Some 'detail' freaks knocked a 'joke' in the jokes section...

It got me thinking about how much the times are a changing!

I posted:

"Yeah, the point of the post is that so much has happened in the past 50-60 years, that someone in their 50-60s now lives in a totally different world to that which they could ever imagine. My GrandFather remembered the Wright brothers first flight and lived to see space flights in his lifetime. His parents experienced the Irish famine!

Man, the world has changed!"

But it got me thinking about how prophetic Bob Dylan's famous song was, there's no way when he wrote it he could have forseen the massive changes yet to come. My thoughts posted above got me thinking about how much things have changed even since I was a kid, and I'm only 45!!!

Post your thoughts and memories of change here, bad or good.

Oh and here's a good live version from Bob!

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ItPz7f-k-dE&...feature=related

Computers. When I was a wee lad, I did Fortran programming classes as a hobby (to satisfy the 'nerd' part of me). You wrote out the code, it was then printed up on fan-fold paper, which was checked for errors and (more often than not) reprinted. When you were satisfied that the code was correct, you provided the program paper to a key punch operator. The key punch operator then typed the program into a machine that produced punch cards (ie cards with holes in specific positions on them). The punch cards were then fed into the computer. Where the holes were in the cards, light could pass through (earlier models used wire), thus providing the instructions for the computer. The computer would then run the program. Where, as often occurred, there was a programming error, the whole process had to be repeated. All these machines were contained in a very large room which was kept at a constant 20 degrees C (68 F) and you had to don laboratory coats and caps to stop fibres/hairs gumming up the works.

In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that I would one day be sitting in my study at home and have computing power, on my own desk, that was inconceivable in those days... with a cup of coffee by my side and cigarette smoke wafting through the computer!

A good example of our failure to be able to comprehend the potential of progress can be found if you ever watch any of the original Star Trek episodes. They will occasionally make reference to things such as 'computer tapes' (notwithstanding that commercial hard disk drives were first marketed in 1956), yet the show is supposed to be set two or three hundred years in the future.

Excerpt from Wiki:

The IBM 350 Disk File, invented by Reynold Johnson, was introduced in 1956 with the IBM 305 RAMAC computer. This drive had fifty 24 inch platters, with a total capacity of five million characters. A single head assembly having two heads was used for access to all the platters, making the average access time very slow (just under 1 second).

The IBM 1301 Disk Storage Unit, announced in 1961, introduced the usage of a head for each data surface with the heads having self acting air bearings (flying heads).

The first disk drive to use removable media was the IBM 1311 drive, which used the IBM 1316 disk pack to store two million characters.

In 1973, IBM introduced the IBM 3340 "Winchester" disk drive, the first significant commercial use of low mass and low load heads with lubricated media. All modern disk drives now use this technology and/or derivatives thereof. Project head designer/lead designer Kenneth Haughton named it after the Winchester 30-30 rifle after the developers called it the "30-30" because of it was planned to have two 30 MB spindles; however, the actual product shipped with two spindles for data modules of either 35 MB or 70 MB.

Full (history of HDD) article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives

E: I imagine that hard (mechanical) drives will be fully replaced by non-mechanical drives in the next five to ten years, since we have already made significant progress in non-mechanical storage.

Suega?

45?

ish perhaps. and have you dug for the infinity pool yet?????? sorry, irish sense of humour

Like Ping I had my first contact with computers working in Fortran to produce the paper tapes for CNC machines to produce airfoil sections (wind tunnel models) back in 1969. The establishment had two computers housed in, and pretty well filling, their own building. We irks never got to see the machines, we had to stand at the front desk and wait to see one of the technicians and hand over our input. They never phoned us when our stuff was ready we just had to keep going back until we saw our batch on the shelf. So we see that tekkies were unhelpful little nerds from the outset .

