Every once in a while I think — usually while calling 5 minutes before I get home to say I’m 5 minutes away from home — how odd it is that in the last century I didn’t own a cell phone.
Aside from email, which I didn’t have until the fall of 1994, it’s probably the piece of technology that most shapes my experience hour-by-hour, since the answer to just about any question or the voice (or voicemail) of just about any friend is only a few thumbstrokes away. Likewise, I am eminently reachable, even if I choose not to answer.
Such an invention so radically alters our experience as to cause psychological reorientations. Like most members of the civilized world, I spend a good chunk of my day patting my inert phone in my front pocket, certain I felt it vibrate. (Those who insist on using ring tones report a similar phenomenon: the phantom phone ring. You’re sure you heard it, you scramble to find your phone, only to have no evidence that any call has come through.)
How did we survive without cell phones? When I need to know where my kids are after school — if they’re not home when they said they would be, for instance — I can easily ring them or some of their closest friends and find out what’s gone wrong. If I were more technologically sinister, or perhaps just more paranoid, I could even track them using a GPS device built into their phones. Such a thing would have been unthinkable during my own childhood.
When I have conversations on topics like this with my kids, I sometimes amuse them with stories about technological “firsts” from my own adolescence. Here are a few things I use on a daily basis that I distinctly remember life before, even though they seem indispensable now:
1. Personal computer
The first desktop computer I can remember came wheeling through the door of my sixth grade classroom sometime in 1981. It was a Commodore PET, monitor attached to the keyboard, blinking square green cursor.
The kids all gathered around and oohed and ahhed. We fought for rights to play on it during free time — text adventure games and rudimentary space invaders programs we quickly learned how to write, using BASIC, for ourselves. Our spaceships looked like tie fighters: [-O-] or <-O->. To play or record programs we used a cassette player that plugged into the back of the computer. The computer always asked us to “Press Play on Tape #1,” but I never remember seeing a PET with more than one tape deck attached.
Because the local computer guru (from whom my dad and I took a community college computer class when I was in 7th grade) had convinced our school board that Commodore would outstrip IBM and Apple in the long run, the Commodore phase of my life lasted all the way to college. To keep things simple, we only had Commodores at home, too. My rich grandpa who lived in Costa Rica and never visited us or sent much money paid for us one summer to drive to Florida to see him. One of the many gifts he gave us that on that trip (along with tickets for the whole family to see Return of the Jedi) was a Commodore VIC-20, which we hooked up to our old TV set the minute we got home. 5K of RAM in the comfort of my own family room! Some summers, for a special treat, I’d even get to bring home one of the Commodore 64s from my dad’s high school classroom — and a dot matrix printer to go along with it! The graphics capability of the Commodore 64 was beyond anything I had previously imagined possible.
Once I’d switched to an IBM-compatible PC in college, life may have been easier in some ways, but I never programmed a computer again. Henceforth I was a consumer only, exactly where Microsoft wanted me.
2. Microwave oven
The first microwave I ever saw belonged to the family of the kid down the street — Roger M. — who blew off a couple fingers one winter making a pipe bomb in his bedroom. He gathered up a couple of younger kids from the neighborhood, myself included, and brought us over so his mom could demonstrate their new microwave. She’d heat up some portion of leftovers, and look! the plate didn’t heat up along with it. She cooked chicken portions in plastic bags (though they remained unbrowned, a kind of translucent, quivery yellow). She laughed when she told how her husband had tried to use it to make toast, and all he got was warm bread.
The microwave was the size of a large breadbox. They’d had it installed over the stove range. Microwave technology had been developed by the army, or so we all told one another. Some people thought if you stood too close to them while they were on they’d give you cancer. (We quickly used “nuke it” as shorthand for “warm it in the microwave.”) Everyone had a story about the first time they accidentally put a gold-rimmed dish into the microwave: that smell! those sparks! And we all speculated what would happen to household pets if they were trapped in there, a sick fantasy borne out in a memorable scene in Gremlins (1984):
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zReX7OpfZXY[/youtube]
As much as microwaves have made life convenient, I’ve never been able to bring myself to follow the microwave cooking directions on most products that could also be cooked on the stove top. It just seems wrong. But I still can’t imagine a kitchen without one, especially now that I have one that doubles as a convection oven.
