Here’s a fun and easy one: In the consumer society of post-World War II America, nothing helps date a community like its memories of technological innovation.
Our reminiscences about mimeographs and Dymo label printers and vinyl records have been powerful reminders of the lost world we grew up in. Spankin’-new San Diego in our youth was a land of early adoption, but I bet most of us can still remember the novelty of seeing our first:
- Pocket calculator
- Video game
- Microwave oven
- Cell phone
- VHS system
- CD player
- Personal computer
- Cable TV broadcast
And maybe even our first color TV show, photocopier or portable cassette recorder.
I’m sure I’ve missed more than a few technological milestones you recall with nostalgia or wonder … Respond to my list, and add some more bullets of your own!
May as well really date ourselves…
• answering machines
• phones with buttons instead of dials
What about our futures-past: all the innovations that we expected to have seen by now? I was sure we’d all have personal jet-packs by 1999…
And high-speed trains! Wouldn’t those have been nice?
High speed trains might be in our future, they are talking of L.A. to San Francisco and Sacramento.
First time I saw one of those huge cell phone I laughed, oyeah remember dial phones in cars, very classy.
I am sticking with my DOS computer.
Strange, I just thought about that about an hour before reading this post. Since our Che days, we have pretty much seen CDs come and go. I still remember when they came out and it was like “they’re unbreakable and can’t be scratched!” They were pretty expensive at first, too….
Didn’t Adam West have a car phone is his batmobile?
I remember when we got our first VCR. It was heavy with the loader popping up from the top and you had to slam it down to get the movie in. The play buttons were bright colored plastic and readable from a distance, not like todays fonts which are sized for the eyes of Keebler elves. The movie we had on tape was the Wizard of Oz which my mom taped off of TV, so it had all the commercials. My sister and I watched that tape over and over until we had it memorized. We recited that movie at the dinner table, at school and in the car on many family roadtrips. (plugging nose and singing:)..”and she’s not only merely dead, she’s really most sincerely dead!” We recited it in costumes and with different voices. Country twang. Martian. Mentally challenged. We drove our parents INSANE.
Rentals stores were far and few between at first. There was one on Morena and another out in La Mesa. That was about it. This was year’s before Blockbuster. I’m not sure when Kensington Video started:
http://members.cox.net/kenvideo/
but “Winnie” has been there as long as I can remember. KV is still going strong and they have titles that are even too obscure for Netflix.
I remember my first ATM in college -- it gave out $5 bills.
Every now and then the kids and I will play “What didn’t you have growing up”. Apparently, I lived back in the olden days.
This is funny! Our first Radar Range which is now a (microwave) was really big and you had to stand back (or you might get radiation):), there were holes in the front no back. It was kind of loud. My Papa Stan brought it to our house (he was an inventor) so he was so excited about this radar range.
Later we also got a VCR that popped up on the top,it was huge with fake wood on the side.
Who had Beta?
I believe I’ve recounted how I came across an old, unconnected rotary phone among drifts of dead office equipment at my last office. For fun, I tested my muscle memory dialing some familiar phone numbers. It was a lot of work! I don’t know how much resistance index fingers had to work against with the average rotary phone, but mine was getting sore after a few minutes.
No wonder telemarketing has gotten so much more prevalent.
Matthew: you could buy a sterling silver “phone dialer”. Remember Breakfast at Tiffany’s?
Before the portable cassette player -- which was separate than the radio so recording songs was a bit tricky -- I had a portable record player. It folded up into a cute little red suitcase. And my 45’s were kept in a very snazzy psychedelic carrying case as well.
In the 70’s sitting in worn red leather swivel chairs in the bar wagering at La Paloma restaurant in Clairemont with my brother, Bobby playing pacman!!! I think I was 10.
Batman had dial phone in his car, Rockford, and so did Manix. Who else?
I’ve got enough 45’s and vintage Slot cars to keep me living in my current vaccuum of not dealing with Digital TV, DVD’s and Youtube. If you want to race any HO aurora Thunderjets, AFX Magnatraction or Tyco Pro, you know where to find me. IS this our age equivalant hobby of model trains? I hope not.
There are lap timers now that can be hooked up to our PC’s. Who’da thunk it?
