Time Accelerates On

[vakkotaur]

When I was a kid I would see things in old movies that were pretty much like the things around me. There were differences, but some stuff still used tubes. Music that wasn't on the radio often was from a phonograph. Cameras used film. Phones had rotary dials. But things have changed. The last few vacuum tubes in the house are the picture tubes (CRTs) and the magnetron in the microwave. Camera now means digital. Phones have buttons. Music is from... a CD maybe, but more often mp3. Even the lights are changing from incandescent to CFL or LED depending on the application. Those old movies were old, but they didn't seem all that foreign. I suspect that to someone who grew up with the modern replacements of things, such films seem all that much more ancient. For them, the continuity is more broken than it was (and is) for me.

Vacuum tube electronics
Record players and records
Rotary dial telephones
Film cameras
Incandescent lights

What did I miss?

Comments

[michaelmink.livejournal.com]

Non-digital clocks?

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah.

[michaelmink.livejournal.com]

Televisions with "rabbit ears."

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

Televisions with only four channels.

Radio as an important way of getting information - weather reports and such. Now you go to your kid's school's website to see if today's a snow day. You look up accuweather or whatever your favorite site is, for the day's forecast.

Non-mobile phones: if you were *wealthy* (until what, the early-mid `80s when they went down in price) you might be able to get phone messages left when you weren't at home. But you had to *be* at home to check the message.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

If the movie or short subject was new enough to have a TV somewhere. An example would be the Three Stooges short where they mixed up the plumbing and electrical conduits and a scene of Niagara falls flooded someplace.

But rabbit ears were something of an odd one for me. I'd visit places where there were rabbit ears, but at home there was twin-lead coming in from the outdoor antenna. Twin-lead and a multi-conductor control cable so that the antenna could be rotated for best signal.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Fountain pens that are refilled with a little lever on the side. I remember seeing that in old Bugs Bunny or Tom & Jerry cartoons and wondering what the heck it was.

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

Fountain pens AT ALL.
Computers big as buildings. (Oops! Self-song-plug!)

When I FIRST saw WarGames that HUGE floppy drive was already extinct.

Floppy drives! Blue/green/b/w computer screens!

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

That one was strictly in the movies and shorts and such, for me. I've never used a fountain pen, myself. So that one didn't provide any overlap or continuity for me.

[timmowarner.livejournal.com]

Depending on how old the movie is, people smoke in old movies. A lot. And EVERYWHERE.

Also, people could pretty much just stroll onto planes.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. There was a lot of smoking. That's a change I lived through and I was glad to see (and breathe!) it. It's downright weird to see ashtrays most places now. And disappointing to find someplace that still permits smoking. * Glares at Wisconsin *

And it would be nice to be able to get on a (commercial) airplane without a bunch of silliness. Real security would be good, but what we've got is mostly silliness that prevents things that you can get around if you think about it for, oh, ten seconds. Of course, for the older movies air travel was itself a pretty big deal. You'd dress up for going to the airport. And in most of the old movies, travel was by ship or train

[tilt-longtail.livejournal.com]

A friend came to my house and was SHOCKED that I used a clothesline. He thought that went out in the 50's.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Clotheslines, the solar powered clothes driers that don't need fabric softener, do seem to be increasingly rare. Some from the inconvenience of having to go outside. Twice. And some from busybodies wanting a neighborhood to look "just so" and banning the things. An indoor rack is a thing I haven't seen in a while either. That would get used in the Winter or maybe in rainy weather.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, if you look at westerns or stuff with late 19th to early 20th century settings (like Sherlock Holmes maybe?) you'd see horse and buggy transportation, steam locomotives, trolley cars, kerosene lighting, and icebox refrigeration to name just a few. Open fireplaces, Western Union delivered telegrams (that were sent over telegraph wires in American Morse code,) newspapers sold on street corners by actual newsboys shouting "Extra!" and a lot more.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Generally I was thinking of 1930s to 1950s stuff. Things that were a depiction of their "now" rather than a period earlier than their own production, but you do mention a few things. Not that much that overlapped with my life directly. I recall that Western Union bailed out of the telegram business (whatever was left of it) a few years back. And Grandpa would call the fridge the icebox.