3. Portable listening device
My parents gave in and bought me a SONY Walkman for my birthday when I was in the 8th grade. Or at least I called it that, even if, in all likelihood, it was a Sears knockoff. They were worried, along with lots of talking heads on TV, that Walkmen would exacerbate the individualism of the Me generation, that people would stop talking to one another in public spaces. Remember the rejoinder campaigns — images of couples rollerskating while sharing a walkman through a headphone splitter? What could have been more romantic in the early 80s? Of course that didn’t solve the problem of people with headphones getting hit while crossing the street.
Along with the portable cassette player they let me have my first Columbia House Tape Club membership. My first three picks were Def Leppard’s Pyromania, Hall and Oates’s Rock and Soul, Part 1, and Styx’s Kilroy Was Here. I very clearly remember listening to the latter on a car trip with my family, one rock-operatic auto-reverse after another, until my parents threatened to restrict my right to use it for the remainder of the vacation, since I was essentially shutting out the family.
My life has had a portable soundtrack ever since, my own music direction to accompany an increasingly cinematic subjectivity. It’s hard to imagine life without an iPod: such a huge collection of music at your fingertips. Certainly the portable discman is one invention we’ll learn to live without, what with all its scratches and skips, just as CDs will phase themselves out. (Who will ever be nostalgic for a CD?) But there was something downright comfortable, comforting, like a whitenoise womb, about the wobble and squeak of a cassette piping out music for you and you alone.
And you, dear reader? What things were invented during your lifetime that you can’t imagine living without?
Great post Bryan. I remember when each of those devices came to my childhood home as significant/big-deal moments. The VCR was a big one too. Today, I can’t imagine living without the internet, it’s such a huge part of my daily life. However, I remember being terribly frustrated trying to use the internet for help with research projects around 1996. On the internet, I had to sift through so much junk to find what I wanted. I recall uttering (maybe kind of shouting) the words “I hate the internet.” I didn’t think it would catch on. It was sooo annoying. The library was way better.
The library still is way better in some ways. But man — how did I write my dissertation without searchable databases of 18c newspapers?
I wanted to write about getting our first VCR but had already rambled too long. I remember the first trip we made to the first video store that opened in our town. I loved our top-loader VCR. In all these years, though, I have never once programmed a VCR to record something while I was away. And I still don’t have Tivo.
I’m not old enough to remember the first portable tape players, but I certainly remember the appearance of VCRs, personal computers, and the like.
Back in the early-1990s, my mom brought home our first laptop. I was 11 or 12, I guess, so maybe it was ’88 or ’89. Anyway, it was an IBM something-or-other, 256K processor, 64K Hard drive—brilliant. Our first computer was a TI-80, or something like that, also with the tape drive. Dad got it from a buddy in the mid-80s. I never used the TI much, except to play those fantastic text-based games, but I wrote a number of short stories, poems, and research papers on that IBM.
I had no use for the internet when it appeared. I faintly remember Mom showing me how to log on, search for stuff, etc., but I found it rather boring. I far preferred the library, with the musty old books, microfilm, microfiche, and card catalogues. (I continued to use the old hard-copy card catalogues long after the creation of the computer-based version. I liked pulling out the drawers and flipping through all those little cards. Good times. I would probably still use the old card catalogue if the libraries I visit still had them.) I still go to the library, but I really love JSTOR and other journal archives-mostly because I can do research at 5 am and read articles on the computer screen without paying 10 cent/copy or anything. Graduate school would be much tougher—and more expensive—without the research possibilities of the internet.
One of my favorite inventions, though it never caught on, was a laptop with a built-in bubble jet printer! Amazing. The computer was fast, perhaps one of the first Pentium II’s, had a color screen, large hard drive, maybe around 200 MG, and probably had around 128K RAM. But the best part was the printer. The keyboard flipped up and you shoved a piece of paper inside. Two or three minutes later, poof! you had a gorgeous print. I loved using that printer. The print quality was rather poor, the ink was wildly expensive, and Mom cussed every time I used it, but I printed several research papers and some primitive 3 color prints over the year or so we had that machine. I thought the technology was amazing, and couldn’t imagine anything better.
Today, I write this on a MacBook—2 Gig processor, 2 Gig RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, DVD burner, widescreen, etc—and I fantasize about MacBook Pros, iMacs with 24″ screens, 2 TB backup drives, Blu-Ray drives—I could go on. But I still wish I could flip up the keyboard on this pretty little MacBook and print out drafts of my Thesis.
