Memowies, wike the cownahs of my mind....

[thewayne]

apostate_96 was posting that change over the last 50-100 years is phenomenal, and that people would lock you up if you were to tell them that you could fly faster than sound or get music out of a little box the size of a bunch of folded up dollar bills. So I started thinking about what change that I’ve seen in my life, and this is what I came up with.


When I got my first car in '79, (a hand-me-down '73 Impalla 4-door), I had a cassette deck installed because it just had an AM/FM radio, not stereo. I used LP records, though mostly bought pre-recorded cassettes. Laserdisc and VHS were new tech, CD was a hideously expensive audiophile toy, we didn't even sell CD players at the store that I worked at. The first Sony Walkman cassette deck sold for $100-150 IIRC.

Pioneer, Sony, Technics were the big audio names at the time for home stereo. Cerwin-Vega was one of the premier speaker manufacturers, Infinity speakers were very expensive and Bose was very new at the time.

The spiffiest personal computers going were the TRS-80 Model I, the Apple II, the Commodore CBM, TI-99/4A, and the Atari 400 & 800. Later the TRS-80 and the Apple got floppy drives. 300 baud modems, and getting disconnected every time someone picked up the phone when you were online. Sprint Mail, CompuServe, The Source. Mainly we used personal bulletin-board systems (BBS).

We had rotary-dial (pulse) telephones, later my mom had a slimline phone in the bedroom that had to plug into the wall to light the push buttons. I remember black and white TV when I was a kid, not to mention that we had five channels, maybe six, I don't remember when the local UHF religious station went on the air. I remember ON TV, a broadcast subscription service: it was a UHF station that at night started showing movies and some adult content (soft-core), all scrambled. Atari 2600 game machine, definitely the best available. No other video game had the market success, we always sold out of that box during Christmas when I was working retail.

For cameras, bayonet-mount lenses and through-the-lens (TTL) metering were still fairly new. Auto-winders were a third the cost of the camera body and advanced your film at 1.5-2 frames per second. Zoom lenses were very pricy, the 70-210 being the most popular that I saw and sold. My current 28-300 zoom was pretty much inconceivable back then.

Paperback books were $0.25-0.75 typically.

And most of the improvements since then are due to improvements in electronics which lead to more powerful computers.


Of course, I’m utterly full of it because there are so many other factors at play here that I can’t account for, but still, it’s interesting reminiscing every now and again.

Comments

[spaceoperadiva.livejournal.com]

My dad was running sheep in the Medicine Bow range one spring and came across some people in a Model A, stuck in the mud. They were driving cross-country, before there were roads. He liked the car so much that he saved up and ordered one. It had to be shipped in by rail from the factory back east.

I guess you can call him an original "early adopter". The crank jumped back and broke his nose.

Humans set foot on the moon before he died. :-)

[magic-rat.livejournal.com]

I remember listening to rock-n-roll on an AM radio station that would sign off every day at sunset. I remember paying a nickel for most candy bars (and Mounds and Almond Joy had to be special because they cost a whole dime!). I remember when NBC would begin certain shows with the peacock (because not all the shows were broadcast in color). I remember staying up late so I could watch Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon over live television. I remember when arcades were for pinball, and how exciting it was when Pong was first released. I remember when radios and televisions that were "Made in Japan" were a bad thing. I remember losing a bet on the first Super Bowl. I remember watching William Shatner "bodly going where no man has ever gone before" as well as how disappointed I was when it was cancelled.

There, does that make you feel a bit younger now? :-P

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Not much, because I, too, remember a lot of those things!

In Phoenix, Rock was AM KRIZ and KRUX, but I don't think they signed off at sunset.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

My parents, when they were riding with their parents across coutry (say from Texas to AZ), would hang those canvas water bags on the fenders or mirrors and they would freeze solid while driving overnight in the mountains.

A lot of people were killed by those crank-start autos from not having quick enough reflexes.

[apostate-96.livejournal.com]

Ahh, memories....

