What was your first gadget? Mine was the Pilot V-point pen
My first fetish gadget was Pilot's Hi-Techpoint pen, marketed in the United States as the V-point V5 and V7. I was perhaps seven or eight years old. Our teacher stopped the lesson to introduce it to us, and from the beginning it was an item of profoundly technical reverence for the entire class.
We were at an age where we were expected to transition to the adult world of dirty, cheap fountain pens, as is the British school tradition. This new pen, its decisive line springing from a strange syringe-like delivery system, routed neatly around a prohibition on felt-tip and ballpoint pens. Our teacher had to make a 20-mile trip to acquire them, but gave them to us freely that first day. From then on, she would pick them up for us as needed, taking orders by the pack.
I liked to watch the ink traverse the fans in the transparent casing, a process as slow as plant growth. Did that do anything useful, or was it pure hype? No idea. Every benefit of the pen, from its perfect inkflow, its sharp, even line, and its cleanliness, are now standard-issues features of everything on the shelf. Everything's gel-ink these days; even its clinical industrial design has been copied to death.
To me, however, it was a perfect single-function gadget, a direct application of technology to one purpose: an ink pen that "just worked" in an environment with stupid rules on pens. To this day, I'm not comfortable using any roller- or ball-point pen that is not one of these. (Though the Parker Jotter, with the gel ink refill, has its charms.)
Tell us about your first gadget in the comments.
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Oh wow, I thought I was the only person hooked on these!
It was my Mom who first introduced me to the V5 when I was in grade school.
It started a life-long love affair with all things ink and paper, and is likely one of the first real steps I took towards my career in design.
I still use these pens - I have one in photo-blue at my desk at all times.
As far as gadget fetishes go, I think pens are my number one fixation!
The Rotring technical drawing pens were always my favourite.
In fact they were a bit of a PITA to use since they could leak. But they wrote smoothly and certainly set one apart from the great unwashed Bic crowd.
I absolutely loved these pens. Except when they exploded in the drier.
I love crisp ink lines, which make ballpoints a non-option for me. While I love the V5, my heart is pining for the long lost Staedtler Microball. Smooth ultra fine writing (almost at par with engineering tech pens) yet durable and refillable, too. But alas, I can't find this pen anywhere anymore, and no amount of Googling has helped me find one.
But my true gadget fetish would be flashlights. My name is Ted and I am a flashlight addict. My first krypton bulb 4xAAA flashlight was the first time I saw a "throw" of more than 5 meters and it got me hooked. Now I am constantly on the lookout for Surefires, Pelicans, and Fenixes. Anything with more than 50 lumens of focused light is sure to grab my interest.
My first gadget was a dirty, cheap fountain pen. :) Actually, I don't know, but I do remember getting a disposable fountain pen when I was really wee, and I've been in love with fountain pens ever since. Writing with anything else feels super-wrong.
P.S. In elementary school, nobody wore watches, and I had four or five cheap digital ones, and I wore them all. Simultaneously. Always loved me some gadgets!
Rapidograph pens!
http://www.rotring.com/en/produkte/tuschefueller/rapidograph.html
Heh, V-ball addict #3 here... there are worse brands to be loyal to.
For me it's the first iPods - the stone-simple monochrome HDD type. I got one of the first 10Gb models as a princely graduation gift (got my name & alma mater etched on it, too). I still use it, 6+ years later (4 hr of battery life left w/o shuffle). It's outlasted 2 FM transmitters. I've watched, bemused, as iPods have shrunk and become cheap & ubiquitous enough to be given as door prizes. Sometimes people see mine and go "Whoa, is that an iPod? It's HUGE!" It too Just Works, or almost. It's just a capacious (for its time) external firewire HD that also plays music. I'd recently had most of my CDs stolen but had ripped them, so it got me started with digital music and I never looked back. I remember downloading a song or two a night from Napster over a 28.8 (if I was lucky) Kbps modem (in the snow, uphill both ways!)... one for the grandkids. I'm not sure what I'll get when my iPod dies. I'd like something equally capacious but non-proprietary this time, just a storage device that plays music.
I'm not sure what my first gadget was. I remember getting a Zippo lighter when I was quite young and was quite fascinated by it (even though it was quite some years before I had my first smoke). I think it was something about the genuineness compared to disposable lighters.
I did have a thing for a writing instrument in my late teens. It was a Rotring Multipen that managed to combine the functions of a gel pen, a mechanical pencil and a highlighter in an actually functional package. It had a very nice weight, and you selected the function you wanted by rotating the pen so that the appropriate part fell into place before pushing down.
My 1st "gadget" was a Ross (who?) digital clock-radio, which I bought in 1972 at a "catalog store" in Burlington, VT. (Why do I remember this trivia???)
It was not at all like today's digital clock; it was old-school. It had motor-driven numbers which flipped-down when the time was right.
BTW, I still have my Rapidograph pen set from college drafting classes in the late '70's!
