photobyalan
A-List Customer
- Messages
- 451
I remember
... my family taking my older brother to the bus station so he could be shipped off to Vietnam. I was too young to understand the danger he was in
...watching Captain Kangaroo in my pajamas (me in the pajamas, not the Captain!)...
...watching the original airing of Star Trek episodes
...being outraged that gasoline cost 57 cents a gallon in 1976
...watching the 1969 moon launch in color at my best friend's house (we would not have a color TV at my house for five more years)
...having a bank book that you took with you when you did business with the bank. The teller would stamp the book with transactions and your new balance.
...the little plastic gizmo that you put in the middle of a 45RPM record so you could play them on a big record player.
...the first time I ever saw an ATM, in 1980.
...the first really new car my parents ever bought, a 1970 Chevy Nova.
...riding on the tailgate, with our feet hanging over the edge, of a station wagon on the way to drop stuff at the dump (in 1970, we'd never heard of a "Landfill"). There was always at least one fire burning there, and it was a treasure hunt for a couple of niine-year-old boys.
...my mother reaching over from the dirver's seat and hitting me in the chest whenever she slammed on the brakes, in an effort to keep me from hitting the dashboard. In the early '70s, nobody wore seat belts or put kids in the back seat unless there was already someone sitting on the passenger side.
...the smell of my father's air-cooled, rear engine Corvairs. He had several in the 1960's, including a couple convertibles, and the heaters always sent a little engine exhaust into the cabin.
...Howard Cosell breaking into a Monday Night Football telecast to announce the murder of John Lennon, in 1980.
...four months later, watching the shooting of President Reagan being replayed hundreds of times as the TV networks struggled and, at times, failed to get the facts straight before they reported the details of the days events.
...sitting in the control room of channel 6 in Columbus, Ohio, in stunned silence as we watched the space shuttle Challenger explode shortly after liftoff, in 1986.
...the sweat on the upper lip of Richard Nixon as he announced his resignation on national television in 1974
...paying $4.00 to see the Grateful Dead in Gainesville, Florida in 1980.
...the first time I talked on a cellular phone, in 1986. It had a separate handset with a coiled cord that connected it to the transceiver/battery unit and the whole assembly weighed about 10 pounds.
...the first computer I ever used, in 1977. It was actually a teletype, connected by a modem to a mainframe at a local college. You had to make a phone call, then put the handset into a special cradle which was part of the keyboard/printer. Programs were run from a roll of paper tape which had holes punched in it.
...computer programming classes in college in the early 1980's, in which the students needed to carry boxes of punch cards around and feed them into terminals. If your program didn't run, you needed to find the offending card, make a corrected one to replace it, and put it in the stack. If your cards got shuffled, you had a lot of work ahead of you.
...cigarette commercials on TV.
... my family taking my older brother to the bus station so he could be shipped off to Vietnam. I was too young to understand the danger he was in
...watching Captain Kangaroo in my pajamas (me in the pajamas, not the Captain!)...
...watching the original airing of Star Trek episodes
...being outraged that gasoline cost 57 cents a gallon in 1976
...watching the 1969 moon launch in color at my best friend's house (we would not have a color TV at my house for five more years)
...having a bank book that you took with you when you did business with the bank. The teller would stamp the book with transactions and your new balance.
...the little plastic gizmo that you put in the middle of a 45RPM record so you could play them on a big record player.
...the first time I ever saw an ATM, in 1980.
...the first really new car my parents ever bought, a 1970 Chevy Nova.
...riding on the tailgate, with our feet hanging over the edge, of a station wagon on the way to drop stuff at the dump (in 1970, we'd never heard of a "Landfill"). There was always at least one fire burning there, and it was a treasure hunt for a couple of niine-year-old boys.
...my mother reaching over from the dirver's seat and hitting me in the chest whenever she slammed on the brakes, in an effort to keep me from hitting the dashboard. In the early '70s, nobody wore seat belts or put kids in the back seat unless there was already someone sitting on the passenger side.
...the smell of my father's air-cooled, rear engine Corvairs. He had several in the 1960's, including a couple convertibles, and the heaters always sent a little engine exhaust into the cabin.
...Howard Cosell breaking into a Monday Night Football telecast to announce the murder of John Lennon, in 1980.
...four months later, watching the shooting of President Reagan being replayed hundreds of times as the TV networks struggled and, at times, failed to get the facts straight before they reported the details of the days events.
...sitting in the control room of channel 6 in Columbus, Ohio, in stunned silence as we watched the space shuttle Challenger explode shortly after liftoff, in 1986.
...the sweat on the upper lip of Richard Nixon as he announced his resignation on national television in 1974
...paying $4.00 to see the Grateful Dead in Gainesville, Florida in 1980.
...the first time I talked on a cellular phone, in 1986. It had a separate handset with a coiled cord that connected it to the transceiver/battery unit and the whole assembly weighed about 10 pounds.
...the first computer I ever used, in 1977. It was actually a teletype, connected by a modem to a mainframe at a local college. You had to make a phone call, then put the handset into a special cradle which was part of the keyboard/printer. Programs were run from a roll of paper tape which had holes punched in it.
...computer programming classes in college in the early 1980's, in which the students needed to carry boxes of punch cards around and feed them into terminals. If your program didn't run, you needed to find the offending card, make a corrected one to replace it, and put it in the stack. If your cards got shuffled, you had a lot of work ahead of you.
...cigarette commercials on TV.
