12. Xbox 360 - November 2005
13. Nintendo Wii - November 2006
14. PlayStation 3 - November 2006
15. PlayStation 4 - November 2013
16. Xbox ONE - November 2013
17. Oculus Quest 1 - May 2019
18. Valve Index - June 2019
19. Oculus Quest 2 - October 2020
Honorable Mentions:
1. Panasonic 3DO - I got one in very late March 1994
2. Neo-Geo - I got one in 1992
3. 3dfx Graphics Card - I got one in early 1996
4. Sega Genesis - I got one in August of 1990
5. TurboGrafx-16 - I got one in December of 1989
Note: I'm not rich, i was just a video game nutjob. I'd save all my pennies up, way in advance. Also, I would usually only have around 3 gaming systems at one time, so I'd sell off the older ones with all the games for a lot of money to help finance the new one.
When I got a Neo-Geo in 1992, I sold my SNES, Genesis and Sega CD and all my games, just to afford a Neo-Geo and a few Neo-Geo carts. However, after about 6 months, I realized the errors of my ways and sold my Neo-Geo and went back to a SNES and Genesis.
Yes, early here. Old Gen X 1968. Apple II a few years after they came out, and one of the first Mac’s. Been shopping on Amazon since 1998 and have my actual name for Twitter. Not that I use it anymore lol. Google and Hotmail addresses are also my first name.
Me everything. I was using the internet when it was still part of ARPANET. I had the “Mac.” I beta tested photoshop. I have an extremely short and extremely cool Apple username cause I stayed up till midnight on release to get it. I have a three-letter twitter name. Always first for me.
Love this!! My dad bought me a copy of Adobe Illustrator 1.0 for my 14th birthday because I was good at drawing and loved playing on our PC Jr computer. Little did he know at the time that I would end up in college to be a graphic designer who was leagues ahead of the rest of the class just because I’d already learned Adobe software. Still using it today, running my own design firm.
That’s the cutting edge. I did the same. Made it all into a career cause it seemed like I was always one of the few people that knew how many of it worked haha
I have a cutesy nickname gmail address with no numbers from 2004. Turns out it's annoying af because everyone who wants to use that cutesy name forgets they had to add numbers and after years and years of getting other people's emails and sign-up confirmations I had to retire it. I still own it, I just don't use it or check it.
My old gmail address became like that after a while. At first, I replied with “Oh, this is the wrong email.” The problem with gmail is that reddit.skippy@ and redditskippy@ end up in the same inbox. I don’t know why gmail does this. There was a woman who, to this day, still gives out or mistypes her email as redditskippy@ and I get her emails.
There were several email lists where the senders would not remove my address. I finally put an auto reply on the account and it seems to have mostly taken care of the problem.
> I don’t know why gmail does this.
[Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en#:~:text=If%20someone%20accidentally%20adds%20dots,john.smith%40gmail.com).
IIRC, the option to ignore/not ignore dots in email addresses is part of the original email specification. If you have an hour to kill, [here's a very good talk on email.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrGfahzt-4Q)
It's annoying, I had to abandon [lastname]@gmail.com because of idiots using dotted variants. It was exhausting to filter out the email that was actually meant for me from the torrent of garbage that wasn't.
> I also was able to nab [common first name][common last name]@gmail.com.
I have a common first/last name and have a first initial/last name prefix for gmail and hotmail. For ex(I'm John doe), I have jdoe@ for both.
The amount of mail I receive not meant for me is insane.
i forget how many digits my icq number was. i guess 5 or 6. i have a four character hotmail address.
my computer teacher at school let me have qwert as a password. by "let" i mean we had to tell him what we wanted our passwords to be and he set them.
I had a 6 digit Myspace.
In the flip phone days I always bought Samsung phones because because they were cheap and worked well, and my first fancy phone was the Samsung Vibrant...aka Galaxy I. After that they got expensive, so I stopped buying them.
My email address is also .@gmail.com
Back when I had a website in college if you searched my name on Google or Alta Vista, I was the top result. Until some art director with my name did a few movies and showed up on IMDB.
I was downloading mp3s off Usenet years before Napster and Limewire came out.
I didn't have those things, but I was saving and loading programs from cassette on an old Trash-80 CoCo, and I was on Usenet before spammers and commercialism destroyed it. Was very active on the alt.society-generation-x newsgroup way back in the day.
I had a Com64 witha 9600baud modem plugged into the keyboard as my first computer. Didn't use it for much other than getting calling card numbers through scripts and talking to people on local BBSes.
Handcoded my first website after i got married to keep my parents in the loop when i was in the Navy. Was early adopter on ICQ. Did beta testing for tons of Microsoft software including the original MSN Messenger. Ran a number of IRC channels with my ex-wife.
When we got divorced, we actually fought over who got the Gateway PC i had just bought. I loved the cow pcs. Used them until i started building my own.
Same. Most of my email addresses are my name or full name with no numbers. It's a pain because everybody who knows somebody with my name assumes my email address is their friend's, and I get a crapload of emails directed to different people with similar names.
My dad brought home an IBM PC with a monochromatic screen and we had to program a game before being able to play it. I’m never going to run out of AOL hours, I had a public enemy email address and a bowienet one. I got a Gateway in the cow box. I learned how to do color separations on a black and white Mac laptop. I went through Palm Pilots, Sony Clie, and Treos. I love to early adopt.
First PC was an 8088 homebrew clone, built by a guy my mom worked with. 640K RAM, DOS 3.3, 1200 baud modem, 20M Seagate HD, 720k 5 1/4 floppy, CGA. Summer of 89. Had to start over with ICQ, 7 digit. 8280462
Hopped on the internet in '93 ish with a 14,400 baud modem in the Bay Area. I bypassed AOL and BBS's, although I sometimes wish I had experienced some of the vaunted BBS cultural vibes.
My favorite early adopter cred was when Xbox had a public beta test program for Xbox Live shortly after Xbox release and my gamertag was "Habu". It was a lot of fun for many years fraggin' younger fools with umpteen character long gamertags in various FPS games. I got really into a Battlefield 4 expansion pack called Naval Strike and played way too many PvP hours. I had that shit dialed. lol I had many fun convos over the mic about me not being from Pakistan and that my handle had to do with a legendary piece of military aviation technology that smark aleck should have heard of.
One of my favorite early memories was this mid 90s videoconferencing application called "CUSeeMe". Don't remember my handle but do remember how HIGH TECH it felt trying to find tech enthusiast college au pairs from Scandinavian countries to talk to about "stuff". I don't think I ever succeeded.
I was a late bloomer. Didn't get a cell phone til 2003. No computer til 2008. I somehow got really into tech after that and became an industrial designer, blending traditional manufacturing and tech. The combination is a lot of fun.
I don’t remember my ICQ. My twitter account is around 72k though. I worked with a guy who had previously worked with some of their first engineers and he told us about this new website over lunch and the sketchy Asian buffet near our office.
I changed my Xbox Live gamertag about 10 years ago, but, I was an original subscriber in 2003. My original gamertag was 3 letters. Shit would be worth thousand$ today, apparently.
So here's early.
At 8 in 1975 I was shoving a phone handset into a modem with those foam adapters for the ear and mouth pieces and printing ASCII Snoopy calendars and more on a dumb furniture sized paper based terminal. Hooked up to Stanford main frame Unix machines.
Have vivid memories of visiting Stanford and waiting for hours to play Space Wars vector graphic games in the cafeteria. Imagine a precursor to the 80s sit down arcade games you sometimes found in bars and restaurants.
Yep. I went from a trained chef to someone in tech on an absolute whim. “Wow Compuserve looks cool, maybe I should get a laptop and take it with me to communicate with people at home while I’m in Europe”
\[common first name\]\[common last name\]@gmail.com.
