Does it have push buttons? Confessions of a Jetsons junkie...Posted on the OS on 12/22/2006.
When I was a child I hated anything "old-fashioned" and loved our 1960s technology. We had all the modern conveniences...We had a phone in our house... one phone, installed by and belonging to the phone company, with a 5-digit phone number. Long distance required an operator was only used for dire emergencies.... We wrote letters instead...
We had a TV, too... a black & white console... we got 4 channels... if you've ever laughed at Jeff Foxworthy's lament about the President being on every channel, hear me now when I tell you it was TRUE!
My dad had a radio on the kitchen table that plugged into the wall... it only got AM, but then again, we only had one station in town... I had a record player, too...
Hey, it was the dawn of the Space Age... I thought we had it all... then one day I saw a rocket ship go up on TV... and I knew there were a lot of things out there I didn't understand. Top that off with a healthy dose of Star Trek, and The Jetsons and a technology junkie was born!
Before the 60s were over we had a color TV, a 4-track tape deck in the car, a stereo, and an extension phone in the house... with a 7-digit number! I acquired a transistor radio, an instamatic camera and a cassette tape recorder... I loved anything with push buttons...
In 1969 my brother took me to see a computer room... this was not a spare bedroom converted into a home office, it was the entire floor of a large building in a large city and it was LOUD... packed with 7-foot tall machines running reel-to-reel tapes and reading punched cards...
That was THEN....I like NOW better!
NOW, I have a desktop PC and a laptop, two PDAs, a MP3 player, a digital camera, and a high-def TV that gets 180 channels... I send emails to my mom and instant messages to my grandsons... I have a wireless modem that allows me to connect almost anywhere...
And I have a phone that suspiciously resembles a Star Trek communicator... it fits into my pocket and works almost anywhere in the country... and it has a 10-digit number...
Our technological progress can now be gauged by the length of our telephone numbers...