One night when I was about 14 (before answering machines), me and some friends were stuck in Escondido with no way to get home. We were trying to call my friend’s parents from a pay phone, but they weren’t home… so we all stood around at the pay phone for nearly an hour letting the phone ring continuously at his house until someone finally came home and picked it up.
Daves comment reminds me of three way calling(why?). used to have a lot of fun making people who hated each other call each other. We must have gotten three way calling in 83.
Why the hell are you calling me, no you called me! LOL!!!
I love this topic. Thanks, Matt.
Where to begin? While I might have once been a bit of a Luddite (it was all a pretense anyway), I now enjoy most of the comforts modern technology has afforded us, that is, if I can afford them. I must admit, however, that I believe technological advances have not only made us lazy physically, but mentally as well. I grew up around libraries, and sometimes the quest for the answer to a simple question became a major exercise in critical thinking, a mystery to be unraveled through detective work. My father used to teach a course called “The Historian as Detective,” and I grew to love historical mysteries and true crime. Thanks to modern inventions, we humans tend to be much less inventive and creative, and our thought processes have become more shallow.
When I was a child my favorite piece of technology was the cassette recorder, which I used to create radio shows, tape music, write songs, create plays and even “invent” a primitive kind of multi-tracking using two tape recorders. I purchased a telephone microphone at Radio shack and recorded elaborate phone pranks--all of this of course before Caller ID and the demise of public telephones made these kinds of calls obsolete. When was the last time anyone got a crank call?
I remember the first time a saw a color TV. My parents had just moved us to Clairemont/Bay Park into a fifties tract home in which someone had cut a hole in a wall to install a color television set. Of course, the set was a piece of crap, and it was connected to one of those big aerial antennas that have disappeared from western civilization. But I remember watching “Gomer Pyle” and marveling at the color, even if it was all purple and green with a relentless vertical hold bar revolving on the screen. Remember those?!
The first calculator I ever saw must have been around 1976. My older sister Elisa, who had gotten a job and saved her money all summer, bought my mom a calculator for the unheard of cost of about one hundred dollars. It was about as big as a loaf of bread, operated on DC power or on four “C” batteries, and could only add, subtract, multiply and divide! I remember thinking that we would never have to do any kind of math again!
Around that same time, I used to hang out at one of my rich friends’ houses. They had all of the latest gadgets, like an ice cream maker, bread maker, cable TV (with one of those push button boxes), and of course, a microwave oven, which although I didn’t realize at the time, had been around since the late 40s! We used to have endless discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of food cooked in it, and the consensus was that it was a fad that would go away. In a related story, Chris Gast (RIP) used to tell me that his father was incredibly paranoid about microwave ovens. Chris was adopted, and because his adoptive father was sterile, he was bound and determined that Chris would keep his seed healthy. Chris used to drive him crazy by standing next to the microwave and positioning his crotch by the door while he was using it!
Toby mentioned electric football. For the Christmas of 1973, my parents surprised me with an electric football set that I had been admiring in the Sears “Wishbook,” whose pages I used to dogear every winter. For those of you who have never played it, you’ve got a metallic surface painted to look like a football field, which is connected to a device that causes the surface to vibrate. It is controlled by a simple switch like that you would find on a desk lamp. To play, you would bend tiny pieces of plastic underneath each badly painted Chinese-made player, attach a tiny felt football to the quarterback’s hand, and then turn on the board and watch the players bump into each other indiscriminately until the “down” was over.
The TV remote was a huge thing.
The time before remotes was grim.
I remember a friend who’s father had wired up a remote switch that went to the side of their couch where you could mute the speaker and turn off the commercials.
This was a fantastic tool for messing w/ other friends who would come over where we would explain that this particular TV had a static issue where you could turn the sound on and off by flicking your wrist towards the TV. It was a 2 man operation and we would have one guy adjusting the victims elbow and wrist while the other would be on the switch by the couch. We really ruined some folks’ wrists and elbows as they really had to master this “special” technique.
Great fun and only possible by the times and technology.
Ray--so funny about the cassette recorder. I remember, before a test I would read my science chapters into my cassette recorder and then put it, playing, under my pillow so that I would, through sleepy audio-osmosis, absorb everything. oy. Needless to say, it didn’t really work.
And Tony, should you ever find yourself in my area of Brooklyn, we have a slot car parlor that hasn’t changed since the early 70s. Four huge tracks, a big supply counter and a great jukebox. And a lot of dust.