[foolscap001.livejournal.com]

Mainframes with tape drives. (And not those little bitty DECtapes, either. :)) In 50s and 60s movies, you had to have tape drives spinning, or it just wasn't a computer!

80-column punched cards. (The round-holed Powers cards and System/3 96-column cards weren't as famous or iconic.) The only thing I know of that still uses them are those fake "handwriting analysis" things at state fairs that are set up to look like old mainframes with the flashing lights and such.

Smoking, perhaps?

[foolscap001.livejournal.com]

Shoot, I forgot. Typewriters!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Good point. MANUAL typewriters, in fact. Not self-correcting either. You used typewriter erasers, those little wheel-shaped rubber ones with a brush on them. And another thing: carbon paper. Photocopiers were scarce and expensive even in the 1960s, so there were carbon paper, and mimeograph machines, and spirit duplicators.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Also the teletype machine, a mainstay of the news business at least into the 1970s, but today's 20-something probably wouldn't know what one was, even if it was operating.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Another thing: trading stamps. Red stamps, green stamps, gold stamps. From the grocery store and the gas station mostly. Pasted into booklets and saved up to get wonderful flashy cheap junk.

And those gift premiums they used to give you at the gas station if you had your tank filled up and it was more than some number of gallons. Drinking glasses with sports team logos or cartoon characters on them, bumper stickers, costume jewelry, kitchen utensils.

How about having an attendant at the gas station who not only pumped your gas for you, but checked the oil level and washed your windshield and mirrors?

[thecanuckguy.livejournal.com]

How about just regular stamps? Being a philatelist, I've noticed that there aren't that many of them any more. And being one who sends more email than snail mail I suppose I"m more part of the problem than the solution.

(I guess "snail mail" also falls in that category).

[thecanuckguy.livejournal.com]

I have one for the "may go the way of the dinosaur someday but hasn't yet" file: I've always wondered why analogue clocks have been replaced with digital (I can sort of see why, but mourn it as you do), but speedometers (and tachometers) are still almost always analogue. Every single car I've been in, save one, no matter how new it is, has an analogue speedometer. Back about 15 years ago I was in my boss's car and he had a rather sporty car with a digital speedometer. I was quite fascinated by it, and thought that it won't be long before every car has one. This was, as I said,a bout 15 years ago and it doesn't seem to have materialized. So why is everywhere else analogue is going away, but it's alive and well on our dashboards? It's so much easier (and quicker, too, a needed feature!) to tell how fast you're going.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

You see this one in airplanes, too. Analog gauges like the ones in my instrument panel are actually on their way out, to be replaced by glass panels like the Garmin G1000. (Note the backup analog gauges at the bottom of that panel; they're there in case the Garmin goes away, such as if electrical power is lost.) Even aircraft that were originally equipped with analog gauges are being retrofitted with graphical instruments such as the Aspen Avionics EFD1000. A good example of that is the 2008 AOPA Sweepstakes airplane, a 1979 Piper Archer that got a makeover featuring an EFD1000. Of course, airliners have had them for years.

Even in all of this digital display real estate, though, the presentation is designed to mimic the old reliable analog gauges as closely as possible, for one simple reason: a lot of information is presented in a way that a pilot can grasp intuitively and quickly. Instead of reading a display that says "the nose is three degrees above the horizon and the aircraft is in a 15-degree right bank", the attitude indicator (otherwise called the artificial horizon, the instrument in the top center of the group of 6 in my panel) shows that graphically. This is vital to a pilot who needs to constantly scan and interpret many instruments at once.

The same principle applies to cars, though not quite as strongly: you can just glance at an analog instrument, but you have to look at a numeric display for a little longer and think about it. I've had rental cars with numeric speed displays, and didn't like them as much (except for the Pontiac Grand Prix GXP that had it in a heads-up display; that was seriously nifty).

