Dept. of Me, Me, Me!

[kaffy_r]

I've Been Thinking

I am old enough* that seeing an airplane go overhead was cause to run out of the house and look to the skies when I was growing up.
I am old enough that the first telephone number I remember was 884. 
I am old enough that I remember the excitement when they put a transmitter up that allowed us to get our second television station. In black and white.
I am old enough that I learned to type on a 1930s-era Remington.
I am old enough to remember bristol board, manila paper, paper with the wood chips still in it, and school tests printed in purple aniline dye by a spirit duplicator** 
I am old enough that my first comic book cost 8 cents. It went up to 12 cents when I was in fourth or fifth grade. 
I am old enough to remember Boer War veterans coming to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day.***
I am old enough to have listened to the funeral of John F. Kennedy piped through my school classroom****
I am old enough to have sent a telegram unselfconsciously. 


I am still young enough to relish all those things.


* .. and lived as a child in a rural enough area ... but it was not in a wilderness.
** or Ditto machine.
***  Hey, I was very young, and the two of them were very old. Very old. 
**** And I was in Canada. 

Comments

[owlboy]

From this I assume you are roughly 250 years old.

I had a black&white TV and a typewriter well into the 90s but that's just Ireland for you.

[kaffy_r]

From this I assume you are roughly 250 years old.

First grin of the day. And yes, I was around when god was a teenager, and dinosaurs walked the earth.

I think there are loads of places, even in the so-called first world, that people can still have those experiences, but I still get a kick out of the reactions I get from many people who are considerably younger than I am when I tell them some of the conditions of my youth.

[st_aurafina]

That purple stuff smelled goooooood. /tiny primary school chromer. (I think we called it a mimeograph? Or a roneo?)

I'm old enough to remember squinting at Skylab passing overhead - this tiny moving dot among many dots. And John Lennon's funeral on the television - didn't know who he was, really, but knew that my parents were sad and shocked.

I'm younger than you, but we're both a million years older than tumblr.

[kaffy_r]

(I think we called it a mimeograph? Or a roneo?)

If it smelled good, you probably were dealing with a so-called Ditto, or spirit duplicator, machine. (Did it smell sort of sweet? That would be Ditto/spirit.) The ink used for mimeograph machines tended to smell much more chemically and not sweet at all.

And yes, one of the mimeograph brand names is Roneo; apparently Roneo is a brand that gets used in Australia and France. Gestetner was the brand primarily used in North America.

we're both a million years older than tumblr.

*snrk* And probably getting millions of years older by the day, judging by what little I've seen over there.

[shanghaied]

I am old enough to remember rationing. I win :P :P :P

[kaffy_r]

But ... but ... Boer War veterans!!!

*checks for dates of rationing*

OK, I stand corrected. But I'm right behind you in the "Christ, are we old" sweepstakes. Heh.

[shanghaied]

Ha! My body may be old, but the rest of me still hasn't aged :-)

[kaffy_r]

Yeah, there's some part of me that's still a high-heeled chick singer in an unsuccessful rock and roll band. Heh ....

[shanghaied]

Hang about - I've seen recentish photos of you! You haven't turned fat, or ugly, or wrinkly. Therefore, not 'old'! (I OTOH, while still sporting the 32-inch arse and still well able for my almost-365-days-a-year morning four-mile racewalk/jog, have acquired that typical vile clock-stoppingly-repulsive-and-damn-near-sexless-looking postmenopausal Old Bag Skin^TM that makes looking in any mirror a nightmare to be barely endured without ever stronger thoughts of 'look, surely suicide would be the decent thing to do, rather than offend the eyes of the world with your ugliness', sigh)

[kaffy_r]

Oh, goodness; pish-tosh to that! I imagine that you, in motion, are probably impossible to keep one's eyes off of. And I have rarely if ever met anyone who truly looked repulsive, certainly not because of age.

