Even though all my friends had pocket calculators, I had to wait until they came down in price. My first one cost $125. Remember slide rules?
What about those things you stuck in the hole in a 45 so you could play it on the same spindle as a 33?
My parents had a business, so I saw a lot of things before they were common.
My parents had Autotypists. These were probably the first word processors. Each one was a big machine, about the size of a small desk. A specially adapted IBM typewriter sat on it. It had a roll of paper that resembled a player piano roll. As the machine “read” the holes, bellows would cause little levers to pull the keys down on the typewriter. One could program in a pause so as to personalize each letter.
Our first answering machine was an Ansaphone. The telephone sat on the machine and two prongs sat under the handset. When the phone would ring, the two prongs would pick up the handset and the tape would start playing. If we were screening calls, we had to be quiet. Since the handset was off the hook, callers could hear everything going on.