One other thing: ordering pizza online! Absolutely brilliant! No worries about the order taker getting the address or toppings wrong; no interaction with anyone at all, except the delivery person or whoever fetches my pie and takes money at the pick-up counter. Awesome.
When this online ordering thing started, I worked at a pizza joint and hated it. The orders would just appear without warning, and I thought there was something wrong with that. But now, I wouldn’t order a pizza any other way—unless, of course, I wanted a good pizza from one of the great places out her on Long Island. Fatso’s and Mamma Lombardi’s don’t take orders online, yet. I can only hope.
hey james — thanks — that’s exactly the kind of comment i was hoping this post would elicit.
i’m going to suggest we call you james + a last initial or Long Island James or something like that to distinguish you from James my childhood friend who comments here from time to time. (It’s been a while since he commented, maybe because he’s on the road promoting his new novel, which I’ve been told has an insider’s reference to TGW in chapter 7 — something called “The Little Whatsit.” I need to grab a copy.)
My brother, who was born in 1983, was over here this morning and thought it was funny that I could remember my first portable listening device. He also reminded me of the code used to shut down those PET computers: SYS 64790.
This post really connected with me. Probably since we’re so close in age, and, these items were not only unique, but life changing. I agree with BW’s comments about the cell phone. It’s hard to imagine what life and/or work was like before the cell phone, especially as I am “on-call” every third month, and am tied to the thing. I remember my mom got one of the first cell phones that was huge; it came in a bag that seemed like a small suitcase, with a built in battery pack. We can’t forget the videogames! When I was about ten, our family got an Atari 2600, and we spend many, many hours playing games like Pong, frogger, and circus (quite a difference from the current X-box 360 where you can be playing with other people from France and Lithuania. I agree with James, in that the VCR was a great success. I never really liked TV much, and since our family didn’t have much money, so going to the movies was limited. But, when the family could go rent a movie for about half the price of one admission ticket, we were hooked. I loved going to the videostore. But once Netflix came along, I’ve been an avid member, often getting the 8 at-a-time membership.
One of the biggest things to change our world has been the advancement of travel. While it is still a marvel to fly coast-to-coast in about five hours, I really hate how it separates our families and friends…
I am shocked you remember life before microwaves.
While I don’t remember life without a personal computer, I do remember life before Windows. In 7th grade we had a computer class, mainly for keyboarding, and I remember having to memorize and use DOS commands to navigate through the programs. And in 9th or 10th grade I remember the big floppy disks (that were actually floppy) being distinctly phased out for the 4 inch hard “floppy disks”. While we had a computer in our home since I was 2 (that trip to Florida), I swear we didn’t get many “up grades” from 1983 until my Jr. year in 1997. My sophomore year I got docked points on an essay because my paper wasn’t written in Times New Roman. I told Ms. Cunningham my computer only had TImes and she didn’t believe me. “All computers have Times New Roman.” I went home and checked. Ours surely didn’t. We still had the dot matrix printer at that time too. What a super Christmas it was in ’97 when we got a computer that could “dial up” to the internet! Thank heavens for the invention of fast DSL and Cable connections!!
Somethings I can’t believe I managed without:
A diffuser for curly hair and a flat iron for straight! How in the world did I manage my hair??
Digital camera. Being able to preview photos without having to develop them! Genius!!
Blogging. I remember seeing my brother-in-law’s blog address on his Christmas letter 2 years ago and thinking, “what the heck’s a blog?” Now it’s practically the only way I keep in touch with people. It’s phasing out email for me.
Great post Bryan, but I wanted to acknowledge another invention of the last 40-or-so years: the mainstreaming of racial issues. In so keeping, I also wanted to wish everyone a happy MLK Day. As evidence of the watering down of King’s message, one of our local mattress stores is celebrating with an “I have a dream” sale. No lie.
Even cordless phones changed life in subtle ways. And call waiting!
My parents bought a microwave oven on a trip to Australia in 1981. They can’t have been available in NZ at the time. But the truly terrifying thing is, it’s still in use. Despite the fact that it’s the size of an aircraft hangar, it has pride of place (anything else would be impossible) in my grandmother’s kitchen.
I remember life before microwaves, cell phones, VCRs, and videogames, and dammit! things were better then. Goddamn kids.
I remember life befor the Whatsit; it was a dark existence. Thank god for technology.
