For me it has changed quite a bit. I was born in 1978 and we had CDS coming out, cassettes and records got old and no longer used, computers,laserdiscs, then video cassettes, then cell phones then DVDs then mp3s.
When my parents were young in the 60's, there were projectors before videos, in the 50's films came out on television re-released and tv shows were in black and white. Colour tv came out in the mid-60's like 1964.
There's PS3 XBox, Wii, Gamecube, we had none of those when I was young.
We did however have like a small console which you plugged in your tv but it was nothing like xbox.
Technology has come a long way. How has it changed for you?
How has technology changed for you?
I was born in 1952. We used to use a dial to dial telephone calls and then touchtone came along. Not to mention the arrival of phones in colors other than black. Then came innovations like the cordless phone (and the Mickey Mouse phone!) and cell phones, which then proceeded to shrink from some box that took up a chunk of your car's trunk, to briefcase size to brick size to something sized like Captain Kirk's communicatior. Soon we'll be talking into a pen, saying %26quot;Open Channel D%26quot; like the Man from Uncle. And the Area Code was introduced so you no longer needed to talk to an operator to make a long distance phone call.
At the airport, planes for commercial flights went from having propellers to having jet engines. Not exactly technology, but we used to watch Dad walk across the tarmac and climb stairs to get into the plane. Now the passengers board through a %26quot;jetway%26quot; and the kids without tickets aren't allowed past the metal detector. Higher tech - There was the development and demise of the supersonic commercial plane.
I remember the 1964 World's Fair in Queens, NY. One pavilion sold plates of food that you could then heat up in an instant in a thing called a microwave oven. Strangely, the food got hot, but the plate stayed cool.
And the phone company was demonstrating telephones that had cameras so you could see the person at the other end of the call (if they were at a similar phone, which put them in a booth at the other end side of the fair grounds.
Speaking of phone booths, the phone booth evolved from a mostly wooden structure with enough privacy for Clark Kent to change to his Superman costume, to a metal-framed glass booth to a small aluminum pole with a broken pay phone on top. And even if I could find a working pay phone, fat lot of good an %26quot;emergency dime%26quot; in my shoe would do.
Cameras have gone through the same incredible shrink as cell phones. Doc Brown had plenty to say about the video camera in Back to the Future.
Banking changed a lot over the same years. ATM's were introduced. Credit cards and Debit cards became commonplace.
Easy to make fun of lack of innovation from car makers, but when I was a kid cars didn't have air conditioning and now I don't know how I'd live without it. The car used to have an AM radio that was incredibly unreliable and now it has AM/FM/CD with surround sound. True, 8-track tapes came and went, but not all the satellite radio companies are out of business yet. Does the Interstate highway system count as tech advancement? EZ Pass toll collection replacing throwing quarters into the toll booth dragon?
I do wonder how I got through college with a manual typewriter and no Google. Thank goodness for Corrasable Paper or I'd still be in high school typing up my term paper.
The post office introduced Zip codes while FedEx with their high tech package sorting made Parcel Post into something of a quaint old term.
UPC codes and bar-code-readers appeared in the Supermarket. Lasers! (Would Dr. Evil be impressed?).
Medicine has made progress. I remember lining up in the school gym for sugar cubes with a drop of polio vaccine on them. I remember when the doctor had to sterilize these big ugly glass syringes with thick scary needles on the end. Now everything is single-use sterile plastic and I truly believe the needles are a lot finer.
And on the military front we had development of the ICBM, stealth bombers, multiple warheads that could be launched together and independently targeted, and, of course, fall-out proof school desks (%26quot;Duck and cover%26quot;) bringing us peace in our time.
How has technology changed for you?
I was born in 1981, so most of what you mentioned is exactly the same for me! I still haven't jumped on the BluRay train, but I am looking forward to it. I still have my New Kids on the Block and Michael Jackson tapes. I also still have the original Nintendo. And it STILL works! (of course, I still have to blow on the games every now and then!)
I was born in 1942. Some people had phones in their homes, but most didn't. (Most stores only had a pay phone - for use by the business or customers.) Make a call outside? There were pay phones all over. Take a call outside? You had to pre-arrange it and stay by the pay phone you were using, waiting for the call. (Part of cellphone technology had already been thought of, but not for cellphones.)
We had airplanes that could cross the Atlantic, and did so every day before the war (and continued to after the war), but the heavily-burdened military air convoys couldn't do it in one hop yet. Jets? That was a top secret project.
Radios were big things - the only 'portables' were what we'd call boom boxes today. TV was still in Sarnoff's lab.
Men wore hats, lifted them to show respect to ladies and removed them on entering buildings. (And you could get a hat cleaned and blocked anywhere.) Women wore dresses, unless they were working in a factory (and changed when they got home). Donna Reed would have been considered radical (and her skirts MUCH too short). No woman would be seen in public without putting her face (makeup) on - and that included more than most actresses wear today.
We had rationing, so you needed ration points to buy butter, meat, tires and I don't remember what else (I was a little kid when the war ended). And we in the US had it easy. England had rationing not to keep stuff for the troops, but because there was very little to be had. Germans and French had the war on their doorsteps (those whose doorsteps hadn't been bombed or shelled out of existence). We have a two-front war today, and you'd think that factories were running out of space to store the stuff they make. Everyone, not just the discounters, is selling at a discount, all year, to get rid of product that's designed to last 2 days longer than the warranty. (In 1942, you expected a refrigerator to last long enough for one of your kids to grow old using it. And the *average* car lasted 20 years - or more. Advertising that your 16 year old learned to drive on the car you brought her home from the hospital in would elicit a %26quot;so?%26quot;)
I walk around with two stents in my heart and two hearing aids that no one notices unless they know to look. So technology kept me alive, and keeps me functioning. It also gives me TV and the internet for entertainment, computers for communications, mental exercise (try programming a round bottom on the square top - but that's what some program specs are like) and a decent income. I can fly from NY to Dallas in a few hours, I can drive - safely - at 70mph on an interstate, I can get a half-decent weather report 15 days out (and it's more accurate than the next morning's report was in 1942).
There are thousands of other little things. My mother studied under a gas light (hence the %26quot;gas light era%26quot;). I have a %26quot;green%26quot; house (fluorescent lighting) and an LED flashlight that probably gives off more light than the gas lights she studied under. I can nuke my food. My clothes don't come out of the wash wrinkled. (%26quot;Out of the wash%26quot;? My mother used a scrubbing board in the bathtub to do the wash - a technology that's as old as cleaning clothes. It's just a high-tech rock.)
I was born in 1960 and saw all those changes you mentioned. Also in the 60's we had transistor radios which were a breakthrough because they were %26quot;small%26quot; and portable. Then there was the boom-box/ghetto blaster phase where radios were the size of suitcases! Now we're back to small with MP3 players.
Probably the more important technology changes have been in medicine. As a kid I had a test called a pneumoencephalogram where a bubble was injected into my spine and sent to my skull to search for tumors. It was a HORRIBLE test and I was sick and semi-conscious for 3 days after, and spent the rest of that summer with terrible headaches until the bubble dissipated. Now a person would just have an MRI or CAT scan and be in and out in a hour! How great is that! I'm sure there are other great medical advances, that's just the one I relate to.