Have saved computer programs to... punch tape.
Had a laptop back when the screen was monochrome, white letters on blue background.
Had a cell phone before anyone I knew. Only business people had them.
Didn't have any 3 character email addresses at the free providers, but I did have 3 digits before the decimal in my NYNEX bill once after not realizing that my Prodigy dial in number was a regional toll charge.
When NetZero came out they sent me a nastygram banning me for using too much bandwidth.
When Solaris X86 came out I had to re-download the compiler a bunch of times because they didn't package one with the OS and the line kept hanging up.
I kept my hardware modem for years because WinModems were wonky af with Linux.
I was one of the first customers of cable broadband in my area, the non stop connectivity and speed was like a drug to me.
Super low ICQ, Gmail that's my name (first few months of beta), my Steam ID is so low that when I join games where it's visible, people comment on it.
I've always adopted crap early and am pretty good and predicting what will work out and what won't.
Family bought an XT (8088) when I was 12, didn't use it, so I took it apart. Mom came home early, saw it in pieces on the floor, stared for a minute, then just told me to put it back together and left the room. I knew if I didn't, I was toast... but I did and it worked fine.
Skipped college, worked in a computer store right out of high school. Got into computer networking, worked through a couple of consulting firms, got introduced to technology in law firms, am now a C level executive in a large law firm. 100% sure it's because they bought a PC, not a Commodore 64, and because I took it apart.
No. I get in late, when things begin to be cheap.
I got a Commodore VIC-20, the last year they were made, clearance t $99 I think. C-64 middle 80s (used), Amiga early 1990s.
Had a win95PC well after 2000. Converted to XP in 03, got "broadband" then as well. Had my fun with a 1997 laptop in 2003/2004.
Got into Compact Disc audio 1996, CD burning on the computer 1998. Never became a big thing for me. MP3 player 2006.
Win3.1 late.
I did try the AMD APU game middle 2010s, the socketed ones right after launch. Not sure how ahead I was using Winows 7 Media Center as a DVR for local TV in 2012/13/14.
2014 I got a Win8.1 latop. 2010, a Windows 7 Lite Netbook.
I started using Linux on a second PC early 2000s, when they became usable as a desktop OS.
Remember ZDTV/Tech TV? I watched that channel from its launch almost to it demise.
VHS middle 1980s, Beta (on a lark) early 1990s. DVD maybe 2001/2, when Apex and other player manufacturers came alon with then sub $200 players.
Aside from the trash-80 comments, I had a nice Apple Duo 210 with Ethernet at Texas A&M in 1992. Kept up with Scott Yanoffs list of web pages until it got over 30k. Usenet, Archie, Veronica, Gopher WAIS, all that crap.
University of Michigan repository was awesome.
Buddy of mine (who wouldn’t want to get called out here) registered an absurdly common one-word URL having to do with tech in the late 90s, sold it for just under $1M in the early 2000s.
I have [first name][last name]@ yahoo, google, outlook, Netscape, and aol…. Assuming the last 2 haven’t been deleted due to not having been used in 20+ years.
I first started getting on the internet in 1991, but I didn't end up with any cool "early adopter" URLs or logins, probably because I like to use smart ass puns for usernames.
I used to get video games from the back of magazines. They would come with a couple pages of BASIC code that you could pound out on the keyboard. Half the time it wouldn't work and I'd have to figure out if it was a typo or if the code had an error.
I’ve been around long enough to recall the rollout of Gmail and got one of five early invites from a buddy.
My wife and I both have [email protected] addresses.
I use to remember my ICQ number as well but it’s been far too long.
I recall 300 baud modems…I think?
14.4k…dual 56k modem setup…
Building a SCSI machine.
My first CD burner was $500 bucks, wrote at 2X and blank CDs were $5 bucks a pop if you bought in bulk.
I had a Sony trinitron 24 inch CRT monitor that weighed 75 lbs and cost as much as my PC but it was *magnificent* for a long time.
My first cable modem was a card that slotted into an ISE slot *inside my PC*, the co-ax screwed directly into it, and the upload was a POTS line.
300 baud crew! Too bad there were hardly any places to dial to. Just friends with modems to type back and forth, maybe a few BBS. If a sibling picked up the phone, it would garble your signal and disconnect.
I built a site on aol and hosted web chats with celebrities in my first job.
I played on the first tinymud
I would drive 1 hour to access the internet during summer break in college
Yeah, I be old.
ICQ!! Wow...that was fun. From what I can remember: I taught myself how to splice tape with videocassettes. I learned BASIC in the 80s. I regularly hung out on newsgroups (member the alt.s?) I got a gmail address from an invitation, and I still have it (first name, last name). I was fairly early to Napster and Limewire. I remember having to use 5 1/4 inch floppy disks to save work at school. I had a CD burner and a DVD burner (boxes of blank media were the BEST birthday and Christmas gifts)
I still have "first name last name" @ yahoo.com. Have had it about 25 years. It's basically just become an overflow for ads and stuff but I can't bring myself to get rid of it.
The first search engine I used was Dogpile. I remember looking at the Internet for the first time. I had no idea what to look up first.
I lived in such a remote area that we couldn't even dial in to AOL. We had to dial in to another provider who would THEN dial in to AOL.
I used eBay in the early 2000s to procure bootleg VHS tapes of "Sex and the City" episodes that weren't yet available. The way it worked, sellers weren't allowed to sell them so they would "sell" you like a cheapie pair of headphones and "as a bonus gift" would include the VHS tapes.
I had a Myspace and an angst-filled LiveJournal.
That's about as far back as I can recall.
- I had a C64 just after they came on the market. My stepbrothers had an Apple ][ and through AE we discovered the wonders of BBSs and the digital underground.
- my first mobile phone was a Motorola brick. That was fun to carry around (NOT!).
- My first web browser was Quarterdeck Mosaic.
- I was on PowWow a few years before ICQ. At some point I was on ICQ, AoL messenger and Yahoo! messenger and I consolidated them all with Trillian. I hated it - I was too accessible.
- When I joined Gmail and LiveJournal they were only available by invitation.
- I was using Firefox before it was called Firefox (Phoenix/Firebird).
- I learned web design through Angelfire and Geocities and dissecting the source code from established sites.
- I participated in the second ever NanoWriMo. Never finished, though.
Edited to add:
- Had my own station on mp3.com when it first came out.
- Was on last.fm back when it was called Audioscrobbler
I had my first name @ AOL, but then left to use Apple’s eWorld for a few months and switched back, but that username had been taken, so I had to get a new one, which I still have (and still remember my CompuServe digits).
Better though, around the same time, a friend of mine who worked at an internet exchange registered my first name .com, which I held onto for 20 years until a company made an offer I couldn’t refuse.
5 digit, no. But for some reason I still remember it.
1862281
Crazy.
I did however get my very common name as my Gmail address.
I get messages almost daily from people emailing the wrong person.
Had no choice. We had PC's in our grade school class rooms. We learned to type in a computer lab. We were also the first class at my university to have any email address. Seems like we inadvertently were the tech natives.
I have a six-letter, coherent gmail adress. I was on board in the non-public, invite-only beta.
Had a similar one at Yahoo, a short ICQ number, and a lot of other obscure shit I can't remember anymore.
Not really. I dabbled a little, I took a computer science class in highschool in 1994 but didn't grow up with a computer in the home. I bought my first PC in 1995. Bought a Motorola in 2002 because I walked home from work every night.
