Got a new cell phone today and I feel kinda old

[skygazer]

I got a new Motorola Razr and I like it a lot - it's pretty cool but I can't help but be blown away by how far technology has come in my lifetime.

When I was a kid, we had one phone in the house that hung on the wall, had a rotary dial and a cord. We had a private line but many of our neighbors had party lines - you had your own distinctive ring and you only answered that one. If you needed to call out, you picked up the receiver and listened to see if any of the sharing families were using it. If they were, you had to wait or ask them to hang up.

My parents had a record player - it was sort of a suitcase affair lined with felt. Had a distinct smell to it that I loved. When I got a little older, they got a cabinet record player (my friend's family got one with a radio, too - that was fancy!). You could stack several records up on the central spindle and they'd drop one after another and play. 45 RPM records required an adapter to fit the spindle because they had a larger central hole (always wondered why) - we had an adapter that came with the record player or we used little yellow disks that fit into the middle.

We also had a television, black and white with about a 13" screen. It stood on a little table in the living room and had 2 dials which had to be turned manually because there were no such things as remote controls. We had an antenna on top of the house which my dad had to periodically adjust by climbing up there and manhandling it around. When you shut it off, the picture disappeared and a little white dot stayed in the center of the screen for several minutes. There was nothing on after about 2 am - the station would show a picture of a waving flag, play the National Anthem and then it would go to static.

By the time I got into high school, there were phones that had pushbuttons which was a huge innovation but they were still tethered by wires and cords and firmly in place within the house. Record players were now called "stereos" and sometimes had speakers that you could place separately across the room from each other. The real fancy ones had "tuners" and some very high end ones had "graphic equalizers".

My friends and I all had pocket transistor radios which were considered pretty cool and a requirement for hanging with the "in" crowd. And the school actually had a computer! This was a behemoth of a machine (which I was scared to death of) which took up an entire room about the size of your average bathroom. It did nothing but perform calculations as far as I could tell and was quite complicated.

So here I am looking at this tiny, razor thin phone that I can use anywhere, that downloads music, takes photos, has about 3 dozen features that no one had ever even heard of when I was born and I feel a little old. Interesting times these are.

[Fla Dem]

1. You just described my life, except our school didn't have

a computer. That came much later. Didn't get a TV until we were in grammar school and then it was only 10". Before that radio was all we had. Being in the business world up until the late 90's, I thought I was pretty tech savy, in fact was over a IT dept for a while. But since I retired it's like an explosion of new technololgy. Blue tooth, WiFi, MP3, etc. The kids are running circles around me.

[uppityperson]

2. We called it bug tv

when the station went off the air and just had static. Drove the youngest sibs nuts if they were up late enough to watch because we would pretend we were watching a real show, laugh, talk about it, etc. Probably new yrs eve.

I know what you mean.