Next contact was around 1978 working in the petrochemical contracting business where we had a program for the desing of tall columns and stacks. Having written out our input we had to go from the 7th to the 9th floor to use the card punch to produce the input cards. Then it was down to the 3rd to hand over the cards to the tekkies and yet again no phone call when the output was ready (so no change between '69 and '78). If you were lucky you had a nice 7 - 8 mm wad of printout, if only 3 sheets you then had to figure out what you had done wrong. Error messages were the same unhelpful load of jargon then as they are now "SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE 178 OF E2251 SUBROUTINE CROSSOVER LINK" .

Does anyone remember the fun using a remote computer via a telephone line modem link? Oh the fun of those crackles and hisses and the characters they created in the middle of your input. Of course you don't see these characters as what you see is what you typed in not necessarily what the computer received.

But let's not forget calculators.

I did my City & Guilds entirely using a slide rule and was quite proficient with it. Had a year or two break before going back to do my HNC and in that time sold my kit to a colleague who had all his stuff stolen, this was around 1975. I didn't buy a new slide rule thinking for the first week's classes I'd slog it out with 5 figure log tables. The lecturer put the first mechanics problem on the board and before I could even get my log tables open students were calling out the answers. I looked at these guys with their little boxes working out problems in seconds and thought "I'm gonna have to get one of those or I'll not survive". My first calculator cost me £20 sterling and had the four mathematical functions, a percentage key and a memory all powered by two AA batteries. My latest calculator is solar powered, fully programmable and has more functions than I can shake a stick at and cost me around £20.

Cor, yeah. Calculators... I can vividly remember the crowd in the playground at the Grammar School when the first kid with a calculator got it out. Er, the calculator; it wasn't that sort of school. When would that have been, '72? '73? If we used a calculator for exams, we had to put a big C on the top of the paper. Not that it would have helped me with my maths O-level, even if I'd had one.

Or how about the first time you played PONG? I think the first time was about the same time as the calculator's debut, come to think of it. This was in the back corridor of the Llandoger Trow, a pub in Bristol. It was housed in a huge, coin-operated cabinet and I really believed that I was seeing the future. Coo...

I can remember my old Dad working as a Sales Rep for Sumlock

selling these in the late 1950's, (pocket calculators they were not)

What's a computer. I'm just transferring my thoughts into the ether by telepathy. Come on guys, get the latest software. Next thing you'll be telling me your'e still using them old Nano IPod thingies that went out with the old HD Televisions.

.

Who else remembers lighting a Kero fridge ?

Suega?

45?

ish perhaps. and have you dug for the infinity pool yet?????? sorry, irish sense of humour

I hope by this patsy that you think I look much younger!

Wow, yeah, computers!

How about cars? When I was a lad you knew your car would one day let you down. Had jump leads and tow rope in the boot. I have not had a car break down on me in donkey years!

My wife just reminded me of something else, her grandmother (long since dead) remembered ladies getting the vote here in the UK. (1918 I think?)

I was shopping for some trainers the other day and was amazed at the range available. Not just the amount of makes, the amount of choice wthin each make!

An old mate of mine was originally from Blighty. He used to tell about these little kero lamps that one put under the sumps of cars in the days before they had multigrade oils. Apparently, with Blighty's winters, the oil used to become so thick that the engine would not be able to turn over unless the pre-heating thing was done with the lamp!

Cars with starting handles, motorbikes with kick starts only. No electric starts then.

Learning to drive meant also learning hand signals for left and right turns and stopping. Do they still have to learn this sh1t?

I don't remember Leungken's kero fridge but do recall kerosine (parafin) heaters for the house. Still had, and used, two of them in my first house in the 1980's.

Black and white television. Televisions you switch on and 15 minutes went by before any image appeared on the screen. Then it was snow or the vertical or horizontal hold needed adjusting. Then dad applied the mystic adjustments to make the thing work that usually ended up with him thumping the side or top of the set. This was cutting edge technology to us kids.

Television programmes like Tomorrow's World predicting things like that in the future cars will be obsolete and we'll all travel by our own personal helicopters.

Valve radios that were as big, or bigger, than the average television set. Listening to BFPO (British Forces Posted Overseas) radio with requests from families in the UK for their men and women serving in far flung places like Akrotiri (Cyprus) or Singapore.

