And what is so different from then to now? How much have things changed, how has technology changed the way you live?
Thanks.
What was technology like when you were a kid?
How about that? What was life like when dirt was still new? Well, lemme tell you what it was like, sonny. One thing that hasn't changed in all these years is Old Fogeys. I was just watching The Who during the Superbowl and couldn't help laughing about their song, %26quot;Hope I die before I get old,%26quot; which they were singing over 40 years ago. Guess what, they didn't die.
Okay, technology when I was a kid... I learned to drive in a stick shift. Sure, there were automatic transmissions, but those cost extra. But I still like the extra control with a stick, even if it does take addtional work. Funny, though, to watch someone trying to steal my car (and insisting that it's HIS car) when he can't even manage to drive it. Brakes were hydraulic back then. You didn't rest your heel on the floorboard and toe the brake pedal. You PUSHED on it. So I slammed myself into the dashboard several times when power brakes became standard.
There were color TVs around at that time, but those families were quite Well To Do. And still half of the prime time programs were in black %26amp; white. And all there was, was NBC, ABC, %26amp; CBS. And not necesarily all of them if you lived in a smaller town.
At that time, it was a big deal to have a Japanese Transistor Radio. All it did was pick up AM radio stations, but it was small and only used a 9v battery. Everything else still used tubes.
Was there a movie you wanted to see? Missed it at the theater? Don't worry. It'll be on TV in 5 years or so. Missed it when it was on TV? Well, maybe you'll get to catch it next year if they run it again.
I was no longer a kid but I remember reading about the new Altair 88 microprocesor chip. Nobody knew what it was good for, but it had the potential of creating something of a personal computer thingy, if such things could be programmed, but nobody knew how to go about it. And 10 years later, I bought my own PC XT. It was the latest in technology, an 8-bit computer with 10.77 MHz processor, 640K of RAM, CGA graphics board (7 colors!), one of those new-fangled 10 Meg hard drives and a 9-pin dot-matrix impact printer. All for $5,000 but I got it for only $4,000 because of the company I worked for.
And when I was a kid, it was lucky to have a friend whose dad had a stash of Playboy magazines that we could sneak into. Now with the internet, a few keystrokes can tap into stuff that Hef wouldn't have dared publish.
What was technology like when you were a kid?
There were no cell phones yet. I had to always bring some change to use on public telephones for emergency. When I leave the house, nobody actually knows where I am, now the gps on the cell phone tracks me almost anywhere.
Actually writing letters and mailing them. A thing of the past. Now, email, text msg, tweet, facebook, myspace, friendster etc.
Calling freinds %26amp; relatives in other countries would cost a fortune.
I used a manual typwriter for my school reports. The fonts are not properly aligned because of the speed of your fingers and how hard you hit the keys.
A road trip, is just driving and enjoying the open road, scenery, and places and whatever the radio stations you can pickup plays, or your cassette tapes. No xm sattelite radio, no dvd players, no psp, ds lite, no ipod, no iphones, no laptops, no internet.
Most of the technological advances makes our life easier. More convinient, more efficient, and brings us much closer to other far away places and people. But when abused, they just waste our time. Many kids today are overweight because they sit all day playing video games, Playstations, Online games, etc. in our old days, physical activity/sports is our playtime. Email is great, but it has lost the human touch, my true freinds will call me, and its always great to hear their voices. People today are just plain to busy, with their iphones, black berries, laptops, now the ipad, etc.
when I was a kid.... we had black and white TV's, and only one per household.
The telephone was rotary, and if you wanted to call a neighbor, you dialed 4 digits.
we got a color TV in 1965
cars were simple, and I could repair it.
the radio was an AM radio.
the police dispatch was just about the AM broadcast band and I could listen to police calls on my old zenith tube radio.
my ham radio hobby was morse code, maybe some AM, SSB sounded like donald duck, and I could not afford to buy a SSB radio.
we had 4 TV channels, NBC, CBS, ABC, and PBS to to receive the PBS channel, it took a special TV because the were on UHF and our TV did not have channels 14 to 83.