[thecanuckguy.livejournal.com]

Ah, how about "Doing math in your head without a calculator"? Calculators are so ubiquitous, even before everyone owned a cell phone (which would invariably have a calculator on it), everyone would carry a calculator in their purse or what have you (perhaps men would have it in their PDAs? Or maybe a calculator in their pocket). And, in the old movies, you would see people doing math by either figuring it out in their head or, if the problem was somewhat difficult, a fortuitous piece of scrap paper would be at the rescue.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

One thing I hadn't seen up close until very recently (and then at a thrift store) was the old style mechanical adding machine. The thing could only add and needed you to work a lever on the side to do the addition and print it on a paper tape.

Another thing that you might see or at least hear about was the slide rule. I actually used one, though by the time I did such things were already rather obsolete. That started as a joke. "There will be a quiz tomorrow. No calculator will be allowed." "What about slide rules?" "Slide rules are OK." The next day about a fifth of the class showed up with slide rules and most of us knew how to use them - though we'd only learned how since the class the day before.

[keeper1st.livejournal.com]

Cel animation.

Public pay telephones (on the way out, at least).

Videocassettes.

Audiocassettes. (We make jokes about the death of the 8-track; the current generation may find tapes themselves to be silly.)

Those overhead projectors with the clear plastic stuff written on with a marker, used in school.

Mimeographs.

Learning to sing songs as a part of normal school ... or any artistic activity for that matter. (Caveat: U.S. specifically.)

Computers without a mouse or GUI.

Analog sound effects -- or rather, the complete lack of digital effects (someone commented recently on a video showing Star Wars shooting scenes with David Prowse speaking the Darth Vader lines as he acted them, wondering why they couldn't use Prowse's voice by "just changing it digitally").

In the U.S.: Crosswalk signs that had the words "WALK" and "DONT WALK" on them instead of pictures.

Doughnuts. (Today, it's only Donuts! Even the spellchecker is complaining!)
Okay, so that's just silly pedantry.

Having to go to the library to find information. In general, the world before the world-wide web.

With TV going all digital: "Snow" on the television with white noise when there is no signal.

The long "beep" test of the Emergency Broadcast System. That has been replaced with a series of short blurbles.

I was pondering last night if today's teenagers who pass by the Borland building in Scotts Valley wonder why the freeway exit identifies the street as "Santa's Village Road" (it's built over the parking lot of an old Santa's Village amusement park -- the park area itself was returned to nature and has become overgrown).

But yeah, as mentioned before: The very concept of not having a telephone with you unless you're at home. The idea that you might not even have voicemail. Answering machines? "What's an answering machine?"

Oh, here's one: Bang paths! Who here remembers having to send email using a bang!path!to!the!specific!user instead of the simple user@domain?

Being on the internet without really being on the internet. Ahhh, shell accounts.

Usenet newsgroups. (Yeah, they still exist, but most people have never heard of them.)

Kind of silly, but I bet most kids in the U.S. today don't know that the Energizer Bunny is simply a parody of bunnies from a Duracell ad. (In the UK, Duracell maintained their trademark and continue to use Duracell Bunnies in their ads.)

Having to get up and turn a dial in order to change the TV channel. (And yet we still say, "Don't touch that dial!" same as we "dial" a telephone number.)

Typewriters were covered, but even "modern" replacements have been replaced, e.g., dot-matrix printers. Having to buy printer "ribbon" is an alien concept to a modern kid.

The possibility that you might not actually receive any mail on a mail delivery day.

The weird tones of tuning an AM radio dial...

Headphones that covered your entire ears.

Coke bottles.

Computer mice with balls.

Floppy disks of any kind. (Until recently, you would have had to specify 5.25-inch and 8-inch.) I'm leery of putting a CD or DVD next to an LCD monitor, just because I am so used to dealing with magnetic media and CRTs that produced a strong magnetic field.

In the U.S.: Outlets that accepted only two prongs. Also, outlets that couldn't accept your device's plug with the wider prong on one side.

Christmas lights with big bulbs about an inch thick, randomly colored depending on how you screwed them in yourself.