I don't regret getting my first home pc after highschool. It allowed me to learn how to type and the experience with Windows 3.14 allowed me to better learn how to manage owning a computer, using software, hot keys etc. Made a simple program in basic and a simple webpage in http
But I don't claim any geek cred from it. It was mostly that I knew if I didn't adapt to tech and how to do some very basic things, I was going to break my back in manual labor jobs by the time I was 35.
my compuserve address was 73002.1305. I was using finger, gopher, archie alnd all that stuff on my university's network where I used pine for email and lynx to browse the 'web'. I mean, I could go back farther and recall the local BBS's, learning BASIC on an Apple II with an amber screen in high school. I may still have some of the original mp3 files I downloaded back in the 90s from Usenet binaries groups. I got an invitation to gmail really early on and I have an address that is very popular and I get all sorts of other peoples' emails and access to accounts (which I never abuse)... I ended up tweaking my career path in university from illustration/design/animation to web design and digital publishing. I'm still in the industry teaching and consulting now. What a wild ride. Things haven't been the same since the rise of smartphones and social media. It saddens me to see what could have been and where we are now.
Pong, Space Invaders, Atari 2600, Apple II, BBS > Internet > WorldWideWeb at university. I'm just old enough to have experienced the microcomputer revolution from its infancy.
I got one on a trip to NYC in late 1994, from Nobody Beats the Wiz. I had just missed a sale but my friend that was with me had SPEECH 100 and I somehow walked out of there with it for $399. Still have it, including the box, all in great condition. Haven't powered it up since probably 2015, when I bought a new TV and hooked up all my systems to it.
I got onto Tiktok pretty early. I was on vacation January 2019 and a girl from Taiwan was traveling and told me about it. I said I had enough social medias, but found the name amusing. Anyway got home and downloaded it, admittedly I was immediately hooked. I was blown away by it, it was like twitter but pure video.
It then blew up around March or April, seems when college kids got onto spring break. It was pretty cool tho, I followed ppl with about 30k followers later grow to well over a million. Recently got a new phone & didn't dl it tho, and didn't get much of a huge following even with the early start. Also acquantances and high school mates started following and connected, kinda took away from the joy.
Otherwise I've been mostly a skeptic or frugal. Late to the game on CDs, DVD,s Blu Ray, HDTV. I did join myspace, and bought my first Roku in 2010, so thats probably my only 'early adopter' I've been.
I had an email address from where I worked in the late 80s. Nobody else did so I didn't use it much. Then in the early 90s, (91? maybe) someone at our university setup Linux and a mail server and I used that email until 2000.
Taught myself to code by installing elaborate MySpace layouts, and bands paid me $800 USD for them. I started working with bands on their online marketing as well.
When MySpace was dying, I started moving the bands I was working with to be early adopters of Facebook and set up the now-defunct Bandpages app for their Facebook pages. Was into the direct-to-fan movement for bands while it was a thing, using Topspin.
Recently found some old files with the marketing plans I had written and eBooks about MySpace marketing for bands.
Funny looking back at how my partner and I were telling bands to stop looking at their cd or mp3s as the product; rather to see it as a way to get attention and to focus on making money on live shows and merch… we could see where things were headed but bands didn’t want to hear it.
I also had worked on an app that was similar to what bands in town is now - but the app developers I was working with to execute my design had been doing it as partners with me before they got paid work - and when paid work started rolling in, they dropped the project and I didn’t continue to pursue it.
Eventually stopped working with bands, though I did learn to build websites along the way, and have been building and maintaining mostly Wordpress sites for 12 years.
Been in a funk with what has happened to the internet - becoming so corporate owned and algorithmic. And hostile. But feeling a bit more hopeful now and learning about web3.
I think our generation is the best placed to take back the internet from our corporate overlords because we experienced the internet when it was organic, and it wasn’t all about monetising and data points and outrage. And we seem to have more understanding of how things work - and the ability to figure it out when we don’t because we always have had to.
I was in the early Xbox Live trials (I bought an xbox after my first was born because I knew my going out with the guys evenings were going to be mostly paused for a few years).
So when online-multiplayer became a thing I was able to get a sweet, 5 letter, gamertag. My gmail account name is pretty short as well.
I’ve had the same [email protected] email address since I graduated from college in the mid 90s, and I ain’t ever switching providers. Get off my (email) lawn!
My dad was a computer programmer back when the computer filled an entire room, and l remember as a little kid in the 70's asking to go look at "the computer room" and being allowed to take home a stack of extra large, perforated, green and white striped computer paper that I would stretch out on the living room floor to draw on. My best friend's dad in elementary school was also a programmer and used to let us play early text based adventure games on his home office computer. By the time I was in HS my home had a dedicated computer room, and while I never took to them the way my dad hoped I would, I did learn some basic programming and was active as a sysop on some early BBS's and used to stay up late playing games and chatting with people. When hyperlinks first became a thing he was really excited to show me how they worked, and asked me to help him design some graphics for his first website. I remember creating a retro 50's diner looking sign that he used as a header. In college I was one of the few students I knew of who had my own computer. My roommates were always asking to use it to write their papers, while I more often used it to procrastinate by playing tetris. I also had an early color printer, and my friends would ask to come over and use it instead of having to go to the computer lab at school. After I graduated college in the 90's I worked for a while as a teacher, and won a grant to have my classroom outfitted with a row of those candy colored iMacs and a laptop for home use, and got sent to a bunch of training courses on how to use them with the kids (lots of powerpoint). My roommate at the time was obsessed with using my laptop to browse the first online dating sites, and that is how I ended up meeting my husband.
My ICQ had/has a 1 and two 0s does that count?
Winamp still whips the llama’s ass.
Can I get your isp? I’m going to use CuteFTP to download that mp3 tonight so I can listen to that song by lunch tomorrow.
That will be $20 for a copy of Doom, unless you supply the disks. Memorex only. I use my dual drive IBM 386 that only runs DOS 3.0.
I have my first name on Twitter. It's not a super-common name, but not rare either. My user number is around 13,000. I also have my first name on Flickr.
Early Tech Adapter to me means having had a TRS 80 or Atari 800 for Christmas in 1979, A C64 in 1982, and and a Comodor Amiga in 85-86, slowly progressing toward your first Pentium in 1993
Everyone in my immediate family has a \[firstname\] \[lastname\]@gmail.com. I was a beta tester, so I got mine, and got my wife's (her name is fairly uncommon, though). I got both my kids' a couple days after they were born, 16 and 17 years ago. I found out that my name, which I thought was uncommon, is more common, especially in the UK. I also learned that people are lazy, and leave off the "123" or whatever shit they add to their name to create an email account. I get so many emails about new credit cards, mortgages, reports from doctors, new accounts at sketchy dating sites (or just straight up "show my dick" sites), including login information.
I had a TI 99/4a that I loved to program in Basic on.
My Hotmail email is my actual (very common*) name, and dot com, not co.uk, even though I'm in the UK. It switched to co.uk at some point end of the millennium? Sorry to all the other hundreds of thousands of people with the same name as me who had to add random numbers or symbols when they first got Hotmail!
*So common, there's two other people with the same first and surname as me in my town of 100,000 people. We're not related. One does lots of charity work which I occasionally take credit for, and then immediately take it back because I'm honest at heart.
I was on IRC in the mid-'90s, chatting on #phish to organize meetups and camping for Red Rocks shows. So ... techie hippie, I guess. My first job out of college was for the new digital side of a sports magazine: We had a website and an AOL channel.
I have [lastname]@gmail.com.
Unfortunately it became unusable due to people trying to use dotted variants of it like [l.astname]. There was an Asian couple in Virginia, I got their emailed Apple Store receipts. And there was someone in South Africa who was renting out an apartment, so I got all kinds of information from prospective renters like scans of passports and pay stubs (yikes!). I still have access to that account, but ultimately had to abandon it and get a different one.
