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.

[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.

[shanghaied]

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

[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.

[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)

[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

[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).

[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?"

[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.

[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.

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

I love you...

That is all.

*HUGS*

[clocketpatch]

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

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

[flowsoffire.livejournal.com]

Sweet memories! ^_^