My parents still have the stereo that is a peice of furniture—AM/FM turntable w/ 8 track deck in a giant oak cabinet that stands 3 feet high and is 7 feet long. 2 big speakers covrered in red crushed velvet. My kids think it’s some kind of table/sideboard. There are records in that thing to this day.
I’m currently posting this on a computer more powerful than the ones used to land astronauts on the moon…or so I’m told.
The Internet is on computers now? By jingies, what’ll they think of next? I’m posting the old fashioned way, via cuneiform tablets carried by oxen. Can’t be bothered by these newfangled keyboards when I can already chisel 15 words per minute.
I can remember going to a shoe store and putting my feet in the Xray machine to see how the shoes fit (it is a miracle that everybody from that generation doesn’t have 15 toes on each foot now).
Our neighbors had the first television in town and on fight nights, they put cinder blocks and planks over them so all the neighbors could fit in the living room and watch the fight on that whopping 13 inch black and white, oval screen. They later bought the first color television which was especially odd considering the husband was color blind - but he always had to have the first gadgets in town.
He also had the first electric garage door opener in town, and the door would pop open whenever a plane flew over the house and we would have to go over, press the button and dash out of the garage before the door closed on us.
They also had the first aluminum Christmas tree - remember those, that spun slowly in a circle and a color wheel was pointed towards it and the tree turned green, yellow, blue and red?
When I was about 12, I was reading Popular Mechanics (remember that magazine) and there was a picture of a new “fad” in California…so I went out and took an old roller skate, dismantled it and bent it with a hammer, nailed it to the bottom of a wooden board, and went out and tried that new invention, called the “skate board”. Fell a few times but got the hang of it rather quickly. Cars actually stopped on the street and people looked at me like either I was insane, or a circus performer doing a new trick. Soon a couple of friends did the same thing and we got pretty good at it. It was a good three years later before the first skateboards went on sale at the local bike shop.
Oh, and I had one of the first bikes with a “banana seat and butterfly handlebars” put on it.
Sounds like a Schwinn Sting Ray like I had as a kid.
Well, it was a prototype…it was an old, hand-me-down, Schwinn 24 inch bike, and bought the seat and handlebars independently and put them on the bike. Trying to do wheelies, I stripped the threads of the handlebars so often, my father drilled a hole and put a deadbolt in the handlebars so they would stay up. Sting Ray bikes didn’t come out a few years later and they were a compact 20 inch - hey, this was small town Illinois - we didn’t get no fancy stuff there.
My grandmother had that in her basement. As if your description wasn’t horrific enough, the name of the contraption is “mangle.” Yes, it’s actually called a mangle. Maybe to scare kids away. We kids were always warned not to touch it.
I remember when our neighbors got a yard light installed with a “magic eye” that would turn itself on at dusk and off at dawn. And for the first few nights, people in the neighborhood would assemble at sunset and wait for the light to turn on.
Can you imagine the whole neighborhood coming to your house to watch you make a call on your new cellphone?
My computer, a three year old Desk Top from HP has a million times more computing power than the computer that set the Pentagon on fire (!) when it got upgraded to 32 kilobytes. (Or was it 16?).
Tris
Ha! Was your grandmother German? Mangel means “to wring” as in put your clothes through the wringer. And yes, those machines are called Mangel in German, but I believe they are stilled called wringers in English…still, if it kept you kids away, then it worked in both languages!