[shanghaied]

Oh how I wish we could discuss this in the manner of an actual real-world conversation! Because while I imagine you still wouldn't agree with me, you might at least have a better understanding of my viewpoint :-)

But FWIW you've given me to think And one result of this round of thinkage is my realisation that at least some of my lifelong disgust at the ugliness of old age - and yes, this goes all the way back to when I was a tiny wee lass-let and would run off retching if any smelly wrinkled old auntie got close enough to touch me, or worse, mush its greasepainted lips against my face - has to do with empty vessels. Which most HomSaps are at any age, so when they grow used-up and start to melt, it turns my disgust circuits up to eleven twenty-two forty-four. And the same thinkage led me to realise that what I really mean is 'my rules of physical acceptableness are absolute except when they are successfully broken (stone me, it's the Blackthorne Defence again!). And you know what tipped me over to to these conclusions?

Thinking about Mary Beard.

Yes, that's right. Mary Beard. The melty-faced, wild-haired, unapologetically age-scarred Hag of History, professor, journalist, and telly presenter. That woman is so... fucking... GORGEOUS, due to her passion for her field of expertise suffusing her with a shining beauty, that I not only would love to spend a very, very long time talking with her, but yes, I actually fancy her. Beard is the utter opposite of an empty vessel, and thus in her case custom cannot stale even if age withers.

So there you are. Go figure.

[kaffy_r]

You're right about 3D conversations providing more potential for full understanding. Alas, unless I sprout the wings of an exceptionally hearty albatross, I will probably be unable to visit in RL.

I can say that much of my degree of comfort with the physical signs of aging undoubtedly comes from the fact that I was raised not only by my mother, but by my maternal grandmother and grandfather. Among the first faces I recall that were filled with love toward me and my brother were lined, and the arms and hands that held me had the fragile, translucent skin of age. I remember touching the blue tracery of veins in my grandmother's hands and marveling at how soft the skin was. With so much love and so much care bestowed upon me by people of such age, it's probably no surprise that the look of age pushes very positive buttons for me.

Plus the fact that my maternal grandmother was a pretty amazing woman all by herself. And my grandfather, despite some hefty failings, was also amazing. Oh, the stories they both told me, and the care they lavished upon everyone around them!

And I can certainly understand how the force of someone's mind and personality can illuminate the vessel in which those things are seated. An engaged mind, a searching spirit, beautify any vessel in which they sit.

[shanghaied]

Ahaha! I too had an amazing nan (step-nan actually, but closer than blood) who told me wonderful stories and pretty much brought me up in my early childhood. But the fact that she had been a breathtaking beauty in her youth (with photographic proof) and still had her looks and grace by the time I knew her was probably a lot of the reason why I abhor the ugliness of most old people.

And again, gotta love it that we are such well-delineated opposites, heh...

[heliopausa]

Our Deputy Principal came over the Public address one day, and said three words: "School- Clay won!"
:D I'm a bit hazy on the year, but someone will know what long-ago fight it was involving the then Cassius Clay that was that was so important that (I suppose) there was keen interest (= Two quid says he wins it! You're on!) about it in the staffroom.

[kaffy_r]

It might have been one of the two fights he had with Sonny Liston, and if they were still calling Ali Clay, then it was probably the first fight: back in February 25, 1964. Does that jibe with your memory?

[heliopausa]

That sounds right. :) I don't know why the staffroom would have been so excited about that particular fight.
Thank you for your lovely words about age, above, too.

[hamsterwoman]

I still got a lot of Ditto handouts in high school (and this was in the late 1990s; I guess we had Xeroxes, too, but not enough of them to phase out the Ditto machines, and the schools were too broke to buy all new equipment). For a similar reason, I learned to type on a mechanical typerwriter (in middle school in the mid-90s), although I think they got rid of them in favor of a computer lab shortly thereafter. (I still hit the keys with a lot more force than computer keyboards require because of those old things :P)

[kaffy_r]

(I still hit the keys with a lot more force than computer keyboards require because of those old things :P)

Oh my goodness, yes! I still have that habit! It was hard for me to take unobtrusive notes when I was doing interviews over the phone and typing, because folks on the other end of the phone always knew I was typing. My Best Beloved says that I'm a little less noisy now, but even listening to my fingers on the laptop as I type this tells me I still have that old "manual typewriter" habit. Heh.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

One of my memories of Australia (circa 1975) is the two South Australia phone books: one for Adelaide, one for the entire rest of the state (380,000 sq. mi., 1/9 the contiguous U.S.). Neither was a whole inch thick.
In the second one, you could see the size of a town by the number of digits in the phone numbers. One was
Government agent . . . . . 6
General store . . . . . . . . . 8
Mission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure where the division is between the cohorts that remember phone books and those that don't.

