photocopier

I’ve never had my own photocopier before, but now that they’re built into relatively cheap printers, I do, as of this morning. (There’s a scanner on this machine as well.) I was really frustrated when my 2005-era HP printer broke down last week, but it turned out to be a blessing.

I remember my parents once talking about how my great-grandparents’ generation had probably experienced the greatest number of changes in daily life from the time of their infancy: airplanes, widespread radio, television, etc. But now I wonder if we won’t be saying the same thing about ourselves, and in fact if the next few generations won’t be saying the same thing about themselves.

My first computer: Apple IIC, with an absurdly small amount of memory and a dot-matrix printer that took a couple of hours to print a long essay. My first Mac was senior year of college in order to write my senior thesis. Perhaps you remember those fairly non-powerful but elegantly small boxes.

My first email account: age 23 (many of you will have no memory of a time before email, when we actually wrote letters and went to the post office to send them, and when mail delivery was an exciting moment each day)

First web access from home: age 27

First laser printer at home: well into my 30’s

I was also a very late adopter of mobile phones, getting my very first one in early 2006. (And it was a gift. Left to my own devices, it would have been even longer.)

In any case, it’s going to make things a lot easier to be able to do simple photocopying at home, and this printer/photocopier/scanner was less than $200– even in Egypt, where electronics prices are always inflated.