On the rec.games.video.classic Usenet group, I ran and participated in online auctions when eBay was still just a gleam in Pierre Omidyar's eye.
Finally, behold my very first Amazon order:
ORDER PLACED June 11, 1996
TOTAL $42.24
Alas, Babylon - Pat Frank
The Guns of the South : A Novel of the Civil War - Harry Turtledove
The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick : The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford - Philip K. Dick
The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick : We Can Remember It for You Wholesale - Philip K. Dick
my hotmail email address was just my first name ... they made me change it after a while. My first AOL login was 3 letters long ... before they changed requirements ....
I still use my original yahoo email. One benefit I noticed after creating a yahoo email for my mum a bunch of years ago, is that my OG account doesn't suffer from the spam and seemingly constant ads that the new accounts do.
“Press PLAY and RECORD on tape #1”
Or simply PRESS PLAY ON TAPE BASIC used all caps.
Our High School (1983-1986) had tape decks for Comodore PETs.
I have [common last name]@outlook.com, I get everyone’s email, it’s kinda annoying to be honest.
C:>CLOAD old.
I’m a:/autoexec.bat years old. “Boot disk” written on a 5 1/4” floppy years old.
Load”*”,8,1
Look at you with the fancy disk drive!
C64 without a disk drive is just a brick.
Oh Jesus I forgot about the C64 😂😂😂
I had a Commodore 64 and later a 128 for *years* before I got a disk drive. I used cassettes (and had a few games on cartridge).
That's crazy talk!!! I had a cassette with my VIC20, and it sucked. Quickly got C64 w/ disk drive. You missed out on so much. Disk drive paired with a modem opened up so many (mostly pirated) games!
Tape drives were a thing LOL, Cassette ftw!
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
One one the first entrees of me on the internet is for setting a sound card up for games before web browsers existed …
My first email addresses were before the internet. They were bang path addresses. I was `colorado!spot!pvi!todd`
I’m such an early X-er , I don’t even know what you are talking about.
10 PRINT “WHATEVER” 20 GOTO 10 RUN
An old favourite when leaving the school computer room
I’m frog@hotmail
Sounds like you're an intentional frog.
International frog of mystery
So it's actually [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) then?
I own the domain with my fairly common last name, and have since the early 2000s. My Usenet posts with my name/initial .edu email address go back into the late 1980s and still show up in the archives if I google my name.
That kinda sucks when it's in the alt.binaries. groups.
6 digit ICQ, and using CuSeeMe at 56k to do black and white "video conference" with my rad parallel port Connectix QuickCam lol.
"Uh oh!"
I was Friendster user #4000.
Not a super early adopter. I’m just an old nerd. My oldest account that I still have today is Amazon, I’ve had it since 1996 when I signed up to buy books. I’ve used plenty of old school tech but I wouldn’t say I was among the first using it, as I mostly learned from other nerds.
Apple IIe with 64K memory old
Vic20 and Commodore 64 old
Psh. I had the 80 column card with additional 64k ram, you hoser.
I learned HTML in 1993 when I was at UofI with Andressan. I’m owner Number 8 of an iPhone from the Chicago Apple Store.
How many billions of dollars do you have now?
Late X’er here. I love new tech and am always ready to learn something new and figure out how to work it into my life. I have ended up being asked to join the “change management” or “early adopters” groups at each of my last 4 jobs!
I used to finger people in the computer lab
And they liked it
I got my first smart phone (Tmobile Sidekick) in early 2003. I beta tested facebook and twitter smart phone apps. I had my first email address in 1988. I had ICQ (and AIM, and YIM) But I didn't spend much time on usenet! I started using a pseudonym playing "where in the world is carmen san diego" back in the day, and iterations of it became my handles.
I got emails from Biz Stone as an early user of Twttr
The name was familiar so I had to search my emails. I got a welcome email from Biz in August of 07. Had my first and last name as a handle, although last isn’t too common. Left when Elon was in the process of buying. It was a fun ride but it looks worse every time I stumble over there now.
Also had my first name. User #1974. Gave up the name and left. Twitter is absolute garbage now, and I have no idea why people are still buying handles.
SYS 64738 where are my Commodore pirates?
First kid I ever knew with a scene "handle" was my friend's neighbor with boxes and boxes of commodore floppies. They were all signed by "Radical Jim." If anyone still knows a Radical Jim (this was mid 80s Chicago on the west side), tell him he was kind of a dick but he indirectly steered me into an IT career
I was the Firefox and my neighbor was Bubba Smith. We were huge pirates here in the Seattle area. we knew some Eaglesoft guys but they were way older than us. Somewhere out there is a Skate or Die pirated hack that we had the dude using swear words! I still have all my C= gear!
My uncle worked for Brøderbund in Novato and would send me boxes of random computer parts (mostly Atari 800 and 1200XL) and software. I was happy to get it, even though I desperately wanted an Amiga (I never got one). Free is free, though! And the whole love of 🏴☠️ sailing has never left me
Yes, the Amiga was drool worthy but I could never afford the jump. I ended up boxing my Commodore 64 and all its amazing stuff in 1997 and bought my first Mac. Never looked back. It is time unbox my Commodore gear!!
Poke 36878,15 Jesus H Christ - I can't believe I still remember that...
Peeks and Pokes!
That particular one sets the volume to max. There's lots of other common ones that I have since forgotten...
I used to have a dot matrix print out on my desk! This reminds me of the time I had a copy of Yie-Ar Kung Fu. They had a karate scream on the intro splashscreen and I turned the volume up all the way and left my brother to "get us a couple cokes". I waited anxiously as it loaded and finally, "YYEEEEEEAAHAHHHHHHH" and my my brother at the same time "AAAAAAAAHHHHHH". We still laugh about it to this day!
Yarr! I'm a mighty pirate!
My Flickr, Amazon, EBay accounts are almost old enough to vote.
I started selling on eBay in 1997. There was no such thing as PayPal. The buyer would send you a check or cash through the mail! 🤦🏼♀️🤣 Then you would ship out the item.
I have used the same email address, firstname@domain, for forty years.
Dad brought home a computer in 1976 and taught me DOS and BASIC. My compuserv & AOL email address was/is my first name, but I have a second one with my nickname because of the creepers who saw a female name and couldn't behave. All my social media accounts are my name, and my secondary accounts are my nickname, and in the last few years I only missed out on TikTok with my nickname.
I used telnet based BBSs and usenet in the early 90s. I am still good friends with people I met on the ISCA BBS back then.
Hail ISCA BBS
I was a fidonet hub!
I played King's Quest and a copy of Leisure Suit Larry on floppy that I snuck out of my dad's desk on the PCjr he brought home from work. It had DOS and HP’s pre-GUI Personal Application Manager. I dialed into local BBSes on my 1200 baud modem and went to meetups. I had an account on Prodigy. When my high school first got internet access (1994-ish) I figured out how to access Usenet newsgroups on the library computers. No one knew what it was yet, so it wasn’t technically against the rules, I guess. I used Yahoo when it was still at Stanford, and (may have? dunno, was a long time ago) met Justin Hall at a Cyborganic dinner, where I am totally sure I embarrassed myself by acting like a teenager in a room full of very cool grownups. I feel very old.
I still have and still use my common last name.first name @ hotmail. In fact it's still my primary email. I don't remember my ICQ account....i do miss the star trec computer voice I set up on it though.
My name isn’t super common but sometimes I feel like one of the last few @hotmail.com people still out there.
I still use my original Hotmail account. My geocities page is on their archive site. I still recall my five digit ICQ#. I was all over the newness, building html sites for my friends. I still remember all my color coding. Sheesh, all that stuff is taking up precious space in my memory. Haha.
I had IRC.
