Changing Times
Sometimes I like to talk about how things were when I was younger. I sort of think it helps some people realize how different things were 50 years ago or before. Having been born in the early 1940s I have witnessed a lot of changes in many things we thought were luxuries or things we could only dream about having, which have come to pass. There are still some of us left from the pre-television generation although we are disappearing quickly. One of the things I remember was the love for the baseball team the Brooklyn Dodgers. Needless to say I come from Brooklyn, New York. When important games were being played you could hear them on radios in the stores as you are walking by. When the team moved from Brooklyn it was as if a knife had been driven into the hearts of all the Brooklynites. People of my generation have never forgiven the team for that move.
One of the great things which happened when I was a kid was being able to go to the movies on a hot summer day, watch a movie you wanted to see and be cooled off by air-conditioning. Air-conditioning was truly a luxury and nobody that I knew had it in their home. In the early days the movies had giant ice machines and fans would blow over the ice and cool the audience. You can see old photos from the 1920s advertising the fact that some of the movie houses were cooled. Today everywhere you go in the summertime you get air-conditioning and it has become so common that if a place is not air-conditioned nobody wants to go into it. When air-conditioning first came out I remember my friend’s father bought an air conditioner. The thing was so large and heavy it had to be held into the window with chains and took several men to install it. Things have certainly changed a lot since that day.
If anyone had ever said computers would be in every home they have been laughed at. There wasn’t even a company that believed computers would become a household device. Thomas Watson was the president of IBM in 1943 and he said he thought only a couple of computers could be sold worldwide so there was really not much of a market for them. In all fairness he was talking about gigantic machines filled with vacuum tubes which took up entire rooms. He had no way of knowing that tubes would become a thing of the past and that miniaturization would take over. I remember when I bought my first computer it was a Sinclair ZX-81. I purchased it in 1981 and was heartbroken when it arrived at my home. The reason for this disappointment was the machine was very tiny compared to what I thought it would be and only had enough power to create a clock with one hand on a black and white screen. To be more exact it had a memory of 1000 bytes. The computer didn’t even have a power switch, about the only moving part was a switch which allowed you to change the channel on your television that the computer would broadcast over, it didn’t use a monitor. Even this simple machine wowed people who came into my home to see it. If you would’ve told the people in those days that you would be carrying a device in your pocket which was probably more powerful than all the computers on earth combined at that time they would’ve thought you were crazy.
Since I am talking about computers, I guess I have to talk about game machines. I remember when I decided to surprise my kids by bringing home a Pong game machine. Pong was a game where you had two paddles, one for each end of the screen and a dot was projected on the screen that would change direction and speed when your paddle controlled blocker stopped it from getting past. It would then knock the dot to the opponent’s side of the screen. It was sort of like a hockey game with only a goalie playing on each team and yet became super popular. I think it is safe to say it was the former of all the electronic games that came after it. After a while simple battery powered handheld game machines came out which by today’s standards were laughable, but they also became extremely popular. As time went by they just kept improving as did everything else connected with computers and game machines until they reached the point where we are today.
Photography was a big hobby for many people and my uncle who was alive at the time had a side job taking wedding pictures. From time to time I would back him up with another camera in case some of the pictures didn’t come out. This was before the time of digital photos. Things we take for granted today in photography either didn’t exist in those days or were not simple to accomplish. Take the idea of zoom, all one has to do is put a digital picture onto the computer and enlarge it as much as you want until it can’t be enlarged any further and you can even do this inside some cameras after the photo is taken or before with a zoom lens. In the old days you had to take the negative from the photo and put it into a machine called an enlarger and project an enlarged picture onto photosensitive paper and then develop it. There were zoom lenses available however. Needless to say this could be quite awkward at times and certainly not as good as what we can do today.
While automobiles still have internal combustion engines, transmissions and metal bodies just about everything else about them has changed since my day. One of the biggest changes are the computer controls we find in almost every car today. Some might say there has been great advancements in engines and transmissions and they would be correct, but to these people I say they are still engines and transmissions. Nobody had cruise control, air-conditioning, and many of the other amenities we find in some of the cars today. Take my car for example, it has heated and air-conditioned seats, heated steering wheel, it beeps when you wander outside of your lane and probably has 100 other things the older cars didn’t have and yet it is not what one would call a luxury car. In the old days cars didn’t have electronic ignitions they used something called mechanical points. These points had to be adjusted from time to time to a gap about equivalent to the thickness of a matchbook cover. Mechanics had to figure out what was wrong with your car when it had a problem, today a computer device is plugged in which reads error codes put out by the car.
All I can think of is how much things have changed since I was a boy and since things are changing even faster today I have to wonder where we will be in another 50 years?