The Pentel P205 mechanical pencil is one of the finest writing implements that I've ever used and was certainly one of my very early gadgets. My dad had picked one up somewhere and really liked it as a pencil; I asked him to get me one and I've never gone back.
Spyderco knife. Friend of mine had one and a remember being absolutely captivated by it. Still carry one to this day (11 yrs. later).
I also admit to a bit of a writing-instrument/paper fetish. After years of experimenting (including with Pilot HiTechs), I finally settled on the Uni-Ball Vision Elite. I find it a very smooth-writing implement.
It's a roller ball, made in Japan, and has the most amazing ink: very fluid but doesn't bleed, drys almost instantly then becomes nearly waterproof. Normally a very fine line, but there's a bit of expression available by controlling the angle and "reserve" (from full pressure on the paper to slightly off). If you're a regular flyer, note: the Vision Elite won't leak (even when your pilot ascends to 47,000 ft and decides to drag everyone else on the airplane with him).
Call me crotchety, but I despise that everything I carry and use daily is mass-produced, soulless, vulgar dross! My remedy is a custom-carved wooden pen barrel. . . a bit of the disappearing rainforrest in my pocket. . . beautiful, smooth, exotic. . . Want to talk fetish?
I love Rapidographs! Use them to ink my design concept sketches for clients. I think my favorite part is the smell of India ink.
Oh, and I think I have to monitor the comments here for rollerball mentions. A while ago I found a Bic Exact-Tip in a drawer, and realized it was an excellent sketching/doodling pen thanks to its flow that gave lines character and an ability to cover larger areas.
But while it had gathered dust in a drawer Bic had discontinued the model, and I'm looking for a new liquid ink roller pen to replace it. I think I'll check out Proto's UniBall next time I pass a stationery store.
Mine was my cousin's Game Boy. It was the size of a small brick, required four batteries at a time (and it ate them constantly), and its screen had the color range of a rotting cabbage. For a while I had only three games - Tetris, Dr. Mario and Yoshi's Cookie - and the instructions were missing, so it took me years to figure them all out.
But none of that mattered. I thought it was awesome.
the first pens i fell in love with were the old Uniball pens with the little ridges at the top of the cap. My grandmother would bring them home with her from work, where she used them all the time, and they became my drawing pens.
But shortly after, i started using the V7s in school to write with and found them perfect for doodling, amazing ink flow and versatile line weight, and have used them ever since for everything from filling out Fed Ex slips to inking my comic books.
i get incredibly neurotic about them, too. when i run out, not any old pen will suffice. i buy these, or nothing at all.
-T
In a life filled with gadget fetishism, some of my earliest memories of those of appreciation towards certain objects of a gadgety nature. My dad was quite the computer guy, and he was constantly upgrading and modifying the PC. As a result, I spent a lot of time playing around with DOS and some fantastic old games (Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy, for one).
I spent a lot of time with an ancient Gravis 5 button joystick. It was my input device of choice. I'd imagine there were more efficient ways to play side-scrollers, but that joystick was a riot. Probably my first gadget infatuation.
i had those pens. lured by the drawing potential, promised it would give me to drawing skills of my favourite comic book artists.
it was horrible, like trying to draw with a needle. scratchy and with inconsistent ink flow. i always assumed the ink leaking into the transparent grip with fans was some sort of design flaw they never fixed.
so i used a biro, didn't look like a comic book, but you could do amazing shading with one if you knew how. looked like Dore copperplates
rotring
FTW!
or uniball gel pen like signoRT
i dont' like pilot
at the end of his live tend to leak ink :P
My first gadget...
It would have to be a pair of nail cutters.
You know, the kind with the little swing-out nail file on it?
I used one to disassemble all my Tonka trucks by unfolding the flaps in the sheet metal holding the things together.
From then it was all about destroying stuff to figure out how it worked.
-or taking destroyed stuff and making it work...differently.
-or working with different stuff in such a way as to not destroy it, but still learn...also. :)
The only thing that spared my clock radio is that fact that I listened to Doctor Demento on it every Sunday night, and I wasn't about to miss that.
@Dacker "So put your little hand in mine. There ain't no hill or mountain we can't climb."
Ok, V5s are great. No love for the Pilot G2 though? I bought my first G2 a little over a year ago, and haven't changed since.
^^^^
I too love the G2, it's usually the only pen I'll use. I guess it's closer to a ballpoint, but the ink is much better than regular ballpoint, it just writes so smooth.
Currently in shirt pocket:
Pilot PreciseGrip ExtraFine
Bic Round Stic med/moy
The very first gadget I ever fell in love with was a tiny calculator/PDA/synthesiser that my father picked up in the early 1980's for what must have been a few hundred dollars at the time, unless he tagged it out of lost and found (My father has been a Finder his entire life).
Courtesy of my father (and his lost-and-found tagging), my latest gadget is a first-gen iPod; I will be investigating the possibility of a firmware upgrade to turn it into a portable recorder. At the least, I've now got an external FireWire drive.