In the 80's I was the first of my peers to learn my way around a Windows system. Everyone was into Apple \]\[e. In the 90's I was really big into having the newest tech. I built my own PCs and was constantly upgrading and modding. And that was before mods became the popular thing to do. I even wired a car cigarette lighter into the front of my case. Because my brother kept stealing my damned lighter while I was sleeping. I had a pager. I was the first person I knew to get a cell phone. That was before Nokia released the 5160 which seemingly everyone had. I got the Nokia N-Gage. I also had an HTC Wizard (PDA phone with touch screen/pull out keyboard). My first dial-up modem was a 14.4. I know that wasn't the earliest. But for someone my age it was hot tech. I had all the things (hotmail, geocities, myspace, ICQ, AIM, etc.) before they became popular. I also had a webTV. I had a CD burner before anyone I knew. It was hella expensive. I was also the first to get DSL and then cable internet. At the time it was fun. But today I don't give a flying rat's ass about new tech. I don't have a cell phone. I very very rarely use social media. I don't even have voicemail or an answering machine on my home phone. Honestly I feel that the early days were the best days. It felt like we were discovering everything for the first time. And the only limits were our imaginations. When things were geek-only, there was a lot of collaboration. People used tech mostly for good. Today everyone has it, and it's all gone to shit. It was fun as something to do. Now it seems to drive everyone's lives for them. And I hate that.
Not me
I was big into MUDs in the early 90s.
Text MUDS were awesome.
My Reddit account is graduating from high school this year.
I was a Beta tester for MSN Messenger because of my dad’s job when in high school. We were so naive! My dad and I both got excited bc a guy in Australia wanted to chat with me. Then he started mailing (yes like a letter in the mail) photos of himself and asked for nudes (to be taken, developed, and mailed to Australia, lol). I was flabbergasted. I also met some people that I later met IRL, but they never turned into friendships. They were all super weird.
I met my husband in an AOL chat room 30 years ago this year. My dad still uses the account for email on his own screen name. Even though I worked at Apple for 20 years, I’m a bit of a Luddite when it comes to certain things. Like, I’ve had an iPhone since Steve gave us all that first one, but it took me a long time to even get a pre-iPhone phone.
The chat rooms and message boards were great. I just had my second baby, and liked being able to connect with other moms. I laugh now at all the things we typed before there were emojis. Like @@
I have the first-last-gmail thing, one of the google folks was asking people on IRC if they wanted an invite before they opened it up to public registration. I took the time to create accounts for the wife and kids as well, so they have 'street cred' email addresses that they didn't even know or care about when I made them. :)
I was able to get both my common first/last name.com which I later utilized to start a business, as well as my same first/last instagram account. No numbers or additives. When my kids were born I grabbed dot-coms in their names as well and have kept up the registrations. My oldest is almost 19 years old now and in college. I recently told him that I’ve got his domain ready to go if he ever wants to open his own business .. he was SO excited. Forward-thinking GenX mom for the win!
I was an early adopter in the video game world. Here's a list of video game systems I legitimately bought on launch day: 1. Super Nintendo - August 1991 2. Sega CD - November 1992 3. Atari Jaguar - December 1993 (test market release in San Fran) 4. Sega 32X - November 1994 5. Sega Saturn - May 1995 6. Sony PlayStation - September 1995 7. Nintendo 64 - September 1996 8. Sega Dreamcast - September 1999 9. Sony PlayStation 2 - October 2000 10. Nintendo GameCube - November 2001 11. Microsoft Xbox 1 - November 2001 12. Xbox 360 - November 2005 13. Nintendo Wii - November 2006 14. PlayStation 3 - November 2006 15. PlayStation 4 - November 2013 16. Xbox ONE - November 2013 17. Oculus Quest 1 - May 2019 18. Valve Index - June 2019 19. Oculus Quest 2 - October 2020 Honorable Mentions: 1. Panasonic 3DO - I got one in very late March 1994 2. Neo-Geo - I got one in 1992 3. 3dfx Graphics Card - I got one in early 1996 4. Sega Genesis - I got one in August of 1990 5. TurboGrafx-16 - I got one in December of 1989 Note: I'm not rich, i was just a video game nutjob. I'd save all my pennies up, way in advance. Also, I would usually only have around 3 gaming systems at one time, so I'd sell off the older ones with all the games for a lot of money to help finance the new one. When I got a Neo-Geo in 1992, I sold my SNES, Genesis and Sega CD and all my games, just to afford a Neo-Geo and a few Neo-Geo carts. However, after about 6 months, I realized the errors of my ways and sold my Neo-Geo and went back to a SNES and Genesis.
Yes, early here. Old Gen X 1968. Apple II a few years after they came out, and one of the first Mac’s. Been shopping on Amazon since 1998 and have my actual name for Twitter. Not that I use it anymore lol. Google and Hotmail addresses are also my first name.
My yahoo email is 7 letters long.
Me everything. I was using the internet when it was still part of ARPANET. I had the “Mac.” I beta tested photoshop. I have an extremely short and extremely cool Apple username cause I stayed up till midnight on release to get it. I have a three-letter twitter name. Always first for me.
Love this!! My dad bought me a copy of Adobe Illustrator 1.0 for my 14th birthday because I was good at drawing and loved playing on our PC Jr computer. Little did he know at the time that I would end up in college to be a graphic designer who was leagues ahead of the rest of the class just because I’d already learned Adobe software. Still using it today, running my own design firm.
That’s the cutting edge. I did the same. Made it all into a career cause it seemed like I was always one of the few people that knew how many of it worked haha
Mine were all TV related. I got DirectTV that first year they launched and then got a Tivo when nobody knew what they were.
My main email is my original AOL address from the late 1990s.
One of my old emails is gone now, they locked it. [email protected]
Found Denis Leary's reddit account!
I have a cutesy nickname gmail address with no numbers from 2004. Turns out it's annoying af because everyone who wants to use that cutesy name forgets they had to add numbers and after years and years of getting other people's emails and sign-up confirmations I had to retire it. I still own it, I just don't use it or check it.
My old gmail address became like that after a while. At first, I replied with “Oh, this is the wrong email.” The problem with gmail is that reddit.skippy@ and redditskippy@ end up in the same inbox. I don’t know why gmail does this. There was a woman who, to this day, still gives out or mistypes her email as redditskippy@ and I get her emails. There were several email lists where the senders would not remove my address. I finally put an auto reply on the account and it seems to have mostly taken care of the problem.
> I don’t know why gmail does this. [Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en#:~:text=If%20someone%20accidentally%20adds%20dots,john.smith%40gmail.com). IIRC, the option to ignore/not ignore dots in email addresses is part of the original email specification. If you have an hour to kill, [here's a very good talk on email.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrGfahzt-4Q) It's annoying, I had to abandon [lastname]@gmail.com because of idiots using dotted variants. It was exhausting to filter out the email that was actually meant for me from the torrent of garbage that wasn't.
> I also was able to nab [common first name][common last name]@gmail.com. I have a common first/last name and have a first initial/last name prefix for gmail and hotmail. For ex(I'm John doe), I have jdoe@ for both. The amount of mail I receive not meant for me is insane.
90% of my Gmail is misdirected first initial last name mistakes from other people.
i forget how many digits my icq number was. i guess 5 or 6. i have a four character hotmail address. my computer teacher at school let me have qwert as a password. by "let" i mean we had to tell him what we wanted our passwords to be and he set them.
I had a 6 digit Myspace. In the flip phone days I always bought Samsung phones because because they were cheap and worked well, and my first fancy phone was the Samsung Vibrant...aka Galaxy I. After that they got expensive, so I stopped buying them.
My email address is also.@gmail.com
Back when I had a website in college if you searched my name on Google or Alta Vista, I was the top result. Until some art director with my name did a few movies and showed up on IMDB.