Steam locomotives on the railways.

Travelling to and from school alone using two separate public bus services. Even if late back mum didn't get worried, just thought that I missed the bus or it was running late.

Ah hel_l, nostalgia aint what it used to be. It wasn't all good but let's try and keep this thread at least mainly positive. Plenty of negativity to be found in the other fora.

What's a computer. I'm just transferring my thoughts into the ether by telepathy. Come on guys, get the latest software. Next thing you'll be telling me your'e still using them old Nano IPod thingies that went out with the old HD Televisions.

I was having a bit of a nostalgia moment yesterday (not as far back as you guys mind ). Having a look through an old gaming website it listed Lemmings as being released in 1990. That's 18 years ago! Does it feel like it....?

Maybe going OT a bit, but Demolition Man was on Cinimax the other day. Okay, it's a bit of a comic book flick, but as it was filmed in a pre-internet era, already some of the concepts in it look a bit dated.

Difficult nowadays to predict what's going to have a massive impact on our lives next year, never mind another 20 down the road...

Some good ones there lads. Strting handles and kick starts, my first car while it did have a starting motor, also had a starting handle - great when it wouldn't start!

I remember the Television taking 15 mins to warm up, and then the reception was crap! As a lad in Ireland we only had one channel, RTE. It didn't start til 6pm and was closed down before midnight!

Tomorrows world was fab - didn't predict the internet though!

Your parents never being worried when you didn't come home, I'd forgotton about that!

Halcyon days!

Yes, a great little trip down the road of recent history. Excellent contributions. Luckily (or not) I never owned a car with a crank handle - although my motor bike would just about break your ankle on the odd occasions that it kicked back.

The old black and white tellies. In those days, they couldn't knit the ads and promos together as tightly as they do now - so you'd be staring at a clock on the screen with a bit of background music, waiting for it to hit the hour. Who'd have ever imagined that you would be watching the news live from a theatre of conflict, or a variety show, football or the motor racing from another country live by satellite?

Arriving at the bank just in time for them to be locking the front door - who could have imagined ATMs or Internet banking?

I'm surprised no-one mentioned fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. You would break a hole through the end and burn your fingers trying to extract them... but didn't they just taste better?

Bloody 'ell, yeah! I remember the first colour TV in our area. We used to sit on the poor chap's front garden wall to try and get a look at it. Our telly (B & W) was part of a huge radiogram, remember them? Dad was always fiddling with the tuning of the thing and it was never really right once it was a few years old. Took an age to warm-up. I used to ask Mum to switch it on as she was leaving home to collect me from Primary School so that it would be ready to watch Robinson Crusoe, Casey Jones or Boots and Saddles. Jeepers...

The radiogram, the size of 3 washing machines! Used to be able to pile up nine 45s on ours and they'd drop down one by one. Any more than that and the needle wouldn't reach the last one! Ahh!

Also remember sitting on peoples walls and fences to try get a glimpse of their Colour TV. In Ireland you had to have an ariel(sp) that was about 50 foot tall, so you always knew when someone had a colour telly!

The first colour television I got I decided to rent. Unbeknownst to me, they were still only doing the test televising, so for the first month or so, there was only one show per channel per day in colour. It's the only time I sat through Roger Ramjet! (What an embarassing admission - but up there with the memorable times, such as the time I got kicked out of class for mucking around just as the LEM was about to touch down on the Moon!) Speaking of which - I reckon he fluffed his line (Armstrong). You would think he was supposed to say one small step for a man... Thus (you will recall) the pause in his delivery of that line.

E: Clarification

Haha, yeah! Sometimes the last single would slip a bit which always used to get me laughing. I liked reading the exotic names on the radio tuning panel. Hilversum is the only one I can remember now. My older brother used to have this theory that aliens would hear our old radio programmes in the future. He must have been explaining light-years to me or something.

