The flip phone will soon be the next natural time divide. These morons acted like the lady was using two tin cans and a string. Tech Shaming is the latest thing.
My own personal time jump is the divide between the seventies/early eighties and today. My college experience was completely alien to young people today. No mobile phones, no computers, no 24 hour news cycle, mystery products like typewriters, carbon packs, and white out. Anyone under 30 has no idea what I’m talking about. Maybe they saw grandpa using a typewriter. Even an electric typewriter seems primitive too them.
I was in college during the transition - when I was a freshman, the library had a room full of typewriters that you could sign up to use. By the time I got my degree, there were MacIntoshes aplenty, which made life a lot easier, believe me…
My only tech device was a TI SR-50 calculator. Over a $100 in 1978. Very expensive for a senior in high school. That calculator made a big difference in college. I just missed Apple computers in the college’s English Writing lab. I think that opened my senior year. I had already taken all my English and Lit classes. People my age are the last that studied only with books and wrote papers with typewriters, Used card catalogs in the research library.
Heck, don’t forget the “Boys from Brazil”. The notion of a bunch of ex-Nazis planning world takeover from South America seemed vaguely plausible, though moreso cheesy.
I have a Sharp pocket calculator from the 70s that I keep as a nice relic of design. Those TI’s were nifty little computers for their time. By the time I entered high school, 1985, we had pretty cheap calculators with a lot of functions–even solar-powered!
We got our first PC in 1985, too, and I learned how to type right away. I was one of the few kids in my dorm who had his own computer, so I made extra money typing papers.
I understand what the OP is talking about. I was born in 1973, a mere 28 years after World War II ended yet it was an impossibly long time ago for me to contemplate. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a direct connection to the events. I did. Both of my grandfathers fought in WWII and my great-grandfather fought in WWI. I even had a great-grandmother that I knew quite well that who was born in 1883. She told me all about reconstruction and the aftermath of the Civil War because she knew the people and soldiers involved quite well. Still, all of those things got mixed into my mind as things that happened a really long time ago even though WWII really wasn’t in the absolute sense.
I started college in 1991 just when computers were starting to become a real thing for everyone. I was lucky because my roommate (RIP) had one but I still had to go to the computer lab (open 24/7) to do most of my assignments. There were no cell phones for normal people but I got a Unix e-mail account in 1993 and web access through something called Netscape 0.8 beta in the lab I interned with in 1994. There was barely anything on the web at the time unless you looked really hard. I figured out the purpose of this newfangled contraption very quickly - porn. There were no search engines back then. You just had to go from link to link to see where you ended up but I could still come up with up to one medium quality nudie picture an hour if I tried really hard. I loved the web from the beginning but it is not an exaggeration at all to say that it was porn that provided the foundation for most of it. Everything from video technology to online credit card payment systems was started because of it.
Flash forward to 1997 or so. The current era began and still hasn’t ended. The web started to mature, you could do most of the things you can do now if you were savvy and tried pretty hard. Most of the change since about 1999 except for ubiquitous smart-phones is about the same with only incremental improvements. That is going on 16 years or more now. The rate of change between 1945 and 1961 or between 1961 and 1977 was exponentially greater. I do believe we are stuck in a cultural lull today. I could go back to 1999 right now and be perfectly fine. I could even take my current wardrobe and not look much out of place.
The one thing I notice is that kids, including my own, are much more regimented and prudish than my generation ever was. Their music is bland and innocuous unlike our was and they study hard starting early on. Everything they do is policed and regimented. Bless them but I wouldn’t have wanted to grow up in that environment. We were hellions compared to them. This may be the first generation is history to admit that.
Ditto. My grandparents (in their mid 90s now), when they were children, were walking around with people who were alive during the civil war. And those people, when they were young, were walking around with people who were alive during the American revolution. Granted, those are some big stretches, and it’s not a ton of people, but still. There is the not impossible probability of someone my age having access to a story of the revolution as passed through only three people. Crazy.
My great grandfather had a horse wagon that him and his wife came to Texas on and built a house in the middle of 600 acres that he had purchased. The wagon still sat in tatters in front of the house when I was a kid.
I remember being a little kid playing on that thing, completely unaware of all the history my little rump was sitting on.
I still sometimes sit in awe that I actually knew someone that moved here to Texas on a horse wagon before cars were a thing. (Or at least a ubiquitous thing)
Meeting elderly people in China always amazed me. I met a 99 year old woman once. She remembers when there was an emperor, decades of war, the worst of Maoist era… And now today. It was only in the 60s that people in Sichuan were eating the bark of trees and one out of seven died of starvation. Now, everyone is saving up for an iPhone 6. The mind boggles.
