Are you an early adopter?

Seeing as the Kindle Fire came out this week, and I don't have one, I thought this article that appeared on Wired's website might be interesting to react to. Now that I think about it though, yesterday my husband did bring home a Google Chromebook from the Google conference he was at - and that's brand new.
So anyway - on to early adopters. This will show my age, but I great up in a family of early adopters. I didn't necessarily realize that at the time, but my mom and I took a computer programming class in 1979 (TRS-80) and my dad brought home a IBM PC in 1981. (I think it's the one featured in the Wired article.) It had no internal storage that I recall and you had to boot it with a floppy disc. There were program you could get from PC Magazine but you actually had to type the code in (BASIC). There was no way to load the program. The only games for it were text-based games, and I clearly remember playing Leisure Larry games (wildly inappropriate) and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I had a laptop my Freshman year of college - September 1988!

(http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/pc/index.htm). It was Zenith Supersport 8088 and weighed about 8 pounds without the battery. Very few people had a computer of any kind, let alone a laptop. I remember we had a really hard time getting it to work with the campus network. Speaking of the campus network, we had email but it only worked on campus!
I know this was all my Dad's doing and he still today loves technology and the Internet. My mom does as well. So when I heard about older people not liking all "these new technologies," I find that difficult to believe. (My grandmother would have LOVED the Internet!) I think that's important to remember because I've also heard several younger people say they don't like technology. We hear all this talk about digital natives and digital immigrants, and I'm obviously not either. (I evidently immigrated when I was quite young!) I definitely see how my daughter and our students just assume certain givens with technology, but I think most of us have a lot of the same tendencies and we have to be careful not to oversimplify the matter when we are thinking about how people approach and use technology.