Back in my day...

this is inspired by one of bewildered's r&r posts:

my dad grew up with an outhouse his first 17 or so years. he always talked about how best time of the year was in the fall after grandma got her canning done, because they would wipe their asses with the soft wrapping paper that the pears came in, and it felt oh so much better than newspapers or corn cobs. until the day he died he bragged about how he could somehow magically wipe his ass with three sheets of toilet paper and yet do a decent job. i have yet to figure out this sorcery.

the fact that a man only one generation ahead of me spent his childhood shitting in an outdoor closet parked above a hole in the ground blows my mind, especially when contrasted with the technology i grew up with in the 80's, which was just over a decade later.

focus: what amazes you most when you think of the difference between technology when you were a child compared to now?

alt. focus: how does today's technology compare to what you dreamed it would be like when you were younger? are we more or less advanced than what you thought it would become?

alt. alt. focus: angel, tell us a story about the olden days.

 

Hey, man, when does the new Rush album come out?

focus: what amazes you most when you think of the difference between technology when you were a child compared to now?

instant gratification. when i was a kid, cnn became a thing, and you no longer had to wait until 6 pm at night to get news or (hahahahaha) the evening newspaper. now, an embassy is attacked or a celebrity has an accident half a world away, and we know instantly on our phones. that's amazing. but one of the bigger instant gratification things is music. when i was a kid, we might hear about a new album coming out for our favorite artist. (and, sometimes we had to call our local dj to find out! and, they answered the phone.) then, we would have to wait for our parents to drive us out to the mall to by a record, or eventually a tape. so, the amazing part for me, is not that records became 8-tracks became cassettes became cds became mp3s, but rather that you know exactly when an artist is about to drop an album (unless you're beyonce); and, you can download it from itunes or amazon at midnight right in your bedroom or on your phone.

typewriters. when i was a kid, every office in the world had ibm selectric typewriters, but you certainly didn't have one at home. and, if you did, you didn't have a bunch of different ball heads with font choices. now, everybody has a computer, multiple word processors, a (color!) printer and a million font options. it fascinates me that ibm is even still around, given the incredible changes to the basics of their product line.

 

music:hell, i remember working for my dad the summer before i went to college (2003) and still calling the radio station i would have playing in the backroom to request new songs. limewire and bearshare and kazaa were around, but for "new" tracks, they were worthless. now everything is leaked or uploaded the same day as release. (ps who actually sits around ripping linked tracks up onto youtube? neckbeards who live for likes?)

internet: ive mentioned before that we had the internet early on where alot of it was a directory of files. my dad would print out a directory of games and hand it to me and i would get to pick out 2 or 3 that he would download overnight and they would be ready for me in the morning. but i specifically remember him scribbling out parts of the directory bordering the games at times, for what i now realize was porn. also, having 1 pc was a huge deal. right now i have a laptop, an older pc, and 2 other shitty laptops my dad gave me to basically harvest for parts when needed.

cellphones: again, not long ago, but in 2003-2004 i had a cell phone that was the green and black display screen, couldn't text, basically a brick that could handle a small scale nuclear blast. i remember as recent as my senior year in college needing a replacement phone for a cracked screen and what was easily available wasn't a prime phone for texting. the equivalent of going from an iphone5 back to an iphone4 meant the loss of alot of features, not to mention texting. also, i can vividly remember texting google at 466453 to get sports scores cause i certainly didn't have a data plan, or functionality.

granted, i'm in my late 20s, so most of my life has been during a period of excessive technological advancement, but even looking back at the last decade, gains have been staggering.

 

just had a conversation about this in the last few days. so many programs still use the floppy disk icon as the "save" and/or "download" button. there is a generation of teenagers that just think that is a random square! they have no fucking idea why that means save! zero.

rush you skipped the poor assholes that bought sony mini-disks (i went in 50% with a friend).

i'm not worried about technology getting away from me at an old age for two reasons, there is a constant major focus on accessibility and user interfacing/user experience. there are people in their 60s and 70s who have no idea how to use an iphone. there are also people in their 60s and 70s that constantly have the newest iphones and ipads, because they've always been keeping on up the latest tech.

technology won't get away from people who are constantly reading up on the new shit. my dad for the longest time had the old fart attitude that "you don't need a fancy phone, you just need a phone that makes calls and receives calls. on top of that you shouldn't be on the phone unless you're working." didn't keep up on the technology, then retired, then got bored, and bought the newest lg android with no clue how to fucking use it. on top of that, it's at the point where he doesn't even understand the basic shit to learn the phone.