[kaffy_r]

Well, we're still sort of in the death throes of phone books, at least here in most urban parts of North America. We still see them pile up at our doors, for instance, and even my son is familiar with both white and yellow pages. (The generation after him? Well, I'm not so sure.)

Phone books are obviously more important to my brother in semi-rural Nova Scotia than they are to me; when I was last up there, I saw people still automatically going to the phone book, and not to their smart phone, for telephone numbers, addresses and such.

[kaffy_r]

That's a little smaller than the telephone book with which I grew up, but not by much.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

I remember many of those and, although we had 7 number local telephone numbers, we had a party line which meant the phone had two different sets of rings (one long, two short for us) so we would know who the phone call was for. My relatives, who farmed near Portage la Prairie, had a lot more people on their party line. You could listen in on the other person(s) calls but it was considered bad manners.

I don't remember 8 cent comic books but I do remember 10 cent comics.

When we got our second English language TV station, our TV would only give us a fuzzy picture at first. It turns out a layer of duct had accumulated on the contacts of the channel changer. The dust was slowly worn away by my sister and myself repeatedly checking the new station (CJAY).

[kaffy_r]

I don't remember 8 cent comic books but I do remember 10 cent comics.

BB is telling me that I may have mis-remembered the 8 cent comics, and that I may only be remembering the 10 cent books, so we're probably in the same cohort.

People who lived outside of town still had a party line system at least until I was a young teenager.

It turns out a layer of dust had accumulated on the contacts of the channel changer.

Heh; well after all, it was back when having another channel to change to was a rarity.

[eaweek.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is fun.

When I was a kid, we had an old B&W TV forever. No cable. I do think we had rabbit ear antennas, though. We could pick up the three major US networks, plus the local PBS. My first impressions of TV was that everything was B&W. It was weird to see shows/ movies later and realize how much we'd been missing by not having color. We got our first color TV when I was in middle school, maybe 12 or 13, and only because the B&W had finally crapped out. My parents were the very definition of "cheap," and they both had experienced times of such bad poverty that they would use things until they literally fell apart.

By the time we got the color TV, their finances had improved to the point where they could also get cable. Back then, "cable" was basically a way to get better reception. Initially, it only added maybe one or two more channels. My brother discovered by twiddling some knobs that we could get pirated MTV. And I discovered, also by accident, that we could also receive MTV over the radio. Eventually the cable company caught onto this and scrambled the signal, but not until we'd had two or three years of free MTV. Good times. : )

My first typewriter was an old, 30s or 40s vintage model, maybe even older, that I think might've initially belonged to my father's father. It was in excellent condition, although it was lacking a couple of characters that would become standard on later typewriter models. That was the typewriter I used at home for my high school papers, which were all typed on that funky paper with the thin red margins. I remember also using paper you could erase mistakes with an ordinary pencil eraser; that was a huge improvement over white-out.

In high school, we used manual typewriters in our typing classes. They were much better/ faster than the antique I was using at home, and I remember feeling like I could just fly when I typed. Our first electric typewriter, a Smith-Corona that was purchased mostly for my sister (but that was later used by me, through my freshman year of college), felt like a rocket ship. Later, my dad got one that was even better than that. It even had two ribbons: one regular, and one for correcting. That also felt space-age. It did superscripting and subscripting as well, and because of this, I was able to con my parents into letting me take that typewriter to college starting sophomore year, because it made typing up science reports so much easier.

My first word processing experience was with XyWrite, which I learned as a junior in college. I can laugh now, but at the time, it was absolutely phenomenal, a revelation, to be able to just move a cursor around and insert things, to say nothing of being able to cut and paste whole blocks of text. My senior thesis was typed in XyWrite, and I did my graphs using a program called Sigma Plot, and the function that labeled the X and Y axes was slower than the second coming. God help you if you made an error or had to re-label a chart! Just backing up the cursor took half the day.

I'm old enough to remember VAX machines, which we used in college, mostly to run statistics programs.