My first gadget was a Victorinox Spartan Swiss Army knife, and I have the scars to prove it.
On the writing instrument front, I've always been very fond of the Koh-i-noor Rapidomatic mechanical pencils.
Though the latest iteration of them, the kind that come in blister packs, have been very disappointing. They simplified the internals to (I suppose) make manufacturing cheaper, and as a result they tend to get gummed up more frequently.
I love both the v5 and the G2 for writing, but they're terrible drawing instruments. For that I usually use Micron pens. I never did like Rapidograph pens. Ornery, leaky, high maintenance things.
The V5 is my favourite pen too. I ran into another pen thread where almost everyone was extolling the virtues of the G2, so I bought one, but I don't like it as much. I went through a period where I couldn't write with anything but a purple V5. I have since "matured" to black. I like the grip variant a lot.
I guess my first gadget was a tape recorder. I had a ton of books with tapes. The only one I remember was the adaptation of one of the Ewoks movies -- the one with the two kids, the boy and the little girl with curly hair. My mom even recorded a few so I'd stop bugging her to read to me.
I was also an addict of these pens. my high school at the time had a bookstore where each year we all had a $100 credit. most of my credit went towards these pens. I was a fan of suctioning the cap to my tongue to entertain myself during class.
however my first gadget was an apple //e. this was actually a family gadget but I put it to the most use and still have it set up in a side room of my flat. about a year later my father received a modem (of the type I can't recall) from the hospital he worked at, we had to set the telephone receiver on top of it to connect to message boards and text databases.
aaaand I remember my first gadget fixation was another gift to my father from the hospital. a motorola pager. roughly the size of a marathon baton that simply beeped and he would have to call a number and get the message from a REAL LIVE operator. needless to say, I used to love paging my dad!
The first gadgets that I coveted seriously were my dad's keychain flashlights, but that was just so that I could play with them. My first real gadget was my Boy Scout knife, which I got before I'd even heard of the Swiss Army. I heavily bought into the myth (or maybe more than a myth, if I was willing to hike up to the Yukon) that, if push came to shove, I could tell Western civilization to suck it and literally carve out my own wilderness empire.
I loved my V-point, but my first REAL writing gadget was my Alvin Draft/Matic Tech pencil. It's probably tied with my "Tinkerer" Swiss Army Knife (same as MacGyver's!).
I also love the Pilot Precise V5 (and, when feeling generous, the V7). I've carried one hooked in my right pocket to weddings, graduations, and every day work for over a decade. I go through about a pack per year. Most end up lost. The few I manage to empty I keep in a desk drawer, their ongoing value to me difficult to describe, but real.
It's too bad they leak on planes. But, relegating myself to travel by car and train is a small price to pay for such a great pen.
Devon
I remember playing with my dad's Cross matching ballpoint and pencil set. Talk about a smooth movement. That Cross twist is a tactile memory I can still summon instantly.
Rollerball pens ARE ballpoints, you know. Only the ink is different.
I went through a serious Rapidograph fetish period when I was younger, but the results were ultimately as tragic as those of my fountain pen phase: inky pockets, inky hands, and on one memorable occasion being informed after an hour-long presentation in front of a dozen bigwigs at work, a completely black mouth, including tongue and teeth.
Now I'll use pretty much any old thing as long as it's a clicker and doesn't have a removable cap -- which I will instantly lose.
casio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F91W
so trusty i will get another one soon
First gadget? That's tough because I'm an electronics nerd. First thing purchased solely for gadgety-ness would have to be the Fairchild Timeband LED watch I bought ca 1976 or so. It still works and I still have the manual to it, 32 years later.
WAITWAIT No. A year before that I bought my first electronic calculator, a LLoyds with a vacuum fluorescent display. Used that all through electronics school. Still have it but it quit years ago. I should get that running again for old times' sake.
Writing utensils aside, i think my first gadget was a Stomper, those little toy 4x4s that ran on a single AA battery. They had lights and big soft tires, but moreover, you could take the little motor out and wire it to the battery yourself, and put it into anything you could think of. i built tons of little belt-driven cars and tanks, helicopters that didn't actually fly, and all kinds of fun kid-experiment type stuff.
-T
This has inspired me to go out and buy some v5s. I did today. I, too, can appreciate the clean lines and extrafine tip. The tip reminds me of the Sakura Micron, which I've always enjoyed (but can never seem to find).
I want to try out these Rotrings that everybody is talking about. Couldn't find them at the standard office supply places, though. I'll have to dig deeper.
I've been a HARDCORE pilot g2 fan since a friend introduced me to them about seven years ago or something.
Currently, though, I've been carrying a Caran d'Ache Marathon:
http://www.paradisepen.com/paradise/dept.asp?dept_id=3018
in matte black or red. They look SWEET, but they're ballpoints (which I don't care for). They write well, for a ballpoint, but I retrofitted them with a rollerball cartridge from a g-2, so I get the g-2 writing style and the Marathon looks!