When I was in ninth grade (in 1962), I won my school’s Science Fair. Much to my surprise, I went on to take third place in the city Science Fair, and I made it to the state competition.
The State Science Fair was held at the University of Oklahoma. All the contestants were given a tour of the university’s computer center, which was a huge building filled with millions of dollars’ worth of clattering, blinking equipment whose entire computing power (and more) can now be duplicated by an inexpensive device that I can put in my purse. Wow. Future shock.
The first color TV in my parent’s house was one built buy my father as part of a correspondence course in electronics. Paid for by his post-vietnam era GI Bill. We had that TV through the mid 80’s.
My first color TV of my own was an old Apple IIe monitor, which I hooked to my VCR (for the tuner) when I wasn’t using my computer.
I also had home built CB radios and shortwave sets as a kid in the '70s.
Any one want to buy a Comodore 64 with monitor and a printer that could wake the neighborhood.Fan paper of course.We were the last to get a color tv. Dad thought it would pass as a fad. Princess summer fall winter spring ,Clabell . Black and white cartoons with a cat that kept getting hit in the nuts.
Dad and I built our family’s first color TV-it was a Heathkit. Two others followed over the years, and I still have the last. Tube operated radios abounded in our household-my brother got a Heathkit AM/SW radio for Christmas when I was just a little peep-Dad strung an antenna inside the attic so my brother could listen to stations from around the world on SW (along with Jerry Blavat, Hy Lit and other Philly rock n’ rollers).
We had a tube tester in the Lafayette Electronics store where I worked as a teenager. Dunno why, but people seemed to invariably come in 5 minutes before closing time with a shopping bag full of tubes, and it drove the Boss nuts-he finally put up a sign prohibiting tube testing with a half hour of store closure. Dad still has boxes of tubes in the basement, and my friends with antique cars call when they need radio fixing.
The Catville sound system is a Lafayette Quadraphonic tuner/amp, four Criterion (Lafayette) speakers, a Dual belt-drive turntable, a JVC cassette deck, a Lafayette 8 track deck, and two Akai reel-to-reel decks. Everything works.
Heck-I’ve got a Tektronix oscilloscope downstairs in the shop which is older than many people on this board!
I’m just approaching GOML status, so don’t remember the tube-testing as a normal route. But: in the late seventies, my divorced engineer Dad sent us kidlets the first Atari Pong game for a Christmas present. As old and simple as it looks now, slow and black and white, it was just amazing then. No one else had one, big score for Dad. All the neighborhood kids would come over to play it, “Wow, a game you can play on the TV!!!” Bink…binkk…bonk…
Kinda like playing tic tac toe in the dirt now, tho.
I’m “only” 47 but I remember the tube testers, Heathkits, crystal radios, etc.
But what did we call those damn plastic spiral looking things you put in the hole of a 45 record so it would fit over the spindle on the console hi-fi? Later you could get a plastic thing that fit over the spindle itself.
I swear they had an actual name for those things, not just “inserts for 45’s” or whatever.
I think I asked this in a thread years ago, but the memory is going…
Hey, one of my other interests just so happens to be steam cars. Is your dad still around? There’s not too much published on Dobles and I’m awfully curious about 'em.
I can remember when there were people on the Moon, when mom and pop stores outnumbered chain stores, when we had five and dime stores, and when small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
Hi-fi enthusiasts called the big speaker a “woofer” and the little one a “tweeter.”
In the early 1960s, my parents had put their old 1950s hi-fi in the basement playroom. I don’t remember the make, but its metal surfaces were colored gold. In a small storage room down there my father had placed his collection of heavy 78 RPM records from the 1930s. I used to take them out, spin them, and dance to big band music from when my dad was a little child. That was my introduction to Jazz.
Nowadays my kids have even shown more interest in the psychedelic rock from my childhood than I took in the big band music of my parents’ childhood. The records were stacked up naked on a shelf. They were twice as thick as 33⅓ disks and made of a more brittle material.
