I’ve always enjoyed my position in history in terms of technology. In middle school I enjoyed the dawn of the home video games, we had a Pong and then later a Magnavox Odyssey², which my Dad liked over the Atari system because it came with a keyboard and perhaps had more educational opportunities.
I graduated High School in 1984, just when personal computers were becoming mainstream. The report card system still used punch cards! In my first year at Boston University, I did have a class that required sending stat problems to the mainframe computer for batch processing. By my sophomore year you could rent time on an Apple computer to work on papers. By the time I graduated just about everyone had their own home computer or laptop.
During this time I also used film cameras, developed my own negatives and had a closet darkroom set up. In High School I had and Olympus OM-10 35mm film camera and then after that fell in the lake I got an Olympus OM-G.
My first online purchase was an old 4×5 Graflex Crown Graphic press camera that shot Polaroid Type 45 Positive/Negative film with and developed in a bucket.
When digital cameras rolled around, I wasn’t an early adopter. I was busy with a career in the Computer Magazine Publishing Industry which was seeing an upheaval. Instead when my son was born I bought a Sony video camera and took a lot of video and had a small digital point and shoot camera. It wasn’t until years later that I had time to get back into photography and purchased a Panasonic Lumix G Series mirrorless camera and started to take serious photographs. Later I added a series of Fujifilm small cameras and a full frame Canon 6D DSLR to my equipment. My most recent addition has been a GoPro Hero5 Black action camera. The world of digital technology is always exciting and I’m glad I lived in the pre-digital, vinyl record, cassette tape analog world growing up to really appreciate what we have now.