When I was a kid, the kids WERE the remote control for the tv. You’d stand to the side of the tv set and flip the dial one station at a time until your parents decided what they wanted to watch.
In the 70s, we had the most useless and disgusting of all kitchen appliances, the trash compactor. If you compact your trash, you don’t have to take it out as often, I suppose… so you can have stinking garbage in you kitchen for twice as long.
This is a much more recent memory, but it includes one of our Che Underground buddies and did presage my accidental career as a Web content maven: I visited my first computer chat room when I came to see Paul Kaufman ca. 1986, when he was doing graduate studies at MIT.
We went out to dinner with my cousin Ron at a Burmese place called Mandalay. Afterwards, Ron (who was working at Lotus) took us back to his office to introduce us to the wonders of computer networking.
As a handle, we chose the name of the evening’s restaurant — and promptly ended up in a gay men’s chat room, where “Mandalay” was warmly hailed as an absolutely delicious pseudonym!
“I’m looking for a Mandalay … Is there a Mandalay here?”
Dave,
My friend’s family had a trash compactor--you are NOT supposed to put food in it! Paper doesn’t usually stink! But it was still pretty useless. What about electric everything: can openers, knives, refrigerators with ice makers, etc.
How about all those Presto products they had commercials for such as the hamburger presser and the Frybaby. For six payments of 6.99 they could be yours! Mail a check today. You could buy cheesy mail order albums off of television too. Remember the K-tel collections?
I always wanted a Popeil Pocket Fisherman!
Hey, what about electronic guitar tuners? My first clear memory of people using these was at a Dinosaur Jr. show in…86? No more public displays of tuning after that…you can tell when live tapes, like many on this site, came before this development.
Paul A.- I totally remember that SD Schools computer system, and playing that exact Star Trek game. Huge reams of paper scrolling through! Did you change the command lines to give yourself 100,000 photon torpedoes?
Of course! Unlimited phasers and dilithium crystals got you past the Romulans to distant starbases without having to separate the saucer from the body of the ship and self-destruct.
Fiberglass Skateboards & those large slot cars two of my fave child things.
Still have a fiberglass skateboard(along with clay wheel board, metal board and a sidewalk surfer rocker) it is a hoi or hot of Santa Cruz not a Z Flex, ride it from time to time, real smooth ride.
My brother and I got our fiberglass boards from Hammels in M.B..
Those large slot cars were/are very cool, we used to go to a track in Pismo Beach were my dad was living. I wish I still have had that slot car, it was metal flake blue with big fat tires.
trash compactors were actually real cool. my brother and i use to save up all the glass bottles and jars we could then fill it up and let it run. it was a great show. remember creepy crawlers? you could serioulsy burn the shit out of yourself with that thing. it was the first toy i had that you could plug in to the wall. i was stoked. burnt myself by 12pm chistmas day.
SSP:flywheel-based, rip-cord actuated toy cars circa 1973.
Wheelo:magnetic wire-frame w/wheel yoyo thing I ran into in 1969.
Battling Tops: friction-wheel top with no string circa 1972.
Water Blasters: rockets powered by compressed H2O.
Gyroscope: still the coolest today.
Do they still have caps? You know, for cap-guns? We used to buy rolls in bulk, line ’em up on the sidewalk and hit ’em with hammers. Much bigger bang. Coolest kid on the block got the biggest line of cap-rolls and hit them all in a row…I can’t ever forget the image of the kinda dim-witted kid next door Marc emerging from a cloud of gunpowder-smoke on Margarita Ave. in Coronado…he had this stupid toothless grin and was deaf for 2 days. I’m sure there were chinese kids a thousand years ago who did much the same thing with rocks.
All the best technological innovations were toys.
Pat
ABC News reports on the 25th anniversary of the cell phone: “Remember the first cell phone? Motorola’s early cell phone cost $4,000, had no free minutes and weighed about two and a half pounds.”
Now THIS guy is cool:
Ode to the Pee Chee folder.
Not a Gadget per se, but it dates us nonetheless. Remember when Yogurt was this new thing and people who ate it purportedly lived to be 110 years of age? And Granola was for hippy-liberal bunny huggers? Now both are a pretty regular part of the average American’s diet, and both have been proven to be about a little above marginal for your health. I recall Future Foods in PB making soy bean patty melts with bean sprouts and tofu cheese, way back- total hippy hangout. Today CEOs of large corporations cut dairy out of their diet and punk rockers go vegan on a regular basis.
