It was really tough thinking I was the only one who knew the moon landing was a hoax. Now I’ve learned there are millions of us who know the truth.
When I grew up, if you wanted to go somewhere, your only choice was to walk there.
Then finally, they came up with that wheel thingie.
Occasionally, I am called on to ferry an airplane, either for maintenance or to a new owner. In the case of maintenance ferry (moving an ailing airplane to a place where it can be fixed) all sorts of gummint folks get involved in making sure it’s safe, defining the allowed flight path, etc.
In the '70s: Go to the relevant FAA office. Obtain form(s). Fill out forms. Send forms to wherever the stricken plane is. Wait for local mechanic to fill out forms (declaring this particular journey is safe). Wait for local agent to acquire copies of registrations/airworthiness/etc. Await word that all forms are returned to FAA. Await FAA issuance of “Ferry Permit”. Go back to FAA office and get permit. Then fly the sick airplane to where it can be fixed. Total time can easily exceed a week, with lots of running to and fro at the two locations. Also includes a few (expensive) long distance phone calls.
Today (yesterday, in fact). Email FAA office with intent to ferry airplane. FAA returns email with attached forms a few minutes later. Fill out forms electronically. Email to local agent and mechanic. Both return filled out forms with sigs and pdf copies of relevant registration/etc. Email final results and forms back to FAA office. FAA emails ferry permit to my computer, where I print it out. Fly airplane to mechanic in the afternoon. Total time, a few hours (excluding the actual flight).
To me, the difference is nothing short of amazing.
This is shown in the movie Airplane, when Peter Graves is signing for gas while sitting in the cockpit. It’s hysterical.
That’s why you have a dog. There were always either pictures of your dog or pictures of your house to fill up the roll. 
And if you found a half-shot roll of film lying around somewhere it was absolutely certain that when you developed it it would be:
- a birthday party
or - that one time it snowed.
We still use it - it’s the only access for a lot of older stuff we have bound and on microfilm. (Yes, we still use microfilm too.) Invaluable when students need primary sources.
My mom has done various types of transcription over more years than I will specify, but enough that she stared well pre-Internet.
Suffice it to say that it revolutionized the whole thing. Need to doublecheck the spelling of a name? Look up their organization and tada! Medical terms? Tada! Legal terms? Tada again! The gigantic dictionaries remain but only for dire emergencies.
And it’s all digital now as well, instead of piles and piles of tapes. It’s much quicker and easier to download a file than to FedEx a pile of shit and hope it doesn’t get lost or something and no fiddling with an incredibly expensive specialized tape player anymore either.
Giving presentations used to be a pain in the ass. We had to make transparent slides and use an overhead projector. Remember those? It really wasn’t that long ago. MS PowerPoint and cheap projectors changed all of that. And for the better, obviously.
Oh, and despite the fact I’m a research engineer, I haven’t used a calculator in 15 years. I hate calculators. (Except for my 25 year old Casio fx-451M, which I absolutely treasure.) Why use a calculator when MS Excel is at my fingertips?
Electricity wasn’t as reliable as it is now, at least where I live. We used to have frequent blackouts for no apparent reason. Not due to thunderstorm or a power pole being felled in a car accident. Just a regular, irritating power failure.
Yes indeed. Or a television set which would get a thin, black line at the top of the screen and a similar thin black line at the bottom. Said lines gradually got thicker until the picture was about 2 inches high and the rest of the screen was black. You had to turn the TV off for a couple of hours until the valves cooled down.
When I was a sophomore in college, I decided to come home during fall break by taking the train. My college was at one end of the rail line, and my home was close to the last stop on the other end of the rail line, and I had made this journey many times before on Friday evenings to come home for the weekends.
On this day, however, I took a train that left my college station around noon. I told my father to meet me at the station close to our house around 1 pm, since the train ride always took about an hour. My father is a college professor and had a break in his class schedule long enough to leave his school, get me at the train station, drop me off at home, and return to school before his next class started.
