When We Graduated: What Gear We Got (Or Wanted!) and What's Hot Now

Technological strolls down memory lane typically, and rapidly, deteriorate from nostalgic gadget journeys to melancholy descents into geriatric emotions of antiquation. Despite claims from various old-fogeys that 40 -- or even 50 -- is the new 30, those archaic feelings of obsolescence hold particularly true for geezers reared in the early days of clunky PCs, 8-bit Ataris and crazy, futuristic fax machines (not to mention those massive, preposterous and commercially unviable mobile phones.) So, with that over-the-hill predicament in mind, this particular old fart has – of course – been asked to guide a graduation gift tour, beginning with the trendy gadgets of yore. So, prepare for a lesson in the astounding power of Moore's Law, as -- over the course of just 16 years -- gadgets have exponentially increased in power and scope, while drastically minimizing in size; an inverse relationship which also distressingly applies to expanding waist sizes and receding hair lines. The only constant amid the tech evolution and physical devolution? The inevitable cash drain. (Well, maybe that isn't so relevant anymore, either.) Hyperbole and woeful pity-party aside, congrats to all you lucky young whippersnappers!

Joshua Fruhlinger, Editorial Director

High School, 1989: Electronic Word Processors
I still remember move-in day at UCSD: mini-vans full of IKEA shelves, Sanyo stereos and electronic world processors. Wait, what? Word processors? Yes, there was a time when electric typewriters were out of vogue and computers were a bit too expensive and bulky. The interim solution were electronic word processors that allowed one to enter text into a buffer before printing, allowing one-line edits before committing the text to eternity (and to critical professors) with the Return key. The better machines allowed one to save documents -- some even had monitors and floppy drives. Of course, the cool kids (like me) had Macs and printers that fit nicely on a desk and allowed for late-night 'Crystal Quest.' Mine? A Macintosh SE with StyleWriter inkjet printer.

College, 1993: Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES )
Two-o'clock in the morning in 1993 looked something like this: write ten pages of my graduate thesis, play an hour of 'Super Mario World.' Repeat. Finish thesis. Never finish 'Super Mario World.' My college apartment's living room consisted of a 27-inch television, stereo, and a Super Nintendo. CDs were littered about like some giant carpet sequins and 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' was in heavy rotation. Of course, by 1994, we were all jonesing for Sony's 3-D polygonal PlayStation as the SNES cartridges made their sad journey to many a storage locker.

Warren Riddle, Staff Blogger

High School, 1994: PowerBook
(The PlayStation wouldn't be released until December, so it didn't quite make the list.) The PowerBook 150 was marketed toward students, but I got the bleh Performa desktop. With a new 56k modem and Netscape Navigator, though, Internet speeds blazingly increased from a painful crawl to a frustrating walk.

College, 2001: PlayStation 2
If I had finished Fall '01, this would be the iPod, hands down. But, spring was still all about the PS2. It was released late '00, but still really tough to find because of demand. For folks who actually had real jobs, the relatively new Palm IIIc, the first with a color display, was still pretty amazing (although seemingly pointless to the nearsighted and oblivious).

Terrence O'Brien, Staff Blogger

High School, 2000: Tivo

When I graduated high school in 2000 everyone was snatching up DVD players just so they could watch The Matrix. But the real entertainment gadget of the year was TiVo. It was clear from the first moment you set eyes on one that this was the beginning of the end for the VCR. DVDs had already replaced VHS as the medium of choice for selling movies, and the TiVo was showing the format the door when it came to home recording. Soon after the emergence of TiVo watching commercials became optional and trading grainy VHS tapes was replaced with P2P sharing of digital videos. Ten years later TiVo is still going, though it has been largely replaced by generic DVRs offered by satellite and cable providers.

College, 2005: Xbox 360

Most normal people who graduated from high school in 2000 would have been out of college by 2005 (I wasn't but that's a story for another time). When I graduated from high school the original Xbox wasn't even out yet. But by 2005 Microsoft was already on to its second generation console, and gamers everywhere were drooling over the Xbox 360. It was the first console to pack a hard drive and make Internet connectivity a primary feature, not just an after thought.

Those who thought of college as serious preparation for a career and not just a chance to stay up all night partying away from the their parents might have exchanged that Xbox for a Palm Treo 650 though. While BlackBerries were already standard issue for enterprise users in 2005, it was the Palm Treo 650 that finally alerted the consumer masses to the potential of the smart phone. Two years later the iPhone debuted and turned smart phones from business tools to must have life accessories.

Thomas Houston, Editor in Chief

High School, 2002: MP3 Car Stereo
This may be a suburb-specific example, but my soon-to-graduate friends and I were hoping for a MP3-CD capable car stereo deck during that heady time before the ascension of the iPod. Those bulky faux-leather CD cases were permanent fixtures in our cars, and discs littered our car visors and back-of-the-seat pockets. MP3 CDs offered 700 MB of glorious storage, and our MP3 collection, bolstered by the spread of early broadband services, Napster and Hotline (yes, we even ran a server in our time), was begging to go mobile without the need for clunky WAV conversion. Sure, MP3-CD mixes eventually refilled those CD pockets, but isn't high school all about having years of Cure and Dinosaur Jr. bootlegs all on one disc?

College, 2007: iPhone
Five years later, Steve Jobs had taken to the Macworld stage in January to stun the tech industry with the announcement of the original iPhone. You may be jaded by the flood of apps and App Store controversies, but the iPhone is over three years old and many modern smartphones are still playing catch up. Apple nailed the mobile Web experience from the start, and while copy and paste wasn't even a thought, the iPhone was the must-have gadget of graduation 2007. Sadly, I lugged around an instantly obsolete LG CU500 flip phone until well after college.

Matt Evans, Intern

High School, 2009: MacBook Pro
For my class, graduation wasn't officially marked until you had a receipt from the Apple store, legitimizing your purchase a MacBook. In Apple's favor, grads entering college in the fall couldn't resist the sleek unibody design, and our parents couldn't resist the free printer, student discount and idea that this gadget would help put us through school. I bought my MacBook in April, not being able to wait any longer to upgrade from my decaying Dell Inspiron. While most of my friends got the 13-inch, I chose the 15-inch Pro instead, as the 13-inch lacked a firewire port. Annoyingly enough, in June, Jobs announced a restructuring of the entire MacBook series, which upped the processing speeds and battery lives, put a Firewire port on the 13-inch and dropped the prices on all models.

So, what's next?

If we were graduating today, we'd clearly say the hot item would be the iPad or the HTC Evo. But already, technology is leaping ahead, with the announcement of Microsoft's Kinect and the next iPhone. Tech fads come and go faster than it takes a grad to walk across the stage, but some clearly have solid staying power (the iPod, for instance, is ten-years-old). The future, we think, is in the clouds. Smaller, faster computers with less storage because people will be accessing their info online. For the next few years, we'd venture to guess, the object we'd crave the most would be a mobile hotspot. No more searching fruitlessly for Wi-Fi signals, and we'd be able to get online and surf from our fantasy treks across Europe, that we'd be sure to take after we collected our caps and gowns.

Tags: electronic word processor, ElectronicWordProcessor, features, graduation, iphone, macbook pro, MacbookPro, mp3 cd, mp3 stereo, Mp3Cd, Mp3Stereo, playstation 2, Playstation2, power, snes, super nintendo, SuperNintendo, top