When I was a kid my dad, who was an electrical engineer, built a home computer from components he got through mail order.
I remember the hefty wooden box he built to put it in.
And the:
Eight-inch floppy disks that it took.
Wrote my first story on one of them eight-inch floppies.
They showed those on “I Love the 70s”. I have to admit that the 5-1/4" ones are the earliest I remember.
I heard a Margaret Cho bit once about recording songs off the radio using a cassette player held up the radio. She mentions how the tape captured the sounds of her bedroom door slamming and it sounded so familiar. I would listen to Casey’s Top 40 Saturday morning and then I would know when my favorites were coming on during the repeat Sunday PM. Sometimes I would have to run and slam my door in the middle of the song to prevent my brother coming in and ruining the high-quality recording.
I hope you’re whooshing me…
But in case you really are just a young 'un and don’t know … Hi Fi was short for High Fidelity. (Fidelity means truth in Latin, and as a marketing slogan it worked, because people used to know these things back in the dinosaur days…like The Marine corps motto "Semper Fi(delity).)
anyway–there was this new idea back in 1950 or so that music didnt have to be scratchy and tinny sounding. Stereo hadnt been invented yet, but higher quality (Hi Fi) sound was available as a huge piece of furniture with one or two speakers, a flat table-top that opened up as a lid for the phonograph underneath, and a radio dial concealed behind a sliding wooden door.
In 1976, the parents of one of my friends bought a remote control RCA television. The remote would turn the set on and off, control the volum, and move the tuner knob in one direction only. Click on the channel button, and the result was a harsh mechanical whirring noise, concluding with a KER-CHUNK!
My parents, despite being late adopters of technology for almost everything else, splurged on cable when they bought their first color television in 1973. Yes, Nineteen Seventy Three. The system had a whopping twelve channels; the five local stations, two from Toronto, a public access channel, one for showing pre-empted programs aired on stations in Erie (Buffalo stations preempted network programming quite a lot in those days), one with a slow-moving stock market and Reuters ticker, and one empty, to become HBO a couple years later. Channel 13 aired analog clock, occasionally switching to an analog thermometer, and later back to the clock, with a 60 cycle hum in the abckground that was occasionally interrupted by NOAA weather radio. Did I mention that channel was in black and white?
I remember my Dad bringing home the first pocket calculator I had ever seen in 1972. It was a Texas Instruments model and the numbers were in red LED. My brother and I used to have fun spelling out ‘ShELLl OIL’ in numbers on it.
Does anyone remember big cabinet b&w TV sets that took a few minutes to ‘warm up’? Or ‘Hi-Fi’ sets where the turntable speed was controlled by rubber belts and metal pulleys underneath it?
Feel Old? Hell, I was Born old.
Generational payback is lots of fun. When Razorette and I visited our son’s place in San Diego in the spring, he showed off his shiny new home entertainment system, and we watched “The Last Samurai” in wide-screen splendor with floor-shaking Dolby sound. He was so proud. I can’t wait for him to come home in September – the audio from our living room TV set plugs directly into my 1975-vintage Pioneer tuner/amp, and I get better sound from my 30-year-old Kenwood speakers than he does from whatever the hell he has.
"We can’t bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don’t go anywhere – like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say.
“Now where were we? Oh yeah – the important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…” - Grandpa Simpson
Get off my lawn!
I remember listening to short wave broadcast. From East Germany. Glowing tubes in the night I could feel the room heat up.
This quote + combination of thread title =
So, were they members of the Whig Party?
<rim shot>
Thank you, I’ll be here all week. Try the veal. Tip your waitress!
Yup, that was the family car growing up – a tomato soup pink and white Ford Fairlane station wagon. When we drove to the beach, my sister and I rode in the way-back where we could stretch out with our books and stuff. No seat belts or nuthin’. It’s amazing we survived to adulthood.
In about '74, my mom used her jury duty money to buy me a TI scientific calculator. It was hideously expensive (IIRC, nearly $200). I don’t think she ever forgave me for changing my major from geology to theater.
We still have a portable tube tester, for the tubes in DH’s stereo receiver.
My dad had one of these too - except it was definitely too big to really fit in a pocket. It came in its own hard case.
My father bought my mom one of the first digital watches that came out; it was a Casio with the red numbers like the TI calculator (he had one of those too). He’s since tried to sell it on eBay but no takers.
As chappachula said, it wasn’t stereo, but it did start the later trend of having the different frequency ranges handled by separate speaker cones, sometimes in the same boxes, sometimes not. Not as good as stereo but a long sight better than a cheap phonograph or tinny radio. My father put together a hi-fi system in the early 1960s, and, inexplicably, thereafter lost all interest in listening to music on any but the lowest-fi transistor radio. After stereo became the norm, some people still used the phrase “hi-fi” for a stereo system.
Yeah, but did you tell the story that went along with it ?
if 142 Arabs fought 154 Jews, and **69 ** camels were killed (x’d or multiplied) in their 5 day war, who won ? =
I do. My grandparents kept theirs. Didn’t see the need for anything else.
I remember my brother doing that. The stations would give out their addresses on the air and you could write them and they’d send you a postcard with the station’s logo and such. It was quite a big hobby for some people but I think my brother lost interest in it pretty quick. I wonder what happened to his shortwave set? Would be cool to have it again.
Nope, it means “faithfulness.” The term “high fidelity” referred to how faithfully the device reproduced the sound.
“Semper Fidelus” means “always faithful.”
In 1958, my family moved into a new house. It had a pool in the lower level. None of the local contractors had ever done that before, and several refused to build the house. When we moved in, my folks decided to put an upright piano and a big TV/radio down there. Within the first month, the heavy moisture destroyed both of them.
To replace the rotted TV, we got a “portable” TV, to be lugged back upstairs when not in use. It had a pneumatic remote control. There was a twenty foot plastic tube with a squeeze bulb on the end. Each hard squeeze would bump up to the next channel (2 thru 13); when it came around to 1, it turned off. There were stations on 4, 6, 8, and 13. Everything else was snow.
As an adult, I ran my first survey calculations on a hand cranked mechanical calculator about the size of a typewriter. It would do all four functions. We got the sine and cosine out of books.
We had the largest outboard motor on the lake. It was an 22 HP Evinrude with opposed cylinders, exposed plug wires, was started by wrapping a rope around the flywheel and there were no gears. If it started ( big IF ) you left.
As a kid in 48 -49 we had a big Zenith radio with the flip lever for the different bands.
Green Hornet, Lone Ranger, Fiber McGee and Molly, Texaco theater, etc.
My older sister was the hit of the neighborhood with her ‘portable’ record player …
My ( 62 - bought while in the ARMY ) Sony TC-500 reel to reel still plays just fine.
My problem is that I can’t figure who that old guy in the mirror is…
And take that weird flying plastic disc thingy with you too!!