This was before either of us had a cell phone, by the way.
What I hadn’t realized was that during the day, the trains did not run all the way to the end of the rail line. The final stop on the train that I took that day was two stops ahead of my usual stop. So I had to get off there, and when I checked the schedule at the station, I saw that the next train that would come along and take me to my home station wouldn’t arrive for two hours.
I wasn’t worried about myself – there was a payphone at the station, so I could either call a cab to take me home, or wait two hours with a book until the next train.
But I was a basket case thinking about my father, who was waiting for me at my usual station for a train that was not going to arrive for another two hours. What was he going to do? If he waited much longer, he would miss his next class. I could go home now or wait two hours, no problem, but there was no way I could get in touch with him to tell him my plan, because he didn’t have a phone in the car. I was SO UPSET about this I was almost in tears. I didn’t want him to be late for work, just sitting there waiting for me, but what could I do??
I don’t know how, but somehow my dad figured out the train wasn’t coming to the station he was waiting at, and drove to the station where I was. He too was SO UPSET – at me, because he thought I had somehow done this on purpose (uh, no, why would I do that? I just had assumed the trains ran on the same schedule all day).
The reason I remember this experience was because I learned a valuable lesson that day, a lesson that many girls learn as little children, but it took me until this moment at 19 years old to learn: if my dad is mad at me and I start crying, he will back off.
So just think: if we had had cell phones that day, I never would have learned that lesson. 
Manual typewriters when you had to type multiple copies with typing paper and use whiteout if you made a mistake (you could get an eraser for the original paper but needed the thing that Mike Nesmith’s mom invented for the carbon pages). And the good lord help you if you had to type on a printed form not meant for it.
About 1972 I had a job where I once picked up my check Friday evening. My friends and I needed some money to go out and guess who just had a paycheck, in fact the only gainfully employed one? No ATMs those days with the check directly deposited. We found an all night supermarket who agree to cash it (they were in the same mall as my employer) if I bought something. So I had to go through and find something we could use…settling on some pre popped popcorn and soda. And then when the clerk said “I can’t take this”, it was “call the manager, he okayed it earlier”.
My father used to have some kind of Polaroid instant camera where he would measure the light with a hand device to set the shutter speed, adjust an accordion like thing on the camera lens/body for the focus, push the button, pull out the picture that had the picture and developing fluid, wait a minute and then peel off the layer to reveal our “instant picture”.
Besides having “snow tires” for winter, my father would put chains on his tires when the snow got bad, before that go outlawed.
The joys of FORTRAN and flow charts and punch cards in having a computer figure out the area in a parallelogram. “Why do I need a If X < Y, GO TO 140 line here, you ignorant Nazi computer geek”?
THE PAST
I wanted a series of articles that appeared in the 1907 issues of Success magazine. Luckily I lived near the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, even they didn’t have that magazine. Luckily they did have the Union Catalog, which was a shelf-full of oversized volumes listing periodical holdings at libraries throughout the United States. Turns out the closest library with the volume I wanted was the Free Library of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. So, a few weeks later, I drove there, turned in a request slip at the library, and was gratified that they not only had the issues I was looking for, but also had a good-quality photocopy machine. So I drove back home – it was about a five hour round trip – happy.
TODAY
Why all the drama? All you need to do is click on the link to Google’s Book’s copy.
At my college dorm, circa 1980, there were not phones in the rooms. Connections were there, so a few people did hook up a phone, but it cost money. For the rest of us, receiving a call meant:
- friend or relative call main switchboard of dorm, and ask for me
- switchboard operator buzzing my room. This caused a little white flag thing to show up.
- I would hit a button to cause the white flag thing to go back to its natural state. This alerted the switchboard operator that I was there
- walk to the end of the hall and pick up a phone that connected to the switchboard
- the switchboard operator would answer and I would identify myself
- the operator would then connect my call to the phone that I was on
If I wasn’t there, the white flag would alert me that I might have a message that the caller had left. There was a pay phone in the dorm for me to make calls.
