In grad school, I had to type out my thesis. I rented an IBM Selectric electric typewriter with a correcting ribbon. While this and white-out made it much easier than it would have been on a manual typewriter, I still had to re-type many pages.
And even though I had asked my major professor to try to make all major corrections on earlier drafts, so I might only have to re-type a few pages, he made a lot of significant changes on the penultimate draft so I had to re-type a lot.
Man, I was so glad when word processing programs finally became available, clunky though they were.
Until the first time I accidentally deleted an almost-completed final report without a backup and had to re-type it from memory.
Like the night our office manager was making last-minute changes to our 100-plus page program proposal. There was a flash of lightning, a clap of thunder, the office lights flickered – and the document was gone! From that night on, our office manager’s nickname was “Oh shit, Oh Shit, OH SHIT!!!”
Before faxes and teh Interwebz, the only way to get written information quickly to multiple people was to send telegrams, which were fast, but expensive. I remember trying to craft a message with maximum information in a minimum amount of characters, then calling a quaint entity named Western Union, dictating the message to an operator, who read it back to me, then painstakingly dictating the names, addresses and phone numbers of all the telegram recipients.
I can. 8-tracks sucked. You had the music split into four “programs,” each program being equivalent to a half side of a cassette or LP. Songs were often split between two programs, so that a song would fade out at the end of one program, and fade at the beginning of the next, with a loud “clunk” in the middle from the track-changing mechanism. And all the tape was on one big spool in a spiral inside the cartridge. Eventually it would get wound so tightly that it couldn’t unspool and therefore not play, as the tape would not move and you would have to take the cartridge apart and unwind a few turns from the spool of tape, hope it didn’t go all over the floor, and repack it and put the cartridge back together. As I recall, they used to sell 8-track repair kits so that you could salvage it and make it playable.
And outside of in-dash car 8-track players, they never became truly portable. They were never shrunk to the size of a cassette Walkman. If you wanted portability in an 8-track, the best you could do was a player the size of a large portable radio that often used four C or D sized batteries. When they actually stopped making 8-track tapes, the first thing I bought was an adapter that would let you play cassettes through your 8-track system, similar to this. You pushed it into the 8-track slot. It had a motor that drew power from the contacts that automatically changed programs when they came into contact with the metallic splice that held the ends of the tape together.
When I was in junior high school, my parents had a second phone line installed in our house so that my brother and I could use that one, and my parents could make sure that the other one was available for adult stuff.
We were, like, ROYALTY in that town. For having two separate phone lines. And phones in our bedrooms that our parents COULDN’T LISTEN IN ON.
I’m not that old, but it used to be that you had a sense of exhilaration when you found not only books that were out of print but any book that wasn’t a new book at all! So you’d, say, find book one (you hope!) of a trilogy at the library, and you want to know what happened next. Well, odds are that bad boy is out of print. Even if it is, they don’t have it at Waldenbooks and you might have to ask the pimply teenager to order it. If it IS out of print, fuck you. What you do after that is, every time you’re somewhere with a used book store, you look in it. One day, you’ll be on vacation in some weird out of the way place and voila! There it is!
Only now it’s been ten years since you read book one and the library lost the copy.
Just a few days ago my aunt and uncle were in town and they asked me, very seriously, if I had some magic librarian tool to find them another hardback copy of a book they lent out and never got back years ago. They’d looked in dozens of bookstores, even ones local to the author, and no such luck - was there ANYTHING I could do for them?
Computers were programmed with cardboard ‘punch cards’ they had holes in them that were read by some kind of optical scanner. The cards were mechanically fed into the machine one at a time. They had to be in a particular order. You could lose weeks of work if you dropped a box of those cards.
If you had a car wreck out in the country, you had to wait for another car to come along and then had to drive back into town to alert the authorities.
Personally, except for having to type things over because of typos on formalized legal things, (something I’ve never had to do) I can’t think of anything that is better for me because of technology. Maybe getting instant money at an ATM, but hell, that’s sometimes not such a good thing. Way back before the internet, I appreciated getting something I really wanted badly, because I had to hunt for the things in stores, or in thrift shops, or whatever. Sometimes I had to wait, but that just heightened the anticipation. Finding something I really wanted by chance was a great thrill. I still remember when I found a copy of Millbank in an old bookstore. Millbank was one of three books the Ingalls had in the Little House series.
I used to have an idea, I wanted to search for a copy of the book Gadsby which is a 50,000 word novel written without the letter E. I don’t give a fuck about that idea anymore, because now I can just call up the thing on Project Gutenberg. I haven’t done that because what would be the fucking point without the hunt?
Technology is good for work applications, but it takes the sport out of everything else.
Plus, it’s fucked up my job search, but if I get into that, I’ll just get depressed. Suffice to say it was a hell of a lot easier to get an interview in the old days.
I used to have to wait months for photos to be developed. No way was I allowed to shoot off the rest of the 36 exposures because I was desperate to see the finish result of the first ones I’d taken. So it could take weeks (if it was Christmas/birthday/other special occasion) or months (if no special occasions) before a roll of film was ready to be processed. Then you had to wait up to a week for the photos to come back.
