Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
Lots of unexpected things have happened since I was a kid. I was born before TV was invented. My father was a Ham radio operator with a W5 license which was issued before there was commercial radio. Radios had been invented already. Radio stations had not.
I think I was 8 when we went to New York to visit my grandmother, probably during the Christmas holidays but I'm not sure. She had a TV, which I hadn't even heard of till I saw hers. I remember when we got back I mentioned that TV in class and half the kids didn't believe me. The teacher had read about TV and that the picture didn't actually exist but that a moving dot of light fooled you into thinking it was a picture and she was absolutely convinced that would make you go blind. When I explained that it was easy to see the picture she didn't believe me. i think I got sent to the principal's office for being contradictory, or some such. It was a few years before TV and stations came to our part of Texas.
I was 14 when we got our first TV at home and we were the only one in our area with one. All of a sudden we got really popular. TV screens then were roundish. The top and bottom was kind of flat but overall it was a circle. There were two stations in Houston and one 50 miles away in Galveston that we could watch about 1 day out of 3 or 4. TV came on at 3:30 when kids got home from school and it went off at 10:30 after the nightly news. In between those times there was nothing on.
My first exposure to data communications was at work, probably about 1967, working for the Harris County (Houston) District Clerk. We had a 55 baud modem that we used to receive data from some federal agency, I forget which. Then we got a T1 line and joined the newly started NCIC system.
I first got on the internet probably in the mid to late 1970s. I don't recall the actual date. It could have been the early 1980s. My roommate had a brother who was the head of the math department at the university of Calgary, (I think that was the school) and when he came to visit he asked me if I'd help his students learning to use small computers online. He set me up with a phone number to call to connect to their computer, which let me connect through it to a lot of other computers. At the time I'd never heard of the internet and I had no idea I was on it. I didn't find out till years later. At the end of each session it would put a bill for the time I'd used on their Amdahl mainframe, usually in the thousands of dollars, which included the long distance to connect to it. I didn't have to pay it of course.
Later I got in Compuserve, which my company paid for at the rate of $12 per minute during off hours and I think it was $80 a minute during business hours. Compuserve was what the world used until the internet became available to the public.
So yes, there have been some changes. And no, I wouldn't have guessed at most of them.
Still, even though I think most of us know we can't predict where technology might go in the future, discussing it's possibilities is both fun and valuable.. It stirs up thoughts and ideas that just might help us invent the future.
Barry
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It is even more fun to listen to the older ones talk about when they were younger.
I am not sure if it was first but one of our first tv channels was in about 1957. I wasn't around then, but I spent quite a bit of time at that station in the 70s.
Home video games were our new thing.
Right now, I am playing slots on one tablet, typing this on another and streaming a movie through the Playstation from Amazon. I remember when you had to buy or rent movies on VHS.