What technology were/are you an early adopter of?

I am engineer and fairly tech-savvy, but I find that I am a pretty late adopter of a lot of technology.  There are some exceptions though:

1) I bought a 2x CD writer/rewriter for like $300 when they first came out.

2) I had a digital camera pretty early on - probably the first generation that didn't save to 3.5" floppies

3) I embraced 3d printing early on at work in ~2009 or 10.  I bought my own hobby level device around this time as well.  BIG mistake - the hobby level stuff was garbage back then.  Its a lot better now.

4) Thinking back, I did try GPS/OBD data acquisition for autox/track early on and wow... that was terrible.

From am automotive standpoint... I had a 1G Prius, but well after the 3rd gen was released, so hardly early :).  Some recent posts here have me considering a Bolt, but that would still be pretty late to the EV game.  

I bought my first 4x cdrw and promptly made my power supply go boom. Like $200 for a NOT HP, because hp still played with proprietary hardware.

I still feel like an early adopter of 3d printing even though I didn't have one till 2016. I'm still in line for a $500 build space equivalent to an fdm resin printer, and the only thing stopping me from having a collection is money.

I got into HD TV early, and I'll even claim piracy/all digital media because I would spend a week downloading cam rips over dialup in the 90s. I've been on exclusively digital media since 2006 or so. 

I tend to try to jump onto new tech stuff, but having a family and not great paying job limits being on the cutting edge a lot.

When Time Warner offered Roadrunner, their new cable internet service, I was one of the first 500 customers.  I had high speed internet at the office, but still remember the thrill of those download speeds at home.  That would have been around 1997/98.  Although the company has changed, I've had the same account since then.  20+ years and I could count the number of outages on one hand. 

-Rob

I made the reckless leap to smartphone technology last year.  I'll drive an electric car after the last drop of dead dinosaurs has been combusted and belched out into the atmosphere.

Ooh.  I was pretty late to HD tv.  I still haven't adopted 4K anywhere.  I don't have a tablet or a smartwatch either.  But those last two are technologies that I don't see as necessary so I may never adopt them.

I had a 1st (and 2nd and 3rd) gen Raspberry Pi.  I might get a 4th to run my CNC router software.

I was an early adopter of online multiplayer games.  I was big into Quake 1 online back in '96-'2000 ish (including TF).  I remember playing ROTT and DOOM via a modem to modem connection before that.  I played Doom on a few specialty multiplayer gaming networks as well IIRC.  DWANGO and Mplayer.

I actually played Xbox 1 games online before Xbox live existed with Xbox connect (plug into a second ethernet port on your computer, your computer connects to other(s) across the net and emulates a LAN connection).

Abacus

I was a pretty early owner of a cell phone(Motorola flip phone FTMFW!), but that wasn't until around 1995. McDonalds had a promotion where if you made a donation to the Ronald McDonald house & signed a 1-year contract they gave you the phone. 
 

Having worked in tech-related fields since 1998 I try to be the last adopter of technology now. 

I was one of the first 100k members of disc based Netflix way back when they still had a good selection of stuff to watch.

First 25k member of gamefly, the videogame version of Netflix too. 

I had the first model of head unit that could play MP3s off of a CD-R in my Saturn.

Before there was Google Maps or Tom Tom, I had a serial GPS receiver that worked with some mapping software on my laptop. 

Before the iPhone came out, I had a little handheld Windows CE computer from HP with a cellular data PCMCIA card for (slow) mobile internet.

Back in the mid 90s, I paid way too much money for a 2B+D ISDN line to be installed in my bedroom.

I used a lot of X10 stuff in the apartments I lived in during the late 90s and early 2000s to control my thermostat, lights, and stuff like that.

Now, though, it seems like I don't get around to adopting new technology until it's like five generations old.....

SMS-based email. I worked for the company that introduced it to one of the big Canadian carriers and ended up being one of the top SMS users on their network at the time.

Wifi. Worked for Nortel Networks at the time, had some of the PCMCIA Lucent cards. PCs at the time really didn't like changing networks so I had to set my home wireless up like the one we had at the lab. I also had a HP handheld that worked on the network  I still have that somewhere. If you can't guess, I worked in the "what's next" part of wireless tech for a while on application. Somewhere I have the demo on what OnStar might look like with a full time wireless internet connection. Showed it to OnStar in 1999, I think. Had a touch screen in the back seat of a Cadillac.

XSLT. But that's a work thing. I was coding HTML by hand in 1995. Still am.

