Quantum Leap

I’ve had kind of a running gag going with my wife where she asks me if I’m middle-aged yet. I’m 43, but I really don’t feel whatever middle-aged is supposed to feel like. I always answered no, till finally she asked me in exasperation, “How old do you think you’re going to get?”

As of now, I guess I’m shooting for at least 87.

She might be relieved to learn that I’ve apparently reached an advanced age in at least one respect; in fact, I might have skipped the middle & headed straight for the rocking chair.

Since I’ve been blogging, I’m always searching for topics, and one thing that’s struck me repeatedly is how much the world has changed just in my lifetime. So I think I’m well set up to be one of those geezers who starts every paragraph with, “Now, in my day….”

Oops, sorry, I had to go put my teeth in. Back now. So I make like Sam Beckett from the late, lamented Quantum Leap and time-travel within my own lifetime....

The easy signposts for this kind of thing relate to technology. When I was a kid, we got 3 TV channels. I guess public TV (it was called “educational” TV then) was around, but you had to tune that in with a whole different dial called the UHF tuner. And TVs had actual knobs, of course. Ours even had doors on the front. And I still vividly remember when we got a color TV. It also had a radio tuner and a “record player” (oh, what the heck, “hi-fi”), and it took up about the same amount of room, and weighed about the same, as your average compact car today.

By the way, when I was thinking about all of this, I really freaked out when I realized that my dad was born about the same time as commercial broadcasting… radio broadcasting. His father before him predated the Victrola.

“Compact car” was pretty much an oxymoron when I was a child, come to think of it. We had a succession of station wagons, including one with the legendary wood-like paneling, and the letters MPG were not prominently featured. Of course, with gas about 30 cents a gallon, who cared anyway? Gas stations were known as “service stations” then, because they gave you service – and sometimes a prize just for showing up. For many years, I kept the NFL team glasses we collected from our local Sunoco.

I think we all get the thing about the meteoric rise of the computer age – but I can’t help but think we’re getting a bit jaded about it. It’s worth (I hope) reminding ourselves that when I was born, “computer” was always followed by “room” because you needed the latter to contain the former. I have written elsewhere about getting my hands on a TRS-80 in the early ‘80s… with cassette data storage. And now I’m publishing this from a laptop (on my actual lap) via a wireless connection to the World Wide Web.

Actually, my favorite Stupid Technology Trick relates to the Texas Instruments SR-10 calculator, basically the original handheld calculator. Not too long after it hit the market, my parents had occasion to buy one for my sister. If you click on the link, you’ll find the SR-10 performed the basic 4 arithmetic operations, and square/square root, invert, and scientific notation. My parents bought it second-hand and paid Ninety-Five Dollars.

Oh, and by the way… when I was born, an entire race of people was still being widely oppressed not only by custom and social stigma, but by actual laws in many places. When I watch a show like "Eyes on the Prize", although I consider myself well educated and not altogether naïve, I shake my head the whole time. It’s hard to imagine that such a world existed in my lifetime. I understand fully that conditions between the races have not reached a state of perfection, but you can’t watch a group of children buffeted by a fire hose without appreciating the difference between then and now.