For graduation in 1989, my parents bought me a Tandy PC from Radio Shack. Even after we'd moved on to better computers at work, I still used the Tandy at home: I could at least type in plain text and reformat the document at the office. In college, they had **just** introduced the 3" floppy disk, which felt VERY sci-fi to me, so I clung to the old 5" variety until I went to graduate school and was basically forced to switch to 3". I did toggle between the two for many years, until the 5" drives became obsolete, and I no longer had one at work. Now it's the 3" drives that are obsolete (I think you can buy them as an external drive, though, or at least you could until a few years ago).

I still recall giving a work study student a project to work on; the PC out at the students' work station was a cranky old thing that didn't like USB drives, so I put the file on a 3" floppy. Handed it to my student, who looked at me with an incredulous expression and said, "What's this?"

[kaffy_r]

I just want to tell you how much I enjoyed reading this. (I've actually read it a couple of times, because it's such a wonderfully evocative telling of a time of great transition.

My first word processing experience was when I did a very short stint as a typesetter on an old Compugraphic machine (I'll never forget the smell of the typeset film as it came out of the machine, still damp from the chemicals.) I wasn't a great typesetter, because I couldn't remember all the things I needed to remember, but it was an interesting experience.

My first word processing program was Word Star, and I loved it. BB had to forcibly wrench me away from Word Star to go to Word Perfect which I still LOVE LIKE BURNING AND I DON'T SEE THE USE OF WORD, IT'S SO AWFUL - ahem. Excuse me. Nowadays, I have to use Word, or Office Libre, which is a freeware word processing program that is similar to Word Perfect. Unfortunately, like Word Perfect, almost no one uses it (it's an .odt file rather than a .doc, .txt or .rtf file, and no one seems to be able to open them. *grump*)

Anyhow, yes, this is wonderful. And Tandy machines ... and TRS-80s, which we all loved as "Trash-80s" ... oh, the memories!

[eaweek.livejournal.com]

LOL, I'm glad you enjoyed. About 10 years ago, a friend of mine and I went to an exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston. Afterwards, we checked out the main exhibits, including the one on technology. We were both semi-horrified to see IBM PCs in the exhibit, the ones that had dual 5" floppy drives. We'd both used those. When you grew up using manual typewriters, a PC with 5" floppy drives felt like flying to the moon. My first experiences, you actually had a system disk that you used to boot up the software, then you took that disk out and inserted your own floppy to save your work. It was something of a revelation when the college got computers with hard drives, the software already loaded in, and you didn't have to boot it up via floppy disk.

I remember being excited by how much stuff you could store on a 3" floppy as compared to a 5", and then again how much more you could save on a flash drive. Now they have flash drives that can save insane amounts of stuff.

When I used Word Perfect my first year-ish on the job here, I hated it, because I'd been using Word for a couple of years in grad school, and it felt like dinosaur software. I picked it up pretty quickly, but it was a vast relief when we switched over to Microsoft Office in... I think it was the summer of 1994. For a while, I would do things in Word Perfect, then convert the documents into Word files, so I could print them with a better typeface. Finally, I was able to give up Word Perfect altogether.

I really loved XyWrite, though. It was based on a set of two-letter commands that were pretty easy to remember. I think part of the reason I opted for a Tandy as my graduation present was that it was so similar to the PCs in the college computer lab. Of course, it became outdated almost as soon as I got it home, but it saw me through grad school and my first few years on the job. It went into storage when I had to move to Cow Country in 2001, and then I junked it when I moved into my own place. I wasn't sorry to see it go, not even for nostalgic reasons.

[marence.livejournal.com]

WordStar!!!
Now, that was word processing. Everything you needed, nothing you didn't.

In the late 80s, I learned WordStar and dBase because our supervisor had bought a 286 for the office, and I found it it could print out all our form letters with names and addresses - I wouldn't have to write out hundreds of letters each month - and, bonus, I wouldn't have to count 3x5 cards to complete the monthly report! The computer would do it for me!
I didn't realize that dBase was a complex program. I just hammered thru it so I could let the computer do the stupid work for me. I hated counting 3x5 cards.