Ping, you mean you didn't stay-up and watch it live? Coo, I recall that very well. Mum was totally underwhelmed by the whole thing but Dad was really excited about it all; the way he was explaining it all to us, you'd think he was part of the team or something. As for Armstrong, I think he did actually admit that he did messed it up slightly; didn't emphasize the "a" enough so it just became "small step fora man". The poor transmission quality did the rest and we all just heard it without the indefinite article. Of course, conspiracy theorists will tell you that he wasn't there at all...

E: typo.

Think about phones. When I came to Bangkok 11 years ago very few people had mobiles, it was certainly a perk and were still fairly 'bricky', and highly unreliable. Today my phone has a 5mp camera (with zoom and flash), email, wireless access to the internet (GPRS and wifi) and an on board global positioning system with voice navigation!

Times have indeed changed a lot!

.

Who else remembers lighting a Kero fridge ?

I'm not yet 60, but can remember having an ice chest (fridge). The iceman used to deliver big blocks of ice every 3-4 days which sat in the top of the chest slowly melting, but keeping the contents cool. We kids used to fight for a sliver of ice from the truck to suck on on hot days.

I can remember the bottlo coming to collect the big brown beer bottles every few weeks and paying a penny or two per bottle. We always seemed to have so many more than anyone else in the street.

And then there was the night cart collectors who came weekly along the back lane to empty our bucket of shit from our backyard dunny!

Back when I was a kid even the rubbish collectors used to come in to our backyard, through gates, past dogs, etc, to pick up the rubbish bin and return it to the same place. They were rewarded at xmas time with a number of full big brown beer bottles left out for them.

I can remember us being the first house in the street to get Tv and have a dozen or so kids sitting in the lounge room after school every day watching the test pattern.

To go from that, to the digital age, in my memory is mind boggling. What will the next fifty years bring?

Mick, here in Oz the first Moon landing was during our daytime while I was at school. Marvellous that in 1969, they had the technology to relay a direct broadcast originating from the Moon.

Quiksilva, your comment re mobiles brings an interesting memory of my early travels to Phuket. In those days, there were no mobiles and (in Patong) there was only one place available to the general public (as far as I can recall) where international telephone calls could be made - it was in Thanon 200 Pi Ratuthit. Overseas calls were extremely expensive, but there was always a queue.

OC's recollections are interesting, because when I was a child the night service had long since given way to a sewerage system. Bread - still warm out of the oven - was delivered to your door, as was the milk. Bread deliveries stopped while I was still a child, and milk deliveries stopped not long after (30 or so years ago).

As to what the next fifty years will bring - I shudder to think, but it won't affect me!

PS The one thing of which we can be certain - since we see it almost daily - is that man will continue to repeat his great mistakes (the same mistakes repeatedly!) notwithstanding the lessons of the past. We will have wars, genicide, famine and pestilence. We will have power-hungry dictators and totalitarian regimes. We will have religious zealotry and persecution. And along the way, some good things will come...

Nice one Ping. The times they are a changin' but human nature doesn't!

Yep, correct-ski!

Complete agrement - TLW Oooops, wrong thread!

Pop-up toasters. Underrated, IMHO. I don't know how I used to put up with the old burn-your-bread-to-a-cinder toasters. Funnily enough though, some things (I am told) that were (are?) popular in the UK never caught on here - like electric overblankets and Teasmaids (Teasmades?).

I actually bought a pop-up toaster that had a computer chip in it. Bloody thing stopped working in no time!

Electric blankets, both under and over, are anathma to me, I have never suffered from the cold and the thought of roasting alive as you sleep...

Also, back when I was a heavy smoker I had a teasmade to wake me up in the morning. Steaming hot cuppa and a few smokes before I got out of bed. Ahhh, bliss. Yes those times have changed too!

A toaster with a computer chip? Reminds me of those refrigerators with the Internet computer built in. I just don't see people sitting around the 'fridge while tapping into Bedlam. Gawd...

...but then again, if you like a beer while 'surfing', I suppose...

Could be useful!

555 I'll wager that the bit you edited out was a description of those for whom it would be useful!