A young lady (as in 7th grade) friend of ours just stopped by after getting done early from her job of detassling out in the fields all morning and wanted to use the phone to call her mom. I handed her the cordless house phone to use and had to show her how to turn on our particular handset. No big deal, I thought, just different than what she’s used to. She put the phone up to her ear and listened for a few seconds, then handed the phone back to me saying that something in the phone was buzzing real loud. I put the phone up to my ear and heard plain 'ol dial tone. Evidently, she had never used a land-based phone before but always cell phones.
I was blown away! She had never heard dial tone before? It made me stop for a moment and realize that the younger generation would indeed lack certain experiences that I take for granted. The lady in the barber shop next door still uses a rotary dial phone. I wonder what our young friend would think of that.
I guess I am getting older. To think that the normal things in my life could be considered things of “The Good Ol’ Days” by the younger generation sure makes it seem that my life has gone by quickly.
I’ve certinally used land line phones before, but we don’t have one in my (parents) house anymore, and we haven’t for several years. We stopped paying for it and just use cell phones now.
But what I might think is a simple common sense issue might just be (as in this case) a lack of experience. I wanted to make friendly fun of her but she could just as well poke fun right back about something like my inability to text quickly.
The pipe-major of the pipe band I play with invited me to meet with him on a weekly basis so we can fit in some more practise time.
He’s a retired gentleman.
While in his house on Wednesday evening, his phone (landline) rang.
After excusing himself, he answered it by reciting his phone number.
I hadn’t heard that since the last time I heard my dad answer the home phone in out house.
Wait until she finds out that she can’t backspace.
I remember a time before personal computers, microwave ovens, VCRs, and pocket calculators. My grandmother still called the refrigerator the ice box because in her day, there really was a block of ice. We had two rotary phones and one black-and-white television in the house. If you missed the annual broadcast of The Wizard of Oz, you had to wait until next year. You couldn’t buy it or download it or see someone’s taped copy. It made events like that special. The family gathered in the living room to watch (together) a special show like that. But I’m really not old.
Maybe this girl hasn’t seen a pocket calculator – she has one built into her cell phone. She skipped that technology.
I learned to use a slide rule in 1961 when I was nine. It was fascinating and I understood little of what I was doing other than multiplication, division, squares, and square roots. By the time I was twelve I had four of them, one a high end Deitzgen mahogany 12" log-log rule. I eventually understood all of the functionality and construction theory but not until trig class. I used it through high school and college and up until 1977 when you could finally buy a programmable calculator for under $100. I gave my Deitzgen to a friend who had always wanted it.
In 1986 I had a Taiwanese student working for me programming a control system for an LSI-11 based satellite computer in VAX Pascal. The kernels were assembled and tested on a VAX and then, when working, downloaded to the satellite of interest. One day the VAX was down and the student could do nothing. There was a Post bamboo slide rule on the computer room counter. I told him if the VAX was down, he could just use that. He looked at me and said he had never learned how to use one of those because they had calculators when he was in elementary school.
I was stunned. I wanted that slide rule back immediately. My friend has never been able to find it. Oh, well. I scored the jumbo version for free.
My parents still “send away” for things by mailing an order form. I simply “order things on the Internet”. Then my father will ask where it came from. He means where it was shipped from. I usually answer “I don’t know” followed by “I don’t care”. I clicked. It arrived two days later. Need I know or care that it traveled from Michigan to New Jersey?
Ordering things used to be more fun when you sent away for something that was advertised in the back of a magazine. Or from a shiny catalog full of nice pictures, like the Burpee Seed Catalog. You sent a letter in the mail with your check (you couldn’t place the order on the phone because nobody had credit cards). Then you waited eagerly for a few weeks for your package that came “all the way from California!”
We used to mail off our undeveloped 35mm film in an envelop, then waited two weeks for the photos to arrive. Sure was an exciting time when the package from the photo developing company arrived in our mailbox.
Sometimes the film had languished in the camera for over a year (we didn’t take many photos). When we finally sent the film in and received the photos back, we couldn’t remember taking some of the pictures, or worse, what was in the pictures.
A recurring theme is that everything was simpler and happened at a slower speed. Do you think that helped make things more special? Getting your film developed, getting a package in the mail, or making a long-distance phone call used to be special. Now it’s just routine. A non-event.
Shut up. Technology moves fast. Oh, and by the way… you’re welcome (my generation created all the stuff that spoiled kids like you can’t live without).
im 19, and i still use my parents black and white tv down at school…my friends get a good kick out of it, but for how little i use tv (mainly news, everything is down on my computer) it meets its needs…but with this new digital thing for 09 i think it will officially be outdated
and i still play atari, in fact i play it more than my xbox 360…
oh and i still use a land phone, in fact i hate cell phones. I cannot stand it when they go off in a movie, opera, or concert. It really ticks me off when I am the one performing. I think all of this technology is leading to the downfall of our society. seriously.
What’s interesting to me is that the option of mailing film off to a developer was one of those “newfangled” inventions I was thrilled to try after decades of simply dropping the rolls off at a local photo shop for developing. I don’t remember if the mail-order developing came next, or the corner convenience/drug store option next.
I wonder if getting old can be defined, not by remembering old ways of doing things, but forgetting the order in which innovations came along.
If this poor migrant worker, exploited by an employer who evades the child labor laws, and exhausted after detassling out in the fields all morning, had a cell phone, she wouldn’t have to borrow your phone.
I collect vintage home computers from the early 80s. I’m sitting next to a decked-out Texas Instruments TI-99/4A and a Commodore 64. Anyway…
Yes, programs were stored on audio cassettes. You typically had a cassette player like this. The data was converted to and from sound, and given the slow tape speed of cassettes, the act of loading a program from (or saving a program to) cassette was sloooooooooow.
<– needless to say
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