CD player. Got my first in 1987 when there was still the triple vs single beam argument, and everyone thought DAT would make it the CD irrelevant.

WAP phones. The summer the Matrix came out, I had one of the slider Nokia phones from the movie. One that never got sold in North America, we had to have the carrier authorize it for use on the network.

Played a lot of DOOM back in 1995. Still have the 100' null modem cable. 

Oh, I used to use a Palm Pilot to datalog my car's ECU including onscreen traces. In 1997.

CD player here too. I think I got mine in late 84 or early 85. The Luxman amp I had at the time was ready. It had an input for DAD.

Digital audio disc

On the flip side, I only just got rid of my picture tube TV last year.

As a kid we were the first people I knew with a vcr.  I held onto my flip phone far too long but I bought Jodi the first iPhone we could find. 

I actually had an early digital camera that took a 3.5" floppy.  Something strange about snapping a picture with a camera the size of a box of Girl Scout cookies and you had to wait about 30 seconds while it wrote the (terrible) image to a magnetic storage device.

I had a cell phone pretty early.  The town where I went to college was pretty small and Bell Atlantic/Nynex was pretty eager to get business moving.  I got a Zack Morris brick phone for cheap or free if I did a 2-year contract.  I have no idea what the monthly bill was, but that was back in the day when you always called after 7pm because it was either cheaper or free.  When I upgraded to the smaller brick with the pull-out antenna, I remember not being able to afford the model that had the address book.  I'll also never forget exactly where I was - pulling into the mall for a first date with Lisa Whatshername - when I got my first incoming call with caller ID.  It showed the number of who was calling and I thought that things could never get better than that.  Unfortunately, it was Lisa Whatshername calling to cancel the date.  Funny I can't remember her last name, but I remember she drove a tan Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer.  Jeez she was hot.

I had a bag phone in like 1992 when having a phone not tied to your car was pretty rare. I had a whole hour of talk time or was a it thirty minutes a month before serious charges accrued.  I did not however get a smart phone until a few months ago. Had a lap top for school in 1990 when having a personal desk top PC was still rare and most of us had to share the computer lab. Been on hand me down computers ever since I graduated.  Both were tools at the time for work and school and took sacrifices to obtain.  Otherwise I am probably a Ludite of the highest order.

Hmm. I had a Odyssey. Then a few Atari things you plugged into your TV.  Then an Interact. Then an Apple II with a cassette drive. Then updated to an actual 5 1/4 floppy with 64k ram upgrade. I built my first PC in '94. Since then I've built all my computers.

Edit: Oh, remember Iomega Zip Drives? The click of death?

They can still <censored>!!!!

I was under the first 20,000 people to sign up to YouTube.  18,700 or something like that.  My Pandora number is 9,156.

I remember when I was 14 I saved for months to buy a DVD player that was the size of 32" tv..

Shadeux (Forum Supporter) said:

 I built my first PC in '94. Since then I've built all my computers.

Hey, that's me!  Mine was an AMD 386DX40.

I was the first contractor in my area using a cell phone. It earned me quite a bit of business. 
 

Damn I miss my bag phone!!

I also had an IBM XT sitting on my desk long before anyone I knew. 1985
 

512K Green screen.
 

My wife worked for IBM.  As an employee, she got a 50% discount. Even with the discount that stupid thing cost us $2700. 
 

The we had to buy $5000 worth of software.  It was almost as fast as an abacus.

In reply to 1988RedT2 :

I had a DX486 but concurrently the Pentium came out so that became uncool. Still kicked ass to me!

Nothing really. As a digital native, there isn't much that I really could have been, and if I could, I couldn't afford it. The only one I can think of is an Apple Watch. Probably among the first of my circle to have one, but that's hardly a groundbreaking idea. Also a carbon fiber guitar, but it's still an acoustic guitar. 
 

My dad, on the other hand, owned either the 2nd or 3rd CD player released, Got us a DVD player about a year after it came out, had the first surround sound system I ever saw (no surround sound for him or me now, not worth it for us), and managed to get his department the amount the very first PCs that Brown and Williamson tobacco bought. 
 

I wanted to have an iPod as soon as I saw one. Didn't get it until the first video one came out. I Didn't want a cell phone, still don't really. 

8-bit microcomputers, some of which required a soldering iron to put together. Possibly also cell phones.

In reply to SVreX (Forum Supporter) :

My bag phone was, what, 5W?

I think I could have called Mars with that thing.

I had the first to market cell phone video camera. It was 500$. In 2004. I also ran the first color blackberry. And I have the newest xbox lol