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?

[michaelmink.livejournal.com]

Televisions with "rabbit ears."

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah.

[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.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. Time-shifting of any sort was something that pretty much just didn't happen. And phones connected locations, not people.

It's to the point now that I don't recall the last time I used the phone or TV in a hotel room. The old "Color TV!" signs that looked strange to me (who didn't have color TV?) are now "Free wifi" signs that I suspect will soon seem as strange if they don't already

[michaelmink.livejournal.com]

I still recall when on drives with folks from CT to FL in the mid-to-late 70s the "Color TV" signs up. This would have been only 10-12 years after colour TV really became the dominant technology.

Of course, I remember a lot of brands that are now gone, like Quasar, Admiral, and Curtes Mathis.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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]

Yep. We get ADULTS who can't tell time on the analog clock any more.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I still use a fountain pen almost daily. It's conducive to good handwriting, and writes almost unalterable checks. Yes, I still write checks, too.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'd have a clothesline today if we didn't have so many trees and birds. ;p

I try to avoid fabric softener because it usually contains chemicals synthesized from rendered animal fat, traditionally horses.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, Gary and I remember horsedrawn wagons on the city streets. They delivered milk and took away rubbish even in the 1950s. Steam locomotives were still pulling freight trains (not so much passenger trains alas) in the 1950s and a bit into the 1960s in some parts of the country.

Refrigerators had tiny freezer compartments just large enough to hold a couple of ice cube trays. Ice cube trays? What are those? Carbonated beverages came in glass bottles with corrugated metal caps that required a special opener. Milk was delivered to the door in returnable glass bottles. Motorcycles had sidecars for passengers (much more common than it is now.)

Playgrounds had seesaws or teeter-totters (depending on what region you lived in,) something you never see any more. "Too dangerous!" Baseball bats were made of wood, not metal or plastic. So were tennis rackets. Car windows opened and closed with manual cranks, not electric buttons. Houses were heated by coal fired boilers or convection furnaces. There were phone booths and coin operated telephones everywhere. Cars had bumpers. Airplanes had propellers.

The movie theater showed one film at a time in a single room. There were still double features and matinees with a different film than the night-time feature. There were still black and white films. In the 60s, some of those were still being nominated for Oscars.

There were still black and white televisions, too. Houses had television antennas on the roof even in cities. Home air conditioning was something only rich folks had, even in the south.

The cream floated to the top of that milk that came in glass bottles. :) And it was tasty, too. The closest thing to frozen convenience food in the grocery store was orange juice concentrate or those newfangled "TV dinners." There were no microwaves, so you had to put them in the regular oven for 30 minutes and they came in foil trays with foil covers.

"Silver ware" was still often silver plated. Cups came with saucers. Mugs were for beer, which could be had in bottles but was much better on tap somewhere. Now it's the same stuff no matter how it's packaged. Root beer had roots in it. Ginger ale had ginger. Ginger beer was alcoholic and hard to find. You could get real (not cultured) buttermilk.

All that is from the 50s and 60s.

[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.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Ouch. Pausing a moment to decipher i might understand. But simply unable? That's an ouch. I expect "half past" and "quarter to" are fading due to such a thing. Though "half four" is an odd one, as I seem to recall it would be 3:30 or halfway to 4:00. Or maybe I'm just remembering the German version.