DTC 375 Blog post # 6 Old School Tech

Dear future college student….

You know, right know you have it pretty good, my elementary school years were a lot different then yours are now….half of the stuff you don’t even question we only thought was science fiction! You know that really cool cellphone your parents have that you like to play

with? ( or maybe you have super cool parents and it is actually yours!) well, when I was

your age,  we didn’t have those! My parents phones could call someone, and they could hold contacts…the really fancy ones had a calculator, or speed dial. I remember when the concept of texting was brand new… and foreign…( why would you take the time to write something to someone when you could just call them?) I remember hearing on the radio in the car when I was your age that they figured out a way to make a camera work in a phone, and within 5 years they were planning on putting it in stores for people to buy. 

Wow! I remember thinking….we were getting closer to Star Wars by the day…my mom thought it was a radio show joke/hoax I remember the forbidden email button on my parents phone….it was deactivated…that was extra…it cost to much! I remember that if I wanted to know what a friend was up to, or if they could hangout, I either left the house, and knocked on their door, or I memorized their phone number, and called their house phone. Yep… the house phone… it used to ring all of the time…and each time it was a surprise… you never knew who was actually calling you until you picked it up… caller ID wasn’t included… a lot of  land line phones were not digital…there was no screen to see who was on the other end of the line…just buttons, and a curled stretchy cord. A lot of things tied into that phone line… fax machines…the phone lines themselves, and the internet.

Think it is annoying when you try to get on a webpage, and it takes more than 3 seconds to load…something must be wrong!!! Its broken isn’t it? Well… that was insanely fast when I was little. All of the little things you are used to doing… watching videos, searching….playing games? That would have never happened…. Searching maybe…. But

guess what Google wasn’t really in use until the end of 1998…I was in kindergarten then. Playing intricate and complicated online games….no, that wasn’t really happening, and there was no YouTube to watch your favorite silly videos. Guess what?  YouTube only came around in 2005.

There were ways to put video on the internet…people could put them on websites … but there was not really a collection of them in one place. Even when YouTube was first starting….most people I knew did not have the capability to use it, their internet was too slow, and it would tie up their phone lines. So there you have it… I think I pretty much covered all the fun things on that shiny smart phones of your parents…. The games, texting, videos, email, and fast internet access…. When I was your age… I played Pokémon my Gameboy Color ( with a parent enforced ½ hour a day  strict limit) , and read lots and lots of books for fun…But hey! 15 years from now you can tell a future college student about the " good ol' days" when technology was " ancient" !