Technology Autobiography

Growing up, anything on tape was a great source of entertainment. VHS tapes could be watched forward and backwards for hours. I remember spending rainy days inside with just one movie and laughing with my siblings until we cried when Cinderella's step mother and sisters marched back up the stairs backwards. 
We generally didn't get much time in front of the tube television, so we cherished every moment. On road trips, we would listen to cassette tapes - mostly singalongs - and fight over who got to pick the next Donut Man favorite.

In the summer, we would visit our grandparents who had a television in almost every room and, since we were on vacation, mom would let us watch Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street every morning. We were in heaven! Sometimes, mom would even record episodes on VHS so that we could take them home and re-watch them. The fact that the VCR could even do that seemed like magic to us.


One summer we got to grandma's house to find that grandpa had bought a "special kids computer". He was the coolest man on the planet! Summers had reached a whole new level of fun!

One Christmas, I became the proud owner of a walk-man. I could now carry my home-made mixed tapes with me wherever I went. And I did. It had sliding levers on the side to adjust the bass and treble. Cool, I know.

A few years later, I upgraded my walk-man to a neon green, clear plastic disk-man. And again, this thing traveled anywhere and everywhere I did. My first CD purchase - a very exciting, big girl moment - was a classy Britney Spears album. And if you put the CD in your computer, you could watch her music video. Amazing!

In middle school I remember coveting my friend's mini-disk player. Looking back, however, this would have turned into another gadget collecting dust on a shelf very soon because I got to pick an mp3 player not too long afterwards. Now I could spend hours transferring music from my CD collection to this tiny new device.

Over the years, our extensive VHS collection was exchanged by an ever growing stack of DVDs. The VCR was replaced by a DVD/VHS player combo and then a pure DVD player. Our home computer kept its box screen for much longer than most other house holds, but eventually my parents did invest in a flat screen for the computer. Just a few years ago my house got an exciting technological upgrade when mom invested in a flat screen TV and wireless internet. It was a good moment for the whole family.

Since then, we've added four laptops, three iPods, and a Netflix account. The house finally got away from a wall-attached phone with a cord that could reach halfway around the house a few years ago and all of us kids got cell phones when we went to high school. None of us have taken the plunge into the smartphone world yet, but I have a feeling it'll happen before too long...