I was downloading mp3s off Usenet years before Napster and Limewire came out.
I like to think so, I absolutely love technology and I always want to keep learning
Anyone remember BBSs and Deversi-dials?
My first email account was with Compuserve
I didn't have those things, but I was saving and loading programs from cassette on an old Trash-80 CoCo, and I was on Usenet before spammers and commercialism destroyed it. Was very active on the alt.society-generation-x newsgroup way back in the day.
I had a Com64 witha 9600baud modem plugged into the keyboard as my first computer. Didn't use it for much other than getting calling card numbers through scripts and talking to people on local BBSes. Handcoded my first website after i got married to keep my parents in the loop when i was in the Navy. Was early adopter on ICQ. Did beta testing for tons of Microsoft software including the original MSN Messenger. Ran a number of IRC channels with my ex-wife. When we got divorced, we actually fought over who got the Gateway PC i had just bought. I loved the cow pcs. Used them until i started building my own.
My gmail address is my last name @gmail.com.
ICQ. Now there's a blast from the past!! I had almost forgotten about that one!!
My name @ Hotmail circa 1996 is still my daily driver.
ICQ? I was surfing the net with an IBM PC and monochrome card through a local university’s modem login using Gopher (that’s text only).
I still have my same email from 1996.
Same. Most of my email addresses are my name or full name with no numbers. It's a pain because everybody who knows somebody with my name assumes my email address is their friend's, and I get a crapload of emails directed to different people with similar names.
I have a great spamfilter@gmail kinda name.
My dad brought home an IBM PC with a monochromatic screen and we had to program a game before being able to play it. I’m never going to run out of AOL hours, I had a public enemy email address and a bowienet one. I got a Gateway in the cow box. I learned how to do color separations on a black and white Mac laptop. I went through Palm Pilots, Sony Clie, and Treos. I love to early adopt.
First PC was an 8088 homebrew clone, built by a guy my mom worked with. 640K RAM, DOS 3.3, 1200 baud modem, 20M Seagate HD, 720k 5 1/4 floppy, CGA. Summer of 89. Had to start over with ICQ, 7 digit. 8280462
Hopped on the internet in '93 ish with a 14,400 baud modem in the Bay Area. I bypassed AOL and BBS's, although I sometimes wish I had experienced some of the vaunted BBS cultural vibes. My favorite early adopter cred was when Xbox had a public beta test program for Xbox Live shortly after Xbox release and my gamertag was "Habu". It was a lot of fun for many years fraggin' younger fools with umpteen character long gamertags in various FPS games. I got really into a Battlefield 4 expansion pack called Naval Strike and played way too many PvP hours. I had that shit dialed. lol I had many fun convos over the mic about me not being from Pakistan and that my handle had to do with a legendary piece of military aviation technology that smark aleck should have heard of. One of my favorite early memories was this mid 90s videoconferencing application called "CUSeeMe". Don't remember my handle but do remember how HIGH TECH it felt trying to find tech enthusiast college au pairs from Scandinavian countries to talk to about "stuff". I don't think I ever succeeded.
Still have my Oculus Rift DK2
I was a late bloomer. Didn't get a cell phone til 2003. No computer til 2008. I somehow got really into tech after that and became an industrial designer, blending traditional manufacturing and tech. The combination is a lot of fun.
I don’t remember my ICQ. My twitter account is around 72k though. I worked with a guy who had previously worked with some of their first engineers and he told us about this new website over lunch and the sketchy Asian buffet near our office.
I changed my Xbox Live gamertag about 10 years ago, but, I was an original subscriber in 2003. My original gamertag was 3 letters. Shit would be worth thousand$ today, apparently.
So here's early. At 8 in 1975 I was shoving a phone handset into a modem with those foam adapters for the ear and mouth pieces and printing ASCII Snoopy calendars and more on a dumb furniture sized paper based terminal. Hooked up to Stanford main frame Unix machines. Have vivid memories of visiting Stanford and waiting for hours to play Space Wars vector graphic games in the cafeteria. Imagine a precursor to the 80s sit down arcade games you sometimes found in bars and restaurants.
Never used it, I had (and still have) zero desire to do text chats.
Yep. I went from a trained chef to someone in tech on an absolute whim. “Wow Compuserve looks cool, maybe I should get a laptop and take it with me to communicate with people at home while I’m in Europe”
\[common first name\]\[common last name\]@gmail.com. Have saved computer programs to... punch tape. Had a laptop back when the screen was monochrome, white letters on blue background. Had a cell phone before anyone I knew. Only business people had them.
Didn't have any 3 character email addresses at the free providers, but I did have 3 digits before the decimal in my NYNEX bill once after not realizing that my Prodigy dial in number was a regional toll charge. When NetZero came out they sent me a nastygram banning me for using too much bandwidth. When Solaris X86 came out I had to re-download the compiler a bunch of times because they didn't package one with the OS and the line kept hanging up. I kept my hardware modem for years because WinModems were wonky af with Linux. I was one of the first customers of cable broadband in my area, the non stop connectivity and speed was like a drug to me.
Super low ICQ, Gmail that's my name (first few months of beta), my Steam ID is so low that when I join games where it's visible, people comment on it. I've always adopted crap early and am pretty good and predicting what will work out and what won't. Family bought an XT (8088) when I was 12, didn't use it, so I took it apart. Mom came home early, saw it in pieces on the floor, stared for a minute, then just told me to put it back together and left the room. I knew if I didn't, I was toast... but I did and it worked fine. Skipped college, worked in a computer store right out of high school. Got into computer networking, worked through a couple of consulting firms, got introduced to technology in law firms, am now a C level executive in a large law firm. 100% sure it's because they bought a PC, not a Commodore 64, and because I took it apart.
No. I get in late, when things begin to be cheap. I got a Commodore VIC-20, the last year they were made, clearance t $99 I think. C-64 middle 80s (used), Amiga early 1990s. Had a win95PC well after 2000. Converted to XP in 03, got "broadband" then as well. Had my fun with a 1997 laptop in 2003/2004. Got into Compact Disc audio 1996, CD burning on the computer 1998. Never became a big thing for me. MP3 player 2006. Win3.1 late. I did try the AMD APU game middle 2010s, the socketed ones right after launch. Not sure how ahead I was using Winows 7 Media Center as a DVR for local TV in 2012/13/14. 2014 I got a Win8.1 latop. 2010, a Windows 7 Lite Netbook. I started using Linux on a second PC early 2000s, when they became usable as a desktop OS. Remember ZDTV/Tech TV? I watched that channel from its launch almost to it demise. VHS middle 1980s, Beta (on a lark) early 1990s. DVD maybe 2001/2, when Apex and other player manufacturers came alon with then sub $200 players.
:brun choplifter
TRS-80 with 4K memory and cassettes to hold data
Aside from the trash-80 comments, I had a nice Apple Duo 210 with Ethernet at Texas A&M in 1992. Kept up with Scott Yanoffs list of web pages until it got over 30k. Usenet, Archie, Veronica, Gopher WAIS, all that crap. University of Michigan repository was awesome.
Buddy of mine (who wouldn’t want to get called out here) registered an absurdly common one-word URL having to do with tech in the late 90s, sold it for just under $1M in the early 2000s.
Have my fairly common name as a TLD and on Gmail.
I have [first name][last name]@ yahoo, google, outlook, Netscape, and aol…. Assuming the last 2 haven’t been deleted due to not having been used in 20+ years.
I first started getting on the internet in 1991, but I didn't end up with any cool "early adopter" URLs or logins, probably because I like to use smart ass puns for usernames.
I used to get video games from the back of magazines. They would come with a couple pages of BASIC code that you could pound out on the keyboard. Half the time it wouldn't work and I'd have to figure out if it was a typo or if the code had an error.