I remember when answering machines first came out. Specifically, I remember incredulity among my friends and family: Who could be so self-important that they need a machine to answer the phone for them? God forbid you should miss a call! Maybe it’s the King of Norway or something! The idea seemed ludicrous.
and now … without answering machines (or voicemail), we’d actually have to answer the phone!
I love this post – especially the opening about the cell phone. I think about that all the time. What was my life like without constant access or the guilt of not being as accessible as my caller, who assumes I should be picking up and gives me crap about it on the message, believes I should be – but that could be just my own family issues.
Because I am probably one of the oldest people in the TGW universe, I remember mulitple musical formats – CD, cassettes, 8-tracks, 45’s and of course my parents mono-sound LPs. I remember my parent’s console stereo and receiving my very cunning suitcase turn table (red leatherette paper covered!) that played 45’s with a little plastic disc in the center. The rich neighbors had a reel to reel tape player that took up half the bookcase. I remember singing “They Call the Wind Mariah” into a portable tape player for the first time and hearing my voice back. I totally remember my first real stereo system with a million components – I felt like a real DJ.
Now my sons and I fight over itunes and share music and dance the night away with a cube of mysterious metal – 3″x3″. You are wrong J-Man – life is much better now – at least it is getting lighter and collects less dust. And the “kids” are the gatekeepers.
It’s interesting, too, how we come to take for granted these objects that are, essentially, magical items–we barely know how to operate these things, much less know how they actually work. and yet they become part of our lives, part of our consciousness, and we form these oddly intimate bonds with them… Anyway, I would add digital cameras to this list–every time I take a photo with a regular camera, I think, “What the–! Oh yeah, I can’t actually see the image instantly.”
Since my grandma was born in the beginning of the 1900, had my dad very late, and infused the love for gadgets in him and me, all three of us had a chance to experience practically all of the major technological inventions over the last 100 years firsthand. My grandma’s first TV had a tiny screen and a water lens to enlarge it. My dad’s first camera Kiev was the first camera to take pictures in extreme freezing temperatures and the first brand to take pictures of the northern pole. Kiev was proudly given to me on my last trip home along with all the tricky lenses and a brown, velvety on the inside, leather case. In 1983 my dad bought me my first computer. It had to be hooked up to a TV instead of a monitor and the TV had a switch TV/Computer on its back panel. Along with my computer I received a box of tapes with video games. I got to play the first version of Blade Runner and The Monkey Island, which I am still a big fan of. The games took about 30minutes to an hour and lots of squeaky noise to download. My personal favorite invention though is the robotics. I got my first Roomba a few years ago, and although I could not use it, I loved the idea as much as the idea of the robotic hotel clerks in Japan. Since I work with cars, I notice the tremendous progress in auto technology every year: ABS, turbo engines, navigation, robotic auto rental booths, my kids’ favorite, auto entertainment system: video games and movies while driving to school. Great post, Bryan! Is this u-tube clip scary? Can I watch it?
oh, yes. it’s scary. and you should watch it. it’s the best microwave scene ever.
what cool responses! thanks, everyone!
I used to have a big phone receiver (from a regular phone, with a curly cord) in my car so that my passenger and I could pretend to be talking on it, because it was just soooooo funny and unbelievable to other drivers that someone would be talking on the phone in their car.
And the best thing about that nasty Gremlins video is that when I looked at the still of it, I thought it was going to be a music video of Mick Jagger circa 1986 or so.
No way, I am not watching it!
Thsnks for the reminder, Bryan; in those first few paragraphs, I remembered that I want to change my voicemail message.
Those early-80s “computer science” classes were truly horrible. All I remember is drawing out flow charts with strange computer terms and having no idea what any of it meant. I didn’t start really using a computer until my third year of college, when I wrote for the weekly paper, which had a few. What a relief to be rid of the ol’ typewriter! It felt so futuristic to print out papers with the dot-matrix in the newspaper office.
Also, anyone remember when fax machines first came out? With those thermal paper rollers? It felt like such space-age technology to me that I actually put “faxing” on my resume as a skill.
I’ll vote for the phone answering machine.
I remember it being a big deal when I was considered “grown up” enough to “properly” answer the phone at our house and then pass it to an adult. I envied the kids who were noted at my home for having excellent phone manners.
We were watching Shadow of a Doubt last night and what struck me most of all was when the heck was that little girl going to get up and actually answer that phone ringing in the background.