Having to adjust the rabbit ears on the TV to get decent reception (and God help you if the TV was in the basement). Either that, or having to bolt one of those big-assed antennaqs to your roof and then run the wires down into your house. I remember the old Pong unit that hooked into the input on the back of the television using the 2 screws for the antenna. The first computer we had, the Commodore 64, came with a cassette tape drive for memory. Dot matrix printers, anyone? Cable TV was such a huge deal when we finally got it, because we could finally get to see what the people making the music really looked and moved like (back when it was just MTV).

How about this? The TV stations, before cable came around, used to go OFF THE AIR AT NIGHT!!!. Now the only time they're off the air is when there's some kind of disaster.

I used to hold a cassette recorder near the radio to try and tape the songs I liked, because we didn't have an integrated stereo system that would allow for more direct recordnig of radio programming....

If you called your friends and there was no-one home or answering....that was it! There was no answering machine to take a message or no pager/cell phone to be used to buzz them. You just had to try your luck again!

So who was this mystery person whose post inspired your own? ;}

[cteare.livejournal.com]

I remember all that and more. We only had three TV stations before the advent of cable. I remember when tape recorders were the reel type. Computers weren't common when I was in high school, calculators were a big deal then, and we weren't allowed to use them on math tests.

I remember when you could buy gas for $.39 a gal, and thought it was outrageous when it went up to $.52.

[deborak]

I really need some kind of hillbilly icon. Jayne will have to do.

I spent a lot of summers in WVA at grandma's where there was no running water. You had your choice of the outhouse or the luxurious indoor chamber pot. Water source was the rainbarrel on the porch.

Coke only came in bottles and you had to return them to the store to get your deposit back. The milkman brought the milk to your house in glass bottles.

Our telephone was a party line, which meant you could pick it up and hear the whole neighborhood's business.

Washington's Birthday, Lincoln's Birthday, Columbus Day were all legitimate holidays without combination or whining about conquest. Memorial Day was still commonly called Decoration Day. Halloween and Valentines Day and Christmas and every other fun holiday were gleefully celebrated during school hours.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Oh, I well remember bottles of soda and when the cans became common place. I was just talking about deposits on bottles, it's amazing how little that gets reused. My great-aunt in Texas had a party line, but I grew up in Phoenix and those were long gone there.

I don't think I've ever heard of Decoration Day, that's a new one on me.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

We never had rabbit ears to my memory, my dad installed a roof antenna. Basements are not a common fixture in Phoenix. :-) Yeah, I remember stations signing off at night with the Star Spangled Banner and the test pattern, now it's all night infomercials.

Dunno who inspired the post, it must be early onset Alzheimers or a messed up LJ tag or something.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

We had the three networks plus an independent plus PBS. The earliest record of what I paid for gas was in 1987 at about $0.95 a gallon. I started driving much earlier than that, but I didn't keep records in Excel until I, duh, bought a computer!

Actually, it was Borland Quattro, then Quattro Pro, then Excel.

[apostate-96.livejournal.com]

That must be it.... ;}

[apostate-96.livejournal.com]

Holy God, yes! The other one I forgot to mention!! Christmas decorations NEVER CAME UP BEFORE THANKSGIVING!!!

[deborak]

The feds changed the name from Decoration Day to Memorial Day in 1967, although the term Memorial Day had been generally growing in usage since WWII.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Oh, man! Hallmark has such a hold over this country, it ain't funny.

[apostate-96.livejournal.com]

Sadly, that's very true. And it's not just Hallmark anymore. I was so depressed this year to see Christmas decorations coming out in the grocery store before Halloween was over! I wanted to just go berserk with a flamethrower upon seeing that....

[cteare.livejournal.com]

In addition the Valentines decorations were in the grocery store before Christmas was even over. St. Patrick's decorations were in the store before Valentines, and so were Easter decorations.

[apostate-96.livejournal.com]

I guess that means if we wait long enough, things'll eventually go full circle and they'll have the decorations up at the right time again. Of course, that'll make it REALLY confusing when we've got Christmas stuff up for President's Day and Fourth of July decorations just before New Years...