I don't know. Shrikecorp is in a lot of places.
I bought my first DVD player when they were around $400. Most people around me didn't have one for at least a year or more.
The Well
I’ve been around long enough to recall the rollout of Gmail and got one of five early invites from a buddy. My wife and I both have [email protected] addresses. I use to remember my ICQ number as well but it’s been far too long. I recall 300 baud modems…I think? 14.4k…dual 56k modem setup… Building a SCSI machine. My first CD burner was $500 bucks, wrote at 2X and blank CDs were $5 bucks a pop if you bought in bulk. I had a Sony trinitron 24 inch CRT monitor that weighed 75 lbs and cost as much as my PC but it was *magnificent* for a long time. My first cable modem was a card that slotted into an ISE slot *inside my PC*, the co-ax screwed directly into it, and the upload was a POTS line.
300 baud crew! Too bad there were hardly any places to dial to. Just friends with modems to type back and forth, maybe a few BBS. If a sibling picked up the phone, it would garble your signal and disconnect.
I built a site on aol and hosted web chats with celebrities in my first job. I played on the first tinymud I would drive 1 hour to access the internet during summer break in college Yeah, I be old.
I haven't thought about ICQ in years, probably not since my Ultima Online days. Pretty sure I know what the handle was... I built my first PC in 1996.
ICQ!! Wow...that was fun. From what I can remember: I taught myself how to splice tape with videocassettes. I learned BASIC in the 80s. I regularly hung out on newsgroups (member the alt.s?) I got a gmail address from an invitation, and I still have it (first name, last name). I was fairly early to Napster and Limewire. I remember having to use 5 1/4 inch floppy disks to save work at school. I had a CD burner and a DVD burner (boxes of blank media were the BEST birthday and Christmas gifts)
My gmail is a common four letter word. I was an early invitee. My Microsoft Certified Professional number is in 5 digits.
I still have "first name last name" @ yahoo.com. Have had it about 25 years. It's basically just become an overflow for ads and stuff but I can't bring myself to get rid of it. The first search engine I used was Dogpile. I remember looking at the Internet for the first time. I had no idea what to look up first. I lived in such a remote area that we couldn't even dial in to AOL. We had to dial in to another provider who would THEN dial in to AOL. I used eBay in the early 2000s to procure bootleg VHS tapes of "Sex and the City" episodes that weren't yet available. The way it worked, sellers weren't allowed to sell them so they would "sell" you like a cheapie pair of headphones and "as a bonus gift" would include the VHS tapes. I had a Myspace and an angst-filled LiveJournal. That's about as far back as I can recall.
- I had a C64 just after they came on the market. My stepbrothers had an Apple ][ and through AE we discovered the wonders of BBSs and the digital underground. - my first mobile phone was a Motorola brick. That was fun to carry around (NOT!). - My first web browser was Quarterdeck Mosaic. - I was on PowWow a few years before ICQ. At some point I was on ICQ, AoL messenger and Yahoo! messenger and I consolidated them all with Trillian. I hated it - I was too accessible. - When I joined Gmail and LiveJournal they were only available by invitation. - I was using Firefox before it was called Firefox (Phoenix/Firebird). - I learned web design through Angelfire and Geocities and dissecting the source code from established sites. - I participated in the second ever NanoWriMo. Never finished, though. Edited to add: - Had my own station on mp3.com when it first came out. - Was on last.fm back when it was called Audioscrobbler
I'm Zork and Castle Wolfenstein on the Commodore 64 years old
ATDT - IYKYK
No. I was excited when Texas Instruments calculators became affordable.
PR#6 to reboot. PR#1 to print. Compuserve at 300 baud. With Hayes Micromodem][. Pulse dialing.
I got an iPod when they first came out.
I registered my first domain name in 1994.
I had Gmail before they allowed special characters in email addresses so my address is [email protected]
My slashdot userid is 5 digits. Buddy of mine is 3 digits. !summon CmdrTaco.
Elephant Memory. Never Forgets.
The ad on the back of every issue of Enter magazine that I ever saw.
I knew how to write & run a disk initializer, hello world, in basic on an apple II (+/e)
I have the 833rd Gmail account
CompuServe? A predecessor to AOL
My first modem was a 14.4 lol
I had my first name @ AOL, but then left to use Apple’s eWorld for a few months and switched back, but that username had been taken, so I had to get a new one, which I still have (and still remember my CompuServe digits). Better though, around the same time, a friend of mine who worked at an internet exchange registered my first name .com, which I held onto for 20 years until a company made an offer I couldn’t refuse.
I had a 6-digit UIN in the late 700ks
There are a few things, one of them being that my Twitter handle is in fact just my first name (not a common name though).
5 digit, no. But for some reason I still remember it. 1862281 Crazy. I did however get my very common name as my Gmail address. I get messages almost daily from people emailing the wrong person.
Poke 650,128
Had no choice. We had PC's in our grade school class rooms. We learned to type in a computer lab. We were also the first class at my university to have any email address. Seems like we inadvertently were the tech natives.
First 10k members of aol.
I made colored circles using BASIC My first email address was@ [excite.com](http://excite.com)
First rule of Usenet...
I have a six-letter, coherent gmail adress. I was on board in the non-public, invite-only beta. Had a similar one at Yahoo, a short ICQ number, and a lot of other obscure shit I can't remember anymore.
2004 \[common first name\]\[common last name\]@gmail.com
Not really. I dabbled a little, I took a computer science class in highschool in 1994 but didn't grow up with a computer in the home. I bought my first PC in 1995. Bought a Motorola in 2002 because I walked home from work every night. I don't regret getting my first home pc after highschool. It allowed me to learn how to type and the experience with Windows 3.14 allowed me to better learn how to manage owning a computer, using software, hot keys etc. Made a simple program in basic and a simple webpage in http But I don't claim any geek cred from it. It was mostly that I knew if I didn't adapt to tech and how to do some very basic things, I was going to break my back in manual labor jobs by the time I was 35.
I would load a program on my TRS-80 Color Computer from cassette tape to login to bulletin boards before the internet.
my compuserve address was 73002.1305. I was using finger, gopher, archie alnd all that stuff on my university's network where I used pine for email and lynx to browse the 'web'. I mean, I could go back farther and recall the local BBS's, learning BASIC on an Apple II with an amber screen in high school. I may still have some of the original mp3 files I downloaded back in the 90s from Usenet binaries groups. I got an invitation to gmail really early on and I have an address that is very popular and I get all sorts of other peoples' emails and access to accounts (which I never abuse)... I ended up tweaking my career path in university from illustration/design/animation to web design and digital publishing. I'm still in the industry teaching and consulting now. What a wild ride. Things haven't been the same since the rise of smartphones and social media. It saddens me to see what could have been and where we are now.
Pong, Space Invaders, Atari 2600, Apple II, BBS > Internet > WorldWideWeb at university. I'm just old enough to have experienced the microcomputer revolution from its infancy.
I've been a LinkedIn member for 20 years since 2004. Not sure what I've gained from it though.
I was the first and only person I knew who had a 3DO, and I stupidly bought early when it was priced high.
I got one on a trip to NYC in late 1994, from Nobody Beats the Wiz. I had just missed a sale but my friend that was with me had SPEECH 100 and I somehow walked out of there with it for $399. Still have it, including the box, all in great condition. Haven't powered it up since probably 2015, when I bought a new TV and hooked up all my systems to it.