Since no one has mentioned travel agents, I will. To get a plane ticket in the old days, I would have to go to a travel agent and figure out the details with her (usually female). Travel agents had computer terminals that connected with the airline and would give info on flights and such. Not sure how it was before that though. The best experience I had with a travel agent was a very pretty young lady with one green eye and one blue eye. Very green and very blue. Hypnotizing.
I have a book written by an ancestor that traces the Colegrove family back to its origins. The book was written in the late 1800s. In the preface, the author explains how, when letter-writing was finally exhausted, he traveled to all corners of the country by train, coach, stage and horseback to track down distant relatives. Now that’s a dedicated genealogist!
I remember those from when I was a kid. Obviously this was years before I got my own credit card, but my grandparents ran a general store. I’ve only made a transaction that way once (just a few years ago) and that was in a restaurant when their regular terminal had gone down. I think many restaurants still keep one of those setups onhand to deal with situtations like that.
I’ve always wondered what my mother was like before cellphones. I have a habit of leaving my cellphone turned off for hours at a time or forgetting to turn it back on after watching a movie or eating dinner and that drives her bonkers. She also has this weird aversion to leaving voice mail messages so sometimes I’ll check my missed calls, notice she called half a dozen times, but not left any messages. And I inheirited enought of her Germanic stubborness (which she denies having) to not bother trying to call her back because whatever she wanted can’t be important because she didn’t leave a message. 
That really drives her crazy.
In the 70s I was working as a typesetter. The input device was like a typewriter with extra keys. It generated paper tape, and punched a 6-bit byte for each character or code. There were codes for everything: font, size, leading, line length, alignment, and an unbelievably complex set of codes for setting tabs. To complicate matters, it was a few years before the input devices had monitors. Instead, they had an LED strip of about 20 characters, including codes, over the keyboards. You couldn’t see the font, size or position of what you were creating. You had to conceptualize everything in your head. And there was no way to edit the tape. If you made a mistake, or if you needed to change something like a font, you had to manually splice the tape with a new corrected section, sometimes even manually punching holes in the tape, or covering existing holes. There was a little device for punching holes, which we called a “chicken plucker.”
The greatest challenge was typesetting a calculus textbook . . . without a monitor.
The tape was then fed into the output device, which was the size of an upright piano. As the output device read the paper tape, it flashed each character, through a film-negative font, onto a roll of photographic film. We then had to develop the film in a darkroom and hang it up to dry.
Around the same time, I had started my own business of selling stamps to collectors. I had all my inventory records typed out on several hundred index cards, one card for each type of stamp. The problem was that sometimes I needed the cards sorted by catalog number, sometimes by price, sometimes by how many I had in stock. I must have spent half my life re-sorting those index cards. I would have paid anything for even a very basic version of Excel.
By the way, This is the type of manual calculator I used for several years. You had to “dial” the numbers in with a little metal stylus. Eventually I bought the first LED calculator that came out. It could only do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and cost $100.
Some of my transcriptionists still refer to our digital audio files (as in WAVs, MP3s, DVFs, etc) as tapes. Makes me twitch every time.
Oh, I remember me and my girlfriends, stopping at the service desk of the grocery store on a weekend night, cashing a check for our drinkin’ money - $20 was more than sufficient and even covered the cost of gas! And the White Out - I was a true artiste of White Out, I could correct even carbon copies with a tiny pointed brush - the daVinci surgery robot couldn’t do better! … I remember my mom’s old washing machine from the 50’s, and her putting clothes through the wringer so they came out flat - and then, out to the backyard and the clothesline. It was a lot of physical labor that way, but of course most women didn’t work outside of the home full time, they had time to do tedious chores. that’s just the way it was, that’s how laundry got done.