When I think about technology, I usually go straight to my parents' childhood and the changes they've seen in their lifetime. Then it dawned on me. ME! What about me? I should be included in the "changes seen" regarding technology.
As a child, we had a television that was in a piece of furniture like a dresser. My parents bought Magnavox TV's over the years. We had one TV, and it was in the living area in the 1960's, that opened into the kitchen. There was no remote control. The channels I remember were ABC, NBC and CBS. My favorite show was "Wild Kingdom", but I rarely got to see it because it came on during evening church service on Sundays.
Phone service back then was a "party line". Several households used the same line. I remember our phone having a certain ring, and when you answered your ring, you often could hear when someone else in another household picked up the phone to listen in on your conversation. You could hear the click when they hung their phone up. As soon as private lines became available, my parents had one.
I learned to type on a small blue-green typewriter when I was about 8 years old (ca 1966). I remember being happy when Wite-Out, a liquid corrector came out.
In high school typing class, etc., we learned to use carbon paper. I did my best to not make any mistakes because that meant typing the entire paper over.
My first fulltime job was at a retail store in San Angelo, Texas, in the office (about 1978). The office manager was excited about the new typewriter they were getting. It was an IBM Memory Typewriter. I worked on that typewriter. I remember learning to program the settings to fit into the blank spaces in the store's statements. When it was time to send out statements, I just typed in a name, account number, and the amount due, hit a button, and the typewriter filled the statement in. I was around 20 years old at the time.
The first cell phone I ever owned was around 1980 or so. It was in a huge bag and it was heavy. To think that that heavy phone has evolved into a small phone that can fit in the pocket of jeans or a purse and you can now access the internet like on a computer is pretty awesome.
With regard to cell phones and how things have changed, I spent many hours on the weekends riding my horse out in a rural area of "The Big Country" area of Texas. My friends and I would meet up and ride miles in a day. No cell phones. No way to contact our families if we needed them other than riding (or running) through miles of cotton fields to the nearest house we could find.
I didn't work on computers until the 1980s in a bank, and though they took up a good part of a desktop, they were nothing compared to the size they were in the early days.
Lastly, I think of vehicles. Whether I was driving a standard or automatic transmission vehicle after I got my driver's license at age 15, I was just happy that we had an air conditioner and a radio. We always had a map, too, and it would be years later when most of all of us would be using a GPS system to help us find our way.
Technology has changed just in my lifetime and as I look back on the "old days", I do miss them at times, but I sure like the advances that have been made in technology.
- Revis
This content was crafted for Amy Johnson Crow's 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge, focusing on the theme "Technology" this week.
