Back in the mid-1950s when I was born, televisions were brand new. Not many people owned them yet, but many people owned radios. You could hear music and news right in the comfort of your home! No more having to go out for the paper to get news. No more just hearing live music now and then. You could hear it everyday! You could hear stories without reading books yourself, and you had instant entertainment for your children on rainy days when they had to stay inside.
Then more and more people started getting televisions. There was no such thing as reruns when we first got a television. All the shows were live, and at the end of the day, television would sign off. There would be a test pattern displayed with a very annoying high pitched sound to make you turn off your TV. It worked. That noise would play all night long if you didn't turn the TV off because nothing was broadcast late at night, but the next morning the shows would come back on in all their black and white glory.
Yes. Televisions were black and white at first. Most stations did not even broadcast in color until somewhere around the mid-1960s, and sales of color televisions did not surpass sales of black and white TVs until 1972.
Amazing to think about.
I believe I was around eleven or twelve years old the first time I saw a color TV. I was mesmerized.
Remote controls were invented, but most televisions did not have one until after I grew up.
There was no such thing as a VCR or DVD or Blu Ray player when I was a child.
There was no such thing as video games when I was young. You could play a pinball machine at the pool room downtown if you were male, but girls and women were not allowed in the pool room until after I grew up.
I was married with children the first time we owned a color TV. It was the mid-1970s by then. I will never forget the first time I saw the Wizard of Oz in color. Amazing!
Also, when I was a child, no one had air-conditioning. Oh, I know air-conditioning was invented in 1902, but no one I knew had an air conditioner until I was grown. Summers were miserable in the south where I was born and raised, but I was luckier than many because it almost always cools down to at least 70 degrees at night in my hometown year-round. That is not true of much of the south.
There was no such thing as hand-held calculators. Those weren't even invented until 1967 when I was twelve. I remember teachers in my high school making us check behind the calculators by doing the math long-hand. Hand-held calculators were not well trusted at first.
Instant cameras were invented in 1947, but almost no one I knew had one when I was very young. Most people took photos using film that had to be sent to a lab for processing and printing. I remember we used Jack Rabbit labs when I was very little. It was a catchy name.
There was no such thing as a home computer. Typing happened on a typewriter and later electric typewriters. If you wanted copies, you had to use carbon paper and not make mistakes in your typing. White out was used if you did make mistakes. It was not attractive.
Original home computers required you to write code to make word processors work, and you printed your work on dot-matrix printers that had holes in the edge of the paper that had to be torn off. The paper was also in big rolls that had to be torn into pages.
School teachers had mimeograph machines to make copies up until at least the 1990s. I can still smell that blue solution.
Telephones were hard-wired to the wall. You could not move them, and the handsets were attached to the phone with a cord. If you were lucky, it was a long cord. The telephone company owned the telephone. You did not have to buy it.
There was no such thing as a cell phone until I was grown. Cell phones were invented in 1973, but no one I knew owned one until the 1980s at least. I didn't buy my own cell phone until 2002. Now I'm not sure how I lived without one.
Funny how times change.
I've noticed the more technology I have the less time I have to spend in person with people. At least that is true so far. Perhaps that will change with time. Technologies seem to have turned to trying to bring people more together with social media and Facetime and Skype and other technologies. I sure hope that trend continues, but nothing beats being with someone in person, so maybe the tech will eventually be able to beam me over to you. I'd like that.
Beam me up, Scotty!
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