#también recuerdo vivamente el primer anuncio de teléfono móvil de Telefónica

[motsimages]

Our first computer was a second hand PC that had had a previous owner who was an Arab. We know because it had Arabic letters glued on top of the Latin letters, a virus got it and it started to type in Latin letters but following the Arabic alphabet on it. It had two very simple games. The second computer was also second hand and lived in the living room. Us kids could use it for one hour a day. When I was 13 or so, a classmate recorded a casette of the first album of one of the groups that was everywhere at the time (Estopa) and gave it to me. A gift military parents brought from the UN peace missions in Bosnia was pirated CDs, a year or two before you could easily buy them in Spain at any African illegal immigrant selling pirated CDs and DVDs in the street (top manta). My first cellphone was also second hand and it was the trendy Alcatel One Touch Easy, bigger than the very cool and newer Nokias. It didn't recognise emoticons that worked on Nokia because the format that showed SMS was different. Because SMS were paying and we were all poor (prepaid phones), we would send missing calls (toques) to each other. One ring and hang up. We all waited to see if it was a real call (unless it was you mom,it never was). We used it for everything, including when we got bored to let our friends know we were bored. Seeing missed calls of friends in your phone was the coolest. Spending the summer evenings calling and receiving calls with no other contact was the best. Me and my friends went to the local Youth Club for a free 1 hour of internet that we used to go on chatrooms and see if we could flirt with somebody. I downloaded videoclips from YouTube to learn the choreography. I downloaded songs on eMule and sometimes the name was misleading and I discovered new groups like that. It was pirating but it was so common that nobody thought it was actually pirating.

When I was a kid I would take the last page of all my mom's sketchbooks and draw a screen on one side and a "keyboard" on the other, then prop it open and pretend we were both doing computer work. Laptops had become mainstream only 5 years earlier, so it was still thinner and lighter than real laptops, and my mom mostly worked on a Windows 95 with a monitor bigger than I was and a computer heavier than I was. I used to think YouTube was boring because it was just a couple hundred home videos filmed by strangers. I got my first camera when I was 12 and it held 10 pictures, or 1 full minute of video, without a memory card. On my first phone, which was a flip phone, it cost $1 minimum every time I sent a text, and you had to press numbers a specific number of times to make a letter. I brought my Walkman to school to listen to Lord of the Rings on cassette tapes. Nobody was allowed to use the phone when my Dad was working in the office. Yes, we had the dial-up noise. I got an AM/FM radio for my birthday one year. Another year, I got a whole box of CDs to listen to music. I wrote my first fan fiction on a Windows 98 that came with free Minesweeper and Solitaire. I was born before El Chupacabra. And now these things are gone. Wild