But I was already familiar with computers - my first programming class, in high school, was the first one ever offered by the school system. NASA had donated a room-sized computer, and this allowed the vocational secretarial students to learn keypunch, a new and valued skill. We wrote the programs, in BASIC, and they keypunched them in. The next week, we'd get 11x17 green and white printouts of our work.

[kaffy_r]

Hi there! It's good to see you around - and oh, yes, Wordstar was wonderful (although I admit that I did eventually transfer all my loyalties to Word Perfect. Heh.

[eaweek.livejournal.com]

I'm too young to remember Viet Nam and Watergate, both of which happened when I was still pretty young. I do remember the big deal of the US's bicentennial, which happened when I was 9.

Our first phone numbers were only five digits. I still remember our old house number: 3-9530. Eventually it went to a seven-digit number. There were two area codes in Massachusetts: 617 for the eastern part of the state, and 413 for the western part of the state. You could call anywhere within your own area code, IIRC, for no extra charge. If you wanted to make a long-distance call, you waited for evenings or weekends. I remember what a huge deal it was when our area code changed from 617 to 508. And it seemed like a blink of an eye when the suburban areas got divided again into 978 and 781. Nowadays, the old 617 is the area code for Boston only, and the outlying suburbs are all 508, 781, or 978. Oddly, I don't believe the 413 area code has ever been subdivided. Not enough people live out there. ; )

My first cell phone was as big as a brick, had an antenna, and took up half the inside of my pocket book. My service plan was like $13 per month. I could send and receive calls--that was it.

We had mimeograph (?) machines when I was a kid. I don't recall my first experience with photocopiers, probably it was middle school or high school.

When I first started working this job, in 1993, there were maybe two or three photocopiers on the entire campus, and one or two fax machines. We had no email. If you wanted to make a long-distance phone call, you had to call the college operator for an outside line. No internet access. They were still using Word Perfect. It was a huge deal when they finally switched us over to Microsoft software. Because my boss was the dean, she qualified for an email account through one of the bigger colleges in the neighborhood. But she was technologically so challenged that I used the account for her, which I had to dial into via modem.

When the college finally got its own web site and email, in 1997, it felt like we had joined the modern world at last. At the same time, they upgraded our phone lines, so we could dial long distance from our own offices. What joy; we had left behind the horse and buggy era for good.

[kaffy_r]

Phone numbers are an amazing way to track the growth of a population. Even when I got to Chicago, things were still kind of handleable; everyone had a 312 prefix. Then they split the city and suburbs apart with 312 and 847; then they had to split the city into downtown and non-downtown: 312 and 773 (which prefix we now have, because yes, we still have a land line of sorts), while the burbs got split between 847 and 630. Then mobiles happened and they got 630 prefixes as well as 229 prefixes ... oh, the snowballing complexity of it all! Heh.

[eaweek.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised there haven't been any new area codes in MA recently, considering the cell phone explosion. And New Hampshire is still all 603, probably because moose don't need cell phones. ; )

[liadt]

We had ditto dupes in the 80's at my school. And I used to rush out and look at planes! The wonder of being a child probably.

[kaffy_r]

I would be happy to se kids these days as suffused with wonder about things like planes as we were. Even now, when I see a sky full of planes I fell like squeeing aloud: "I'm living in the future!"

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

I love you...

That is all.

*HUGS*

[kaffy_r]

And I you, my dear! I'm just getting back onto my journaling now, so I'll have to take a run at my f'list and see what you all are doing!

*hugs right back*

[clocketpatch]

I remember the blue-inked copies from gradeschool in the ninties.

Your **** does not surprise me in the slightest.

[kaffy_r]

Your **** does not surprise me in the slightest.

Well, in those days, Kennedy was the object of near veneration among young people throughout the First World; he was harbinger of change, he was young, and handsome, and fearless (remember, we didn't know about his faults or weaknesses, etc.); and to have such an assassination take place, practically in front of our eyes, thanks to television news, hit everyone hard. The U.S. was right on our border, when it sneezed, we got a cold ... there were so many reasons that the reverberations of his death, and the funeral itself, would become part of the school day.

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

Sweet memories! ^_^

[kaffy_r]

I love it when the memories are sweet and not sad; and these were all pretty nostalgic.

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

Indeed :) ♥