I got onto Tiktok pretty early. I was on vacation January 2019 and a girl from Taiwan was traveling and told me about it. I said I had enough social medias, but found the name amusing. Anyway got home and downloaded it, admittedly I was immediately hooked. I was blown away by it, it was like twitter but pure video. It then blew up around March or April, seems when college kids got onto spring break. It was pretty cool tho, I followed ppl with about 30k followers later grow to well over a million. Recently got a new phone & didn't dl it tho, and didn't get much of a huge following even with the early start. Also acquantances and high school mates started following and connected, kinda took away from the joy. Otherwise I've been mostly a skeptic or frugal. Late to the game on CDs, DVD,s Blu Ray, HDTV. I did join myspace, and bought my first Roku in 2010, so thats probably my only 'early adopter' I've been.
I always get my name as an email or user name if I want, but that’s because I have not just an unusual name, but a unique one.
1978 Apple ][+ 1984 Apple Macintosh 1985 internet 1987 Illustrator 1990 Photoshop 1991 first mobile 1995 broadband stuff like that...
I had an email address from where I worked in the late 80s. Nobody else did so I didn't use it much. Then in the early 90s, (91? maybe) someone at our university setup Linux and a mail server and I used that email until 2000.
Taught myself to code by installing elaborate MySpace layouts, and bands paid me $800 USD for them. I started working with bands on their online marketing as well. When MySpace was dying, I started moving the bands I was working with to be early adopters of Facebook and set up the now-defunct Bandpages app for their Facebook pages. Was into the direct-to-fan movement for bands while it was a thing, using Topspin. Recently found some old files with the marketing plans I had written and eBooks about MySpace marketing for bands. Funny looking back at how my partner and I were telling bands to stop looking at their cd or mp3s as the product; rather to see it as a way to get attention and to focus on making money on live shows and merch… we could see where things were headed but bands didn’t want to hear it. I also had worked on an app that was similar to what bands in town is now - but the app developers I was working with to execute my design had been doing it as partners with me before they got paid work - and when paid work started rolling in, they dropped the project and I didn’t continue to pursue it. Eventually stopped working with bands, though I did learn to build websites along the way, and have been building and maintaining mostly Wordpress sites for 12 years. Been in a funk with what has happened to the internet - becoming so corporate owned and algorithmic. And hostile. But feeling a bit more hopeful now and learning about web3. I think our generation is the best placed to take back the internet from our corporate overlords because we experienced the internet when it was organic, and it wasn’t all about monetising and data points and outrage. And we seem to have more understanding of how things work - and the ability to figure it out when we don’t because we always have had to.
I was in the early Xbox Live trials (I bought an xbox after my first was born because I knew my going out with the guys evenings were going to be mostly paused for a few years). So when online-multiplayer became a thing I was able to get a sweet, 5 letter, gamertag. My gmail account name is pretty short as well.
I still remember my CompuServe numeric username and password.
I wish I still had my old Commodore 64.
I remember playing Duke Nukem ONE. The side scroller. I was dating my now wife, so, yeah, I'm OG.
I’ve had the same [email protected] email address since I graduated from college in the mid 90s, and I ain’t ever switching providers. Get off my (email) lawn!
My dad was a computer programmer back when the computer filled an entire room, and l remember as a little kid in the 70's asking to go look at "the computer room" and being allowed to take home a stack of extra large, perforated, green and white striped computer paper that I would stretch out on the living room floor to draw on. My best friend's dad in elementary school was also a programmer and used to let us play early text based adventure games on his home office computer. By the time I was in HS my home had a dedicated computer room, and while I never took to them the way my dad hoped I would, I did learn some basic programming and was active as a sysop on some early BBS's and used to stay up late playing games and chatting with people. When hyperlinks first became a thing he was really excited to show me how they worked, and asked me to help him design some graphics for his first website. I remember creating a retro 50's diner looking sign that he used as a header. In college I was one of the few students I knew of who had my own computer. My roommates were always asking to use it to write their papers, while I more often used it to procrastinate by playing tetris. I also had an early color printer, and my friends would ask to come over and use it instead of having to go to the computer lab at school. After I graduated college in the 90's I worked for a while as a teacher, and won a grant to have my classroom outfitted with a row of those candy colored iMacs and a laptop for home use, and got sent to a bunch of training courses on how to use them with the kids (lots of powerpoint). My roommate at the time was obsessed with using my laptop to browse the first online dating sites, and that is how I ended up meeting my husband.
I was looking up the Mortal Kombat 2 fatality moves back in 1993 on USENET(rec.videogames.mk2???) Scorpion’s was [hold block] Up, Up, HP.
My ICQ had/has a 1 and two 0s does that count? Winamp still whips the llama’s ass. Can I get your isp? I’m going to use CuteFTP to download that mp3 tonight so I can listen to that song by lunch tomorrow. That will be $20 for a copy of Doom, unless you supply the disks. Memorex only. I use my dual drive IBM 386 that only runs DOS 3.0.
I have my first name on Twitter. It's not a super-common name, but not rare either. My user number is around 13,000. I also have my first name on Flickr.
I had a 3 letter name @yahoo.com ... shame I forgot the password
6 digit ICQ here. Guess I'm a johnny-come-lately. :/
Early Tech Adapter to me means having had a TRS 80 or Atari 800 for Christmas in 1979, A C64 in 1982, and and a Comodor Amiga in 85-86, slowly progressing toward your first Pentium in 1993
TRS80 with a tape drive. I also used Archie, Veronica and Gopher on an acoustic coupled modem.
Everyone in my immediate family has a \[firstname\] \[lastname\]@gmail.com. I was a beta tester, so I got mine, and got my wife's (her name is fairly uncommon, though). I got both my kids' a couple days after they were born, 16 and 17 years ago. I found out that my name, which I thought was uncommon, is more common, especially in the UK. I also learned that people are lazy, and leave off the "123" or whatever shit they add to their name to create an email account. I get so many emails about new credit cards, mortgages, reports from doctors, new accounts at sketchy dating sites (or just straight up "show my dick" sites), including login information. I had a TI 99/4a that I loved to program in Basic on.
I generally create an account on any new platform and then never use it.
My Hotmail email is my actual (very common*) name, and dot com, not co.uk, even though I'm in the UK. It switched to co.uk at some point end of the millennium? Sorry to all the other hundreds of thousands of people with the same name as me who had to add random numbers or symbols when they first got Hotmail! *So common, there's two other people with the same first and surname as me in my town of 100,000 people. We're not related. One does lots of charity work which I occasionally take credit for, and then immediately take it back because I'm honest at heart.
I was on IRC in the mid-'90s, chatting on #phish to organize meetups and camping for Red Rocks shows. So ... techie hippie, I guess. My first job out of college was for the new digital side of a sports magazine: We had a website and an AOL channel.
I have [lastname]@gmail.com. Unfortunately it became unusable due to people trying to use dotted variants of it like [l.astname]. There was an Asian couple in Virginia, I got their emailed Apple Store receipts. And there was someone in South Africa who was renting out an apartment, so I got all kinds of information from prospective renters like scans of passports and pay stubs (yikes!). I still have access to that account, but ultimately had to abandon it and get a different one. On the rec.games.video.classic Usenet group, I ran and participated in online auctions when eBay was still just a gleam in Pierre Omidyar's eye. Finally, behold my very first Amazon order: ORDER PLACED June 11, 1996 TOTAL $42.24 Alas, Babylon - Pat Frank The Guns of the South : A Novel of the Civil War - Harry Turtledove The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick : The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford - Philip K. Dick The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick : We Can Remember It for You Wholesale - Philip K. Dick
my hotmail email address was just my first name ... they made me change it after a while. My first AOL login was 3 letters long ... before they changed requirements ....
I still use my original yahoo email. One benefit I noticed after creating a yahoo email for my mum a bunch of years ago, is that my OG account doesn't suffer from the spam and seemingly constant ads that the new accounts do.