Rapidly becoming the case: 12-pack boxes of canned soft drinks. Everything is rapidly becoming 8-packs (in this way, they can raise the price by lowering the per-pack price, thus duping consumers into thinking it's actually cheaper now instead of more expensive).

Coke Classic called simply Coke. Knowing why it's called Coke Classic now.

Anaglyph 3-D glasses (outside of cereal-box gimmicks, anyway).

Street signals that turned to flashing-red/flashing-yellow at night.

Parallel ports. Game ports. Serial ports.

Speaking of clocks: Clocks that have to be wound.

[foolscap001.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes... analog sound effects. Cornstarch for walking through snow, an array of wooden pegs for marching soldiers, and so on, including the ubiquitous use of two discordant notes on the organ for ray guns on radio SF shows.

[haystack.livejournal.com]

Nixie tubes for numeric displays -- which I suppose goes under "vacuum-tube electronics", but I feel they deserve a special mention 'cause I love their look.

Flip-readout clocks -- I remember my dad having one when I was young.

Mechanical cash registers.

Cars without seat belts or air bags.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I hadn't encountered Nixie tubes save once, a demonstration in one class used a voltmeter with a Nixie tube display.

I do recall flip-digit clocks as my folks had one for a while.

Oh yes, mechanical cash registers - and of course no barcode scanners. The price was on a tag and the cashier looked at the tag and punched in the price. And I get a bit nostalgic for that every time some barcode doesn't scan... several times... and then a number is keyed in.. and rejected.

Or they had seatbelts but almost nobody used them. I remember at least one car my folks had that still had a manual choke.

[https://users.livejournal.com/-dakko/]

How about hats! Other than baseball caps, a hat is rare in modern pictures.

Also ticker-tapes and the punched tape outputs on teletypes.

Telegrams are no more.

Even morse code is now known mostly just to ham radio operators.

Most phone booths are gone, and not getting an answering machine? Someone is just being rude if you can't leave a message.

Hollerith cards (although we're back to computer stuff again and we all know that changes every five years)...

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I remember when it was news that Western Union was bailing out of what was left of the telegram business. Morse code is no longer a requirement even for hams, so I expect that will fade even more. I don't expect it to ever go away completely - it makes for simple transmitter design and has other advantages for those willing to use it.

There is an old style telephone booth several blocks from home. I made a point of a getting a picture of it this year.

As for leaving a message, that depends on if the message is the thing or talking to the person is. Sometimes just hearing the machine pick up is the same as hearing the 9th or 10th ring, "Oh, not home." Though often when I see a that there has been a message on an answering machine and there isn't really one, I hear call center sounds that tell me I didn't miss anything - and I prefer they didn't leave a message. I am also glad I wasn't there to be annoyed by their call.

[https://users.livejournal.com/-dakko/]

I almost forgot about automotive differences!

Carburetors, points and condensor, maybe a hand-crank?

Manual steering, vent windows, pop-up hood vents, the clock you pulled out of the dashboard so you could wind-up the spring? 6-volt batteries, positive-ground systems. Speed-knob on the steering wheel (unless you have a boat - for which they are still available) One example -

http://www.overtons.com/modperl/product/details.cgi?r=view&i=70746

Hand-signals for turns? I suppose cyclists should be familiar with these.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I haven't dealt with a hand-crank starter, though I have probably seen a couple on antiques, so I wouldn't consider those to be much of a real-life crossover with the movies.

Carbs, points, distributor systems and such are another matter. And my folks did have one car that I recall that had a manual choke. Oh yeah, the vent-windows. I don't recall pull-from-dash clocks, but I do recall when the clock in the car was almost always wrong. I also do recall 6 Volt systems and maybe positive ground systems. It was a bit of a shock to encounter an older all-steel (and think steel at that) car a while back. I was amazed the little old lady driving it could open and close the doors.

And no cup-holders as such! Pre-airbag, a typical car might have a couple spots on the door of the glovebox (when was the last time anybody kept gloves in there?) to set a couple drinks - while parked.