| I was 18 in 2003 so I can remember the tech of that era vividly. I got my first mobile phone in 2002. Mobile phones had been around for a while but at least in Australia phone plans were very expensive and it was not really affordable for my parents to pay for a phone for me while I was in High school. A few of my friends had phones towards the end of High School (maybe 40% of people had a phone by end of school) but mostly you would call people's land lines to get in touch with them. The most popular phone at the time was the Nokia "Brick phones" like the 3210. My first phone was a Motorola I can't remember the model but it was absolutely privative compared to modern day phones - it had a monochrome screen, no camera or anything like that. About the only cool feature was it had was a polyphonic ringtone which was pretty advanced for the time. A Few years later (2005ish) I upgraded my handset to a "flip phone" which had color screen and a camera (but camera quality was shocking everything just a mess of pixels). I want to say it was maybe 2007 or 2008 when I started to get data (i.e. internet) on my phone it was really slow (and expensive) but I remember looking up a train timetable on my phone and thinking it was revolutionary, having the internet in your pocket genuinely felt game changing. I purchased a computer with money I saved up working over the summer before I started Uni. It was a Pentium 4 with a 2 ghz Clock speed. It ran Windows XP (Cheaper lower end computers at the time had Windows Millennium Edition, which was complete garbage). It had a 19 inch CRT monitor which weighed a tonne. "Flat panel" LCD screens were available but were very expensive. ADSL internet had just started coming out in Australia, before that it was 56k dial up or cable (which was extremely expensive I only knew one person with cable internet). I used to play games like Starcraft and Diablo 2 over dial up around this time period, if my Mum picked up the phone to make a call the internet would drop out. DVD's were relatively new technology. I got the Collectors Edition DVD of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings as a Christmas gift, it is still one of my prized possessions. If my 18 year old self was to look around my home today he would be in awe of how much the technology has changed. |