The record player had some dubious wiring, and sometimes when I grasped the needle arm the wrong way, I got an electric shock. The farther back you go in time, the more objects become bulky, massive, and solid, while safety was less a concern than today.
That phonograph was typical of the 1950s: it had FOUR speed settings to accommodate the different record manufacturers, because playback speeds were in flux as different standards battled for market domination in the recording industry in those days. It had a switch for 78, 45, 33⅓, and 16 RPM. The manufacturers must have been optimistically hedging their bets including the 16 RPM setting, expecting that such products would hit the market any day now. As far as I know, though, 16 RPMs never appeared. So instead we kids used to play “Monster” by putting on a record at the 16 speed and voices would come out horrifyingly deep and slow. Then we yelled “Frankenstein!!!” and ran out of the room.
Johanna,
You’re right about the weight and safety. I have an “portable” fan from the 1930’s. Must weight 50 pounds including the cast iron base and 3/4 hp motor spinning those shiny brass blades that could double as propeller on an outboard motor. And a blade guard that couldn’t stop a boxing glove!
That doesn’t worry me as much as the 120 volts exposed by the open contact power switch. I, a large man, can easily stick my pinky between the contacts. Must have been an unexpected ending to some gene pools.
But to everyone writing, it’s not that we’re getting old. Others are too young. I make our new arrivals at work feel even less experienced when I show them my Visa credit card with “member since” date prior to their births!
Which means only one thing: our job is to put those young whippersnappers in their place. They may have physical agility but we can use our life experiences to manipulate them to do our hard labor. Who’s with me?
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PS: There were 16 rpm records. They were audiobooks for the blind. We had some at our local library when I was a kid. I couldn’t listen to them because I was supposed to READ books.
We had a Quasar TV when I was a kid. Does anybody remember these? Most of the electrical parts were in a compartment which could slide out for repair.
The tagline of their commercials was “with the works in a drawer”. This launched several jokes in which attractive females were referred to as “Quasars”. (They had nice “works in their drawers”).
Sorry to hear about your father, and Jay certainly does love his Doble. I wish you’d been around to take part in this thread, since your cite supports my position in that thread.
And whenever a Quasar needed service, it always seemed to be the “master power module” that had to be replaced – and which cost more than the picture tube.
I’m pretty sure we called the yellow 45 inserts ‘spindle adapters’. I remember them well.
Remember ‘suitcase portable’ record players? It would look like a small suitcase, but when you opened it, the lid was a speaker and would detach. Inside was a record player. Fairly clever packaging for the time. You would take them to people’s houses who didn’t have record players, so there would be music for a party. The very first boom-boxes.
And remember when stereos and TVs were major pieces of furniture? They’d come in huge wooden cabinets with legs - the TV’s would sometimes have a sliding door or opening doors in front of the screen, so when you weren’t watching you have a lovely…large wooden box… in the middle of your living room. The most sophisticated ones would have a TV, a record player, 8-track player, and radio all built into one big unit with incredibly crappy sound.
But man, we thought all that stuff was the bleemin’ space age. I grew up with my grandparents, and for years I lived in a farm house with no running water, no central heat, and only recently installed electricity. We got heat from a big cast-iron stove that you would use to cook supper and then it would throw enough residual heat to keep the house warm until everyone went to bed. My grandmother was extremly proud of her washing machine with the power wringer attachment - it was basically a huge tub with a motor in it to slosh clothes around, and a contraption on top that looked like two wooden rolling pins. You’d pluck clothes out of the washer, then run them through the wringer to get the water out before hanging them on the line to finish drying. No finger guards, by the way. Just two big rotating cylinders of death, waiting to catch careless fingers and mash them to a pulp.
Our first TV was an old Zenith black-and-white. It had a rotating knob tuner, with a fine-tune ring around the outside. We used to have to stick toothpicks between the tuner and the fine-tuning ring once we got a channel to come in reasonably well, becuase the tuner’s indent stops didn’t match the frequency any more. So you’d have to tune it slighly off detent and jam it in place. Fun times.
