This is kind of a flip of this thread, in which people discuss the social, technological, or cultural changes that have happened in their lifetimes that surprised them the most. Instead, I wonder - what changes, that happened before your life or very early in your life, seem totally werid or surprising to you in light of what’s happened since?
One of mine is cable television; I grew up with cable in every household, and most of my peers unthinkingly consider it a necessity on part with running water or electricity. It’s really weird to me to think that it was, not long before I was born (1980), a complete luxury, and that was where it was available. I remember watching an eighties movie recently where one of the characters was enthralled with the rich kid’s cable TV, and muttered “we don’t even have that in our county yet…and we couldnt’ afford it if we did.” Weird!
Another one is interstates - I only recently learned that the national interstate system wasn’t really even built until 1960 or so, and wasn’t completed until 1991. I never really thought about it - I just kind of thought they were “always there.” :smack:
That 3D movies and stereoscopic photographs have long gone out of fashion seems backwards.
The Super Bowl is younger than my parents, and Barbie’s just the same age as my mother. Both seem like timeless American icons.
That “negress” and “jewess” were used neutrally and genuinely still seems hard to swallow.
Oh, more:
Being gay meant never having to worry about condoms.
Client/server wasn’t the default way of computers communicating with each other (don’t get my mother started).
For me it’s how terms for groups of people fall in and out of use. Witness “queer” (bad, then good); gay (good, now is losing its meaning), the n-word, black, colored, etc. I find it hard to accept that “boy” and “girl” were used for fully functional adults.
This is kind of a cliche, but on par with the interstate highway idea: the internet.
I mean, I can remember using a hardcover encyclopedia to get information for a homework assignment; calling businesses and asking for directions; stopping by the movie theater to buy tickets for a show later that day; trying to remember what actor played a character in a movie and just having to ask people if they knew. But things like that just seem so weird and wrong now. It seems like a different lifetime.
Virtually no movie video media before VCRs.
If you missed seeing a movie at the theatre it was pretty much gone forever. Maybe a few years later one of your 5 tv channels may show it as their movie of the week. But before DVDs and VHS there didn’t exsist a way of going “Let’s go home and watch a movie!”, or “Let’s pop in a movie for the kids to watch.”
The ubiquity of porn. When I was 12, sneaking a peek at a Playboy in the drug store was an unimaginable thrill. I have to think that this would be absolutely dull for a 12 year old today.
The instantaneous availability of information. I am with Autumn on this. If there was something I needed or wanted to know growing up, I had to ride my bike to the library. Now, all the information in the world is a few clicks away.
It always amazes me that banks (and other big organizations with lots of numbers to crunch) existed without computers. All those calculations, done completely by hand. Amazing!
Same deal with the moon missions. They sent people to the moon with the processing power of my dishwasher. Crazy!
Just after graduating from high school, my mother worked for a bank in Peterborough, Ontario (in the early 1950s). She worked around what she described as ‘the first computer in Peterborough’; she also said that they called it ‘the Marchant machine’ (presumably Marchant was the maker).
I can remember when bank branches started to become interconnected. This was in my teens (late 1970s), and it was a big deal. Multi-Branch Banking! No longer did you have to go to your specific branch to deposit and withdraw money without extra hassle!
By the time I got to university (late 1981), I had access to a money machine, and not long after that the national Interac network came in, and machines from different banks were interconnected.
Well, if your goal was to make me feel old, mission accomplished!
Hell, the Walkman was “big deal”, so you can imagine what I think about Ipods! Other than computers, I think cell phones are probably the biggest single change. In the 60s, 70s, 80s such compact and powerful devices were inconceivable.
Barcode scanners. How places like supermarkets even functioned before this boggles the mind. I vaugely remember stock boys with pricing guns rapidly putting individual price stickers on each and every can of green beans before putting them on the shelf. And if there was a sale or price change they had to go resticker every single can. Bizzare.
ATMs and direct deposit. If I had to go to a bank nowdays between 9-5 Monday thru Friday or before noon on Saturday every time I wanted to deposit a pay check or take out some cash I would go insane. I couldn’t imagine be stuck on a Saturday at 1 in the afternoon with no access to my money when suddenly a friend drops by and wants to go out to dinner, movies, and then to the bars and you have to tell him “Sorry, I didn’t take out any cash this week.”
I was born just late enough to completely miss the decades long dark ages of animation. In fact, those even a teensy bit older than I caught the tail end of it and and those their age and older hold an obnoxiously uncritical nostalgia for dreck ranging from Yogi Bear to Rocky & Bullwinkle to Transformers. That I just started gaining cognition when the sleeping titans of animation (Disney & WB) suddenly reawakened left me no perception of the cartoon chasm between the late 50’s and the late 80’s. I can’t imagine what it’d be like consciously witness the burgeoning animation silver age.
Awhile ago, there was a Pit thread on feminism, and people talked about the way it used to be. One poster mentioned having to sign a form to help his mom get a mortgage. She couldn’t get a loan without having a man’s signature. It’s so strange that things like this happened just a little while ago.
About 30 years ago I remember a female friend having to get her husband’s signature to get her tubes tied, even though she and the husband were in the process of getting a divorce and she had just given birth to their 4th child whom he refused to acknowledge. You would think that they could have cut this particular person some slack but apparently he still owned her reproductive capacity.
Women simply couldn’t get a loan without a male’s signature. I remember a friend who had to take her senile grandfather out of the nursing home to have him co-sign a loan for her house! Apparently the only qualification was having a penis.
When I was a kid they were both Very Big Things. When you went to see Grandma and Grandpa and you flew on an airplane that was the most exciting part of the vacation. Everybody got dressed up and you even took photos of getting on the plane. These days, flying is an uncomfortable routine – although, I grant, a lot less expensive.
Same thing with long-distance. When I was a kid, you had to place a call through an operator, wait for it go through, and pay through the nose for the privilege. As such, it was reserved only for verry, very good or very, very bad news.
Today, except for punching in a couple of extra digits on your cell phone, does anyone even distinguish between local and long distance?
Walt Disney World. It’s existed almost my entire life, certainly for the entire part of my life where I actually had cognition, so it’s REALLY weird to know that I actually existed for 7 months before it opened.
Same way with things like the Mary Tyler Moore Show or the Brady Bunch…these ran concurrent with my childhood, but I don’t remember any of them first run. All of my memories of them come from syndicated reruns.
And Rankin-Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, that sine qua non of Christmas, is only 7 years older than me. That realization, when it came, was stunning. I literally cannot imagine a Christmas without Rudolph.
Not that long ago banks weren’t even open that long. I remember when “banker’s hours” were something like 10 am to 3 pm, and they weren’t open on weekends. If you were lucky, some branches had extended hours on Friday so people could cash their paychecks. Oh, the tellers were there all day, but they had to do many things by hand to get ready in the morning and close out the books in the evening that are handled instantly by computers today.
This leads me to how extended business hours are today. When I was a kid, nothing was open on Sunday, and even during the week many businesses closed at 5 or 6 pm. Now it seems inconceivable that any store would close before nine, any day of the week.