 

back in my day . . . . there was a dj, who usually picked the songs he would play, and announced the artist and song title before or after, sometimes both, every song. now, the songs are either picked by a station manager or a computer generated list, and they hardly ever tell you who is playing. hear a new song on the radio and wondering who it is, or what the name is? tough titties, sparky.

tv: most folks still had black and white tvs when i was young, and the screens were usually 19" or so. not to mention the 3 major and 2-3 local stations (and pbs) that were all we could receive. tv is completely different now, as to be almost unrecognizable. flat, hd, color 50" screens, with a seasons worth of shows, from 300 channels, at your fingertips? wizardry, i tell you!!!!

cars: back in my day, they were big hulking chariots of steel, that got 12 miles to the gallon. 8 cylinders, power nothing, and a small sedan could seat 6-8 people. they had carburetors, timing belts, rotors and points, drum brakes, and other shit you can't find on cars these days. i like the safety improvements on today's cars, and of course the gas savings. the doo-dads i can live without. although a/c is nice. i do get tad svitzy in august-time.

 

i'm 35 and the first 5 years of my life we had an outhouse at my papaws house, which is where i spent most of my time. in fact...when i was three or four we lived in an airstream camper. i dunno what we did or how we did it for bathroom facilities. or actually getting water to us. i'm pretty sure it involved buckets.

 

back in my day you could buy leaded gas.

my father in law volunteers for habitat for humanity in both north carolina and florida on a regular basis. don't think for a minute people still don't have outhouses.

 

i still think it's crazy that i didn't have my first camera phone until 2003. they seemed so new and awesome then. i remember when they started advertising them around 2002 or so and thinking, "i can't wait to get one of those fuckers so i can send pictures of my nuts to people! it'll be fucking hilarious!"

and it still is, 11 years later.

 

i remember when the motorola razr debuted. i was working at cingular (before it became at&t) and people came in to pay $700 cash for that phone. we had a no bags allowed policy in the store and there was someone posted beside the display at all times.

i remember my first cell phone - a kyocera phone through sprint that didn't do anything but call and text message and play snake. i remember when text messages were free.

 

this was my first cell phone.



it plugged into the cigarette lighter (i remember when cars had cigarette lighters and ashtrays instead of power ports and change bins!) and the battery was the size of a vhs tape (i remember vhs tapes!) and weighed about two bricks. if you wanted to take it with you, you toted the whole bag.

 

the thing i remember most about my parents' bag phone was that you had to make damn sure you hit the "end" button at the end of each call, or you'd keep getting billed for time, even if the person on the other end had hung up already. i heard horror stories about people who left their bag phones off the hook all night and ended up with a ridiculous bill at the end of the month.

i also remember when a lot of contractors had phones installed in their trucks that would honk the horn and blink the headlights when they were getting a call.

there are probably already people who don't know where this icon originated from:

 

take it with you? bitch, please. i had a car phone. as in it was bolted to the floor of the car and had a wire running from the phone the the thing bolted to the floor like a landline.

 

there are lots of people who still use those phones. the ones who go into areas with little to no coverage take the bag phones with them. i remember trying to fix one of them. i had to call and was given a freaking push button code crazily reminiscent of updownupdown etc to make it work.

 

why, back in my day, this was gasoline:

 

you all make me feel young.

i remember our first computer. it was an intel 8086, cost about $5000 and you had to load dos off a 5 1/4" floppy. i remember when a quarter would buy you a popsicle from the corner store, when all the rides at the park were made of steel, and when you could fail a kid for being stupid. i remember trucking down to the library to look shit up in the encyclopedia britannica, borrowing books on the ever-elaborate "date stamp on the cue card in the back of the book" system, and going for drives as entertainment because gas was so fucking cheap. our first microwave had a dial instead of buttons, our first cell phone had a battery the size of a small child, and our house didn't get an electric can opener until 2001.

 

i remember when the first video store opened in town. you could rent movies and a fucking vcr. it came in a padded bag like pizza delivery drivers use. the following christmas we got our first vcr. we also had one of those high speed tape rewinders. because we liked being kind.*










*if you don't get that reference, then what the hell are you doing on my lawn?

 

speaking of this, academic sources. when i was in middle school, we got the hilarious projects of "i want five sources, and none of them can be from the computer because the internet is evil."

by the time high school hit, they were perfectly fine with using academic databases... but now you needed ten, fifteen, twenty sources because the teachers basically thought, "hey, it's easy now! let's make it take the exact same amount of time to do research!"

capabilities have gone up, so expectations have gone up as well.