I first traveled to Europe for work in the Early 1990s. We had to transfer computer files. No internet. Austrian phone service was awful locally, and of course transatlantic calls were low S/N and echoey at best. It would support 1200 baud if you got a good line. Sometimes we had to dial it back to 300. And the Austrian phone system would disconnect all international calls after 30 minutes…because NOBODY would EVER stay on a long distance call for HALF AN HOUR!!
So it might take 2-3 calls to transfer a 2-300 Kbyte executable. Sealink was the protocol we used, it allowed you to pick up where you left off when a call got disconnected, and seemed to be more robust dealing with the echo and delay. Anyone else remember ProCom?
Phone rates were extreme at hotels (in some cases this is still the case) so you went to the post office to call long distance. Which means you have to wake your buddy up at 2AM (when the post office in Germany is open) to let him know your flight itinerary.
A few years later the customer and home base both were wired with ethernet (token ring at one end, actually) and had working 56K auto connecting phone links to the internet…woo hoo! I remember using telnet to download NCSA Mosaic (early web browser, commercialized as Netscape) and getting it working so I could get daily Dilbert cartoons in Europe.
Our house was heated with electric baseboard heat…poorly. We supplemented with wood and coal. Dad and I would have cut, split, and stack 5-7 cords of wood a year. I’d have to bring two or three wheelbarrow loads from the stack up to the porch every day or so. The stove in the kitchen was a high efficiency unit, we’d leave some wood large so that two pieces would fill the stove and last all night.
The last 5 years or so we upgraded to central heating…it was HEAVEN.
I traveled extensively in China in the 1980’s. I would be there for 3-4 months at a time. I would write letters by hand and post them, and it could take ages to get to the US if you were anywhere outside of a couple of major cities. People would write back to a quaint thing called “post restante” in Hong Kong. So after a few months, I would make it back to HK and a beeline to the main post office. There some guy would flip through an alphabetized stack of letters and you’d get a few months worth of letters. Reading through them you’d find out about deaths, marriages, births and other mundane pointless stuff people shared. You’d also find out about stuff like Philippine Revolution.
One time I just had to call my long distance girl friend in the US. It only cost about $10/minute from China to the US, was patched through some really crappy lines and then the underwater cable, which was about a 5 second delay for what sounds like the secret witness program guys talking underwater.
Now I can take direct flights to places that took a 3 day train and a 3 day bus ride, and have a better cell phone connection with data than I can get in the US. Shit, Poste Restante probably doesn’t even exist anymore. Think about it - months of not being in communication versus whipping out your mobile and speed dialing.
Meeting up when traveling - no cell phones, no email, no SMS. We made plans like “In front of the Roman theatre in Arles, at such and such date, at noon” and actually made it work.
Word. But it kinda sucked. I would have all sorts of back up plans, and worry if someone didn’t show up, and you could spend a couple of days trying to meet up.
I had this VHS video tape of my favorite band, playing one of their first shows ever. I don’t remember how I got it…
Then I taped the band every time they were on TV.
Then, I found some fans in Australia who had made tapes every time the band was on TV in Australia.
So, I paid for the Aussies to send me their tapes, then I paid some people to transfer the tapes from PAL to NTSC.
Then I put together my original tape, plus all the TV appearances I’d taped plus all of the Aussie TV appearances, using two VCRs.
Then I made copies of the new tape, and put them in bubble mailers and sent it to people all over the world. Most of them sent me audio tapes of live shows in return, or a couple bucks for the video and the mailing.
This is just, say, 15 years ago or so. Now, all of the videos would have been on YouTube in HD for anyone to see, for free.
I still run into people who have seen my video, tho. That is weird. I should find it and try to actually get it on YouTube.
Car tires weren’t as reliable as they are now, and automobile air conditioning was, erh, not always available. That is, simply crossing the California desert by car was not something to be done lightly - had one or two memorable breakdowns on our family vacations, as I remember.
Amazingly, though, under some limited circumstances, household electric appliances could be repaired! The family electronics (new word!) wizzard would unscrew the back off of the television and poke around looking for burned out, well, we called them ‘tubes’. And you could buy replacement tubes! At the drugstore! And if everything went well, the television or radio could be put back together and it just might possibly work again.
Getting 100 copies made of something was a pretty big undertaking. I don’t even remember the right name for this, but it involved making a master on something kind of like carbon paper, then setting up the master on a metal drum / hand cranked machine that would apply a coat of alcohol (most distinctive odor) to the master and allow an ink impression to be taken off the master and put onto one copy. Okay, 99 to go.
Dittos. They were purple, and had a very distinctive smell.
Credit cards didn’t just get swiped through a reader. The clerk put them in this big metal frame, with a couple of pieces of paper and carbon paper on it, and dragged a big heavy thing across it to imprint the raised letters from your card on the paper. They used to write all the numbers in by hand, but then gas stations got these newfangled big metal things where they could click little wheels to imprint the price. When you bought gas on credit, you gave a gas station attendant your card, and he would run it through this thing, then hand the whole assembly to you for you to sign. You’d hand the whole thing back so he could compare your signature with the one on the card, then he’d tear off your copy and give it back to you with your card.
