Come on over here kids and sit on Uncle Bob’s lap while I tell you a little story about those days long ago when you were just a twinkle in your daddy’s eye. Oh how the world has changed – one wonders how we ever managed to get by back in the 1970’s when I was a small boy.
When I was a small child there were no cellular telephones. I think my father actually owned the very first cellular phone. It was a big square clunky thing that probably weighed five pounds. Back then when my father talked on the phone in a public place it created a big scene – people would stare open-mouthed at the self-important asshole taking a phone call while waiting in line at Taco Bell. In fact not only did we not have cellular telephones, we didn’t even have push button phones! The phones I grew up with were called “rotary” phones. It’s a difficult device to describe but instead of pushing buttons to dial a phone number you put your finger into a circular wheel with holes in it for each number. Then you spun the wheel around and let it spin back into place for each digit you needed to dial. It could take one several seconds to dial a phone number and there was no speed-dial or pre-programmed numbers. This was all before digital technology took over and circuit boards replaced much larger electronic components.
There were no answering machines when I was a child. When you dialed a telephone number and no one was home the phone just rang and rang and after maybe a half-dozen rings you would conclude that no one was going to answer and hang up. Then you had no other option but to wait and try your call again later. There also wasn’t any call waiting so if you were calling someone who was already talking on their telephone then you heard a strange beeping noise called a “busy signal.” I don’t know how we survived to be honest.
The first computer I ever worked on had a memory capacity of 4K. That’s four kilobytes, not megabytes or gigabytes. We saved our information on a strange plastic thing called a “floppy disk.” It was a big deal when we got a computer with 64K of memory, we were really moving up in the world.
Speaking of floppy disks there were no Compact Discs or DVD’s when I was small. While I was growing up the format of choice for music switched from vinyl records to short-lived and ill-fated 8-tracks to cassettes. Compact Discs first made their appearance when I was nearly graduated from high school and Compact Disc players were very expensive. There were not Compact Disc recorders available on the home retail market until much later.
There were no microwave ovens when I was small. Anything you wanted to heat up had to be cooked on a stove-top or in an oven. It often took up to forty-five minutes to prepare a meal! When we got our first microwave oven my dad and I used to take slices of cheese and put them on pieces of salami, then microwave them until the salami rolled up and turned dark and the cheese melted and then crusted into a boiling orange film. Don’t ask me why, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Power locks on cars were a relatively new thing when I was a child – Cadillac cars had had them for awhile but my family never bought a Cadillac. A big brown mercury we later named “The Lemon” was the first car we owned with power locks. I sat in the car at the car lot and operated the power locks repeatedly for a long time until the sales man told me pretty forcefully to stop doing that. I remember not liking that guy much and the car turned out to be a piece of crap.
There were only three channels on television when I was a child and reception on the channel with the best cartoons was poor. I watched it anyway because the programming on the other channels was dull. Color television was relatively new and my family had one color and one black and white television. I still have a little black and white television in my garage that I use more like a radio when there is a game on and I am working out in the back yard.
Yes times have changed since I was a young boy in America. But some things have stayed the same. We had just extricated ourselves from a highly unpopular war in Vietnam when I was young and the Middle-East was a mess. For all of our technological progress more people than not still don’t have access to clean drinking water, an adequate food supply, or medicine. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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