What is your favorite piece of technology?
 

For me, it is the calculator on my handspring visor. The area and length features are very usefull for metric/foot calculations. I use it a lot, I enjoy it, I still have things to learn about it. :o

My pleasure is juiced by childhood memories. I remember hearing about the first hand held calculators before they came out. "They cost a thousand dollars!" my first grade buddy told me.

My mother just got a free calculator, actually two, because she shopped at the right store at the right time and qualified for the free gift ... one of the pair, which I ended up with is a "scientific calculator." It was given to me because of the word "scientific" appearing on the cover, along with it having a number of mysterious keys labelled "sin" and "cos" and "tan" that my mother has no understanding of or use for. The buttons are too small, and the display too tiny for her elderly eyes, and so it ends up in my hands. At least she has not sunk so deeply into her burgeoning senility that she wrapped it and tried to pass it off as a present. She's very fair-minded when it comes to Christmas presents. Her siblings reached a stage where they would do all their shopping at the dollar store, and the Christmas Cards from Aunt Sarah, who never quite understood inflaction, that contained $2 were a longstanding family joke.

Anyway, as I held this device for the first time I was transported backward in time, reminiscing about my first Texas Instruments TI 30, which had the same mysterious buttons, and cost a lot of money, in 1978 dollars. I think it was around $40? Anybody remember? I got the deluxe package, with the simulated denim zip case and the book that taught you to do biorhythms. My first actual calculator was a Commodore, which didn't have floating point decimals. It operated just like a mechanical adding machine.

As much as I like calculators, though ... I'm hard pressed to name a favorite piece of technology ... the computer, the stereo, the television, the game systems ... if I would have to pick one and forsake all others, it would be the computer. Or maybe the car.

How technological did you mean? I mean, damn near everything I have has some technological aspect to it, including my ball point pens ...

Oh wow. I had this one. This was my second Commodore calculator.

my cell phone. I'm so non-linear in my personal and professional life that I love only being 5 seconds away from connecting with someone. Production or arrangemetn ideas don't have to get lost, I can get a call for a Musical Director gig and 5 minutes later have the whole band booked, be thinking of a friend I haven't seen in a while and 2 minutes later be on the way to lunch with them.

As annoying as it can be when other people use them, I love mine.

That would be a toss-up between the computer and the "personal massager" for me. After them... the vacuum cleaner maybe? I rarely use the cell phone and don't calculate much (although I remember playing games on my grandfather's scientific calc with him as a kid (before the alzheimer's kicked in, when he was still a nuclear engineer)). Tivo is pretty cool, but again, I rarely use it so I wouldn't call it a favorite.

Fire good.

I'm actually neutral about the cell phone. Yeah, it's nice. It's convenient, and is very reassuring to have when driving alone at night (which I do a lot) or for long distances (which I do occasionally). But overall, it's not a terribly necessary item in my life, even if I can play games on it, download cool ringtones, and listen to FM radio.

I still don't understand how that became a feature. And why not AM?

iPods... love mine.

I swore I'd never forget the calculator company who had one of the first widely disseminated consumer devices, but now the name has seemingly escaped me...although I'm pretty sure it was National Semiconductor.

They were memorable because the legendary radio guy Dick Orkin (Chickenman!) did the commercials, which featured his unparalelled offbeat humor wherein ad execs were trying to identify the defining characteristics of the product. This eventually resulted in the creation of a catchy jingle, which went something like: "It's got big green numbers, and little rubber feet!"

Priceless.

Oh, and my favorite piece of technology is my computer.

The long lighters with the trigger on them. Use em for starting grills, campfires, just about anything. Since I have a phobia of freshly blown-out matches (how do you KNOW they're not going to start something on fire?), I always have at least 2 around.

The computer. I love being able to get on a forum, such as this and sort of converse about things with cyberpeople.

At the minute, it's a close run between this dopey computer and the retro LED watch i bought today. It reminds me of all the fun I had as a teenager. And it's so stupidly simple yet impressive.

A technology that blows my small mind is holography. I once saw a Russian (or Soviet as the case may be) hologram that had a magnifying glass in the foreground and various objects in the background. If you moved left and right of the hologram and looked at it at an angle, the images in the background would fall behind the image of the magnifying glass and become magnified. All that in a sheet 1/8" thick. Damndest thing I have ever seen.

Indoor plumbing. ;)

WHOO HOO!!! National Semi-circle!!!! someone else remembers the ads!!! :)

I loved Dick & Bert.

Dick's Site

Bert's site

A valuable Chickenman resource.