I understand voicemail and caller ID being other, later manifestations of not having to rush over and physically pick up the phone before the person on the other end decided to give up (another fun psychologcial guessing game of intent and “what if?”) but answering machines stand out to me as being a real day to day life changer.
And I love that my grandmother STILL audibly hates leaving a message on one!
Great post and comments
My parents were pretty advanced as far as computers go. We had a home computer in the early ’80s, early enough that my brothers may not remember a time before it. However, they struggle with phones. They never bought an answering machine and finally got voicemail on their home phone around 1995. The reason for getting it was so we wouldn’t have to answer the phone during dinner. Of course, we still answered the phone. When they got cell phones a few years ago, it took a few months for them to figure out how to answer it. They would open the phone and then press a button that ended the call, not realizing they had already picked up.
Over Christmas my Dad got a new cell phone. I was playing with it and showing how it can take pictures! and video! and look! this is how you send a text message. My Dad just shook his head, not looking at the phone, saying “That’s ridiculous.”
I used to get horribly flustered when I got someone’s answering machine instead of a real person. Anxiety about formulating and delivering a clear message usually caused me to hang up, think about what to say, and call back to actually leave a message. Email now means I don’t have to talk on the phone nearly as much.
One thing I like about this post is how your nostalgia for old technologies contrasts with your dislike of new technologies: you’re skeptical of post-Commodore computers, you don’t like to cook with microwaves, you prefer cassettes to CDs.
I remember the first time I saw an automatic dishwasher. My parents — with help from my aunts and uncles — bought one for my grandmother. It sat on the top of the counter and you hooked it up to the sink. You could watch the churning action of the water through a yellow dome on the top. It looked sort of like a UFO. I think my grandma used it once.
Hey James, since when have you been on the island?
Ah, yes, the parents and phones thing. For years, my mother refused to leave messages on answering machines. But she would still get exercised that we didn’t return her calls, even though we had no way of knowing she’d called. I finally convinced her to leave messages, no matter how short, and the first few were these identical and monotone: “This is your mom. Bye.”
They just got a cell phone last year, but have yet to set up a voice mail box for it.
Lisa, for the last time: please call me!
#24: but i loves me my ipod.
#26 is exactly the reason for my suggestion in #4.
who’s the careful reader now, pandora?
Bryan are wise and careful always.
PS – I watched all 17+ minutes of MLK’s “dream” speech on youtube last night.
I loves me internet soooooooooo much.
Apparently without coffe I speak like Yoda.
Bryan, YOU are . . .
and spell poorly.
will stop now to re-caf-in-ate
gale — my parents always said they had a dishwasher: my dad! actually, we all had to take turns doing dishes, but i would buy out my younger siblings for a buck.
do you think some people are emotionally attached to dishwashers the way they can be to other forms of technology?
has anyone out there ever named an appliance, other than kiev the camera, your car (i know what PB’s car was called), or an ipod?
Oh I’m disappointed, I was hoping James had moved his enterprise to Amagansett.
If only I’d had the stamina to read comments 4 through 25. – whew!
#34 My parents named their garbage disposal George. The name was discarded though after they gained a rotund brother-in-law by the same name.
I’d like to throw a shout out to the pager. I worked in film production pre-cell phone days for a number of years, mostly as a miserable PA, running around town picking up rental items for the production. It was a comforting freedom being away from the set or production office, driving a cube truck around away from real authority. These were the only times you could relax and even goof off a little – go for a long lunch. The production manager had no idea how long it really took to pick up scaffolding, tables & chairs for catering, the director’s favorite gin, etc. They had to wait until you returned to send you on another mission.
Then pagers became the norm in the business. Now you could be stopped midway to one vendor and be forced to find a payphone (carry plenty of quarters with you!), phone up and be told to delay that errand and get right back to the set with 15 coffee’s. I dreaded the vibrate from the pager as it always meant additional work, and if you didn’t respond within 5 minutes, you were really screwed.
But then you learned to have fun with pagers. What was better then paging your best friend the # of the local pornshop or strip club and imagine the hilarity that ensued…
My grandma called the garbage disposal Grendel, and would feed the monster after dinner.
I remember when my mom got me my first answering machine for my fledgling publishing enterprise. We all thought it was tres cool, and moreso when we got a fake Henry Kissinger recording for the outgoing message.
And actually, the Little Whatsit is in Book Three, out in October. Book Two (which you linked to) has an honest-to-God Great Whatsit.