Wheat germ! Tiger’s Milk bars!
Do you remember how in “Sleeper,” Woody Allen’s character had owned a health-food store called The Happy Carrot back in the 20th Century?
8 wheel traditional roller skates have given way to inline skating
Inline skates, otherwise known as “fruit boots”.
>>Remember when Yogurt was this new thing and people who ate it purportedly lived to be 110 years of age? And Granola was for hippy-liberal bunny huggers?
In the late sixties and early seventies, there were just a few health food/vegetarian restaurants around. In San Diego, we had Kung Food and Cornucopia. The Beach Boys recorded one of their strangest songs about a restaurant called H.E.L.P. (Health through Education creates Love which manifests Peace):
“I read a book on organic foods
Jumped on a health food kick
Put me in the mood
You may not get to perfect overnight
But on the way you’re feelin’ clean out of sight
We ate tonight at Fairfax and 3rd
We’re gonna spread the news and give you the word
We hope that soon you’ll eat like we did today
We’re mighty thankful now that H.E.L.P.’s on its way
Salad with a special knock you right off your seat
With carrot juice to wash it all down
Yummy carob cookies are an organic treat
And H.E.L.P. has got the best food in town”
The 24th is the 25th anniversary of the Mac!
I never owned one and really never fooled with the first one, but right now I have 5 or 6 of them in various places around the county and in various configs. As far as I care, Windows are what you look through to the outside!
Newspapers on computers in your home!
I like the caption, “Owns Home Computer.”
Oh! And here’s the Internet in 1969 … The music is pretty weird — it gets all Pepperland at the end:
“I’m looking for a Mandalay … Is there a Mandalay here?”
Howling !
I remember…Matthew and I were both DJ’s at San Dieguito High, Encinitas. We had two Teac turntables and brought in most of our own records representing some bizarre musical tastes for the day, I played a lot of Clash, Sandinista album and I think it was John Keishnick who first played Jimi Hendrix star spangled banner for the captive lunch crowd, prompting a ban on that song from the adminisration. True to our dada tendencies we proceeded to try and play that song as much as possible after that. If we weren’t inside the studio playing it, we would listen outside and hold our breath and count when that song came on till we heard the zzzzip of it being ripped off the turntable by the station manager. Can’t get that zzzziiip anymore with digital. Good times.
We weren’t a tech savvy family, my dad didn’t have a TV till his forties when he had me and my sis, then we had Black and White till I was 10 or something, I used to dream in black and white. We got excited when we got a Pong game and my sister and I used to play that a lot. that was about tops for us, and we had an electric typewriter. I wrote my final paper for highschool in a bar in Greenwhich village on my way to Europe and mailed it to my mom. She typed it up for me and turned it in. No cap and gown parade for me I was drinking 50 cent bottles of wine in front of the Notre Dame cathedral…
Not exactly off topic: I recently saw Bill Tapia who rocks the jazz ukulele, he’s 101! No kidding! He told a story about buying his first ukulele for 75 cents! And smoking mary j for the first time with Louis Armstrong! Amazing…
I got a Casio digital watch in 1980 or 81, these things were all the rage.
There was no winding, it had a stop watch and a calculator!
I still have the thing and it works, I replaced the battery about 8 years ago.
Now I just need a Members Only jacket to be oh so 80’s trendy.
This is actually brilliant:
1980: I remember standing in my fathers living room, classic 80’s condo with a chrome globe light chandelier and a view of the SD airport. My older brother told me “stand here and listen to this. It’s called techno music”. Uno Dos Tres Quatro! I stood there slack jawed in my burgundy Members Only jacket listening to my first Kraftworks album. I was all tingly with the feeling that the future was finally here.
Hey, Ron! I hope you and your family are well. I remember listening to that album with Dan on the gargantuan audiophile system. Please tell him I say hello.
We had a huge antenna for the TV that had a motor to change the direction of it. If you wanted to get channel 13 in LA to watch New Wave Theater you had to switch the dial to north. Since the TV was in a room that used to be the attic, you’d hear the antenna whirring loudly overhead and coming to a stop with a thud.