I still can’t make sense of the fact that I was alive for apartheid, and I remember it coming to end.
I call it generation jumping and you can go back really far very quickly with the right connections. My grandfather (still very much alive at 87 and running his own business; he also has two much older siblings still alive) had a grandfather that was one of the last surviving Civil War soldiers (Confederate). He died in 1949 when my grandfather was completely grown. I have a Life magazine issue from 1948 with my great-great grandfather and the rest of the surviving Civil War vets in it (there were enough to fill up a few pages of photographs even then).
One strange trivia fact is that John Tyler, 10th President of the United States (born 1790 and serving 1841 -1845) still has two living grandsons. I am 41 and the oldest people that I ever met growing up were born just after the Civil War. One of them read stories to us in the town library when I was a child and she was 103. My father, born 1948 met an actual Civil War soldier as a child.
I agree. In fact, it was a better world back then (pre-9/11, etc.), and I miss it.
I agree here too. My daughter is 9 and has a ton of homework to do. She seems to play like a normal kid. The only differences I see from when I was a kid is that she plays more video games (although we lived in the world of Atari and Intellivision, so it isn’t all that different, really), and she has Internet access. She lives in a world that is tougher and stricter than mine was (though her parents aren’t very strict).
My grandfather was in his late forties when my dad was born. I never understood as a child that he was born in the early 1890’s. He was eligible for the draft in WWI but didn’t get selected. I’d have quite a few questions for him now. I regret not asking them. But I knew him as this older man that never learned to drive. He even insisted on using a mule to plow his large garden. I knew he was old but didn’t understand he was from a different generation than my other grandad.
I think generally speaking, as one grows older, 20 years or 30 years becomes fathomable. As a child 3 years seems like a big deal, now in my 30s it might be 3 years before I see a friend. So at a certain point you think that 20 years before you were born, once an incomprehensibly distant epoch, seems much closer to hand. I can’t think of a better term but I call it telescoping of time.
I have been doing a lot of historical research lately and once you dig beneath the surface, seemingly alien aspects of previous eras I think it only starts getting really hard to comprehend prior to the 1860s or 1850s. Even then, there are of course artefacts of much older periods that resonate with the modern mind.
I think modern youths have much more access to archival stuff if they want it than we would have had growing up so perhaps the more recent past doesn’t seem quite as past for them as for previous generations.
I didn’t really understand WWII in an intuitive way until I went to see my little brother on Coast Guard duty in Oahu, Hawaii 2 years ago. We went to the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor on a Sunday morning when it wasn’t crowded. I thought it would be like a typical tourist attraction but it wasn’t at all. If you want to know how recent WWII was, that will drive it home for you in a very hard way. The memorial is beautiful but you stand just over a ship that is also a graveyard from which the bodies can never be retrieved even though it is in shallow water.
The point that really drives it home is that it is still leaking diesel fuel to this day and you can see it as an oil slick right below you. That may not sound like much but ancient ruins do not do that. Recent tragedies do. You want to ask why people can’t stop the diesel fuel from polluting the beautiful harbor but no one can. If they try to fix it, it will probably just make things a lot worse.
It is also quite painful to see the very old American and Japanese soldiers crying their eyes out on the memorial just like they do every day. If you ever get a chance to go there, do it, because it is both a beautiful and tragic display and it will make it clear just how recent those events were in just a painful couple of hours.
Your grandmother might have even known some Civil War veterans. When I was a kid some of the elderly had known some. And as I mentioned before on another board an Indian woman said that she had elderly relatives who experienced Wounded Knee.
I think one of the reasons “Stranger Danger” failed so badly is that it was made by adults who failed to appreciate how children’s memories work. I remember being three or four, and being assured by my mother that I had met the person she was re-introducing me to. For a little kid, not seeing someone for just a few months means that you might as well not have met them at all.
Well, probably not, but that’s just because she came to the US when she was five or six, and spent most of her first ten years or so on the lower East side mostly with other Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Your point is still well-taken. My other grandparents, who were born here, and a little older, most certainly did know Civil War vets. One branch of my family has been in the US for a long time, and belonged to the first synagogue in the Americas. I should look it up-- it may not be as many generations ago as I think.
Similarly to the President Tyler trivia, the last person receiving a Civil War pension just died a couple of years ago. She was much younger than her husband who had served but still…