So I tried this as a poem a few months ago, but it didn’t feel right as a poem. I wanted to talk about the changes I remember in just my lifetime, to think about the way things shift over time with new technologies. I mean, they landed on the moon the year I was born.
The one that I keep coming back to is microwaves. I remember not having one for a lot of my childhood. They became pretty normal in my teens (the 80s), but as a kid, there was no microwave in homes. Food was cooked in ovens, which took time, or made on stove tops. Popcorn was made on stove tops or, later, air poppers. I also don’t remember many places with air conditioning, though it was a thing. We opened windows at home and in the car. No seat belts in cars that I recall until there were, and my parents pushed to use them.
There was a lot more laundry on clothes lines, with people paying close attention to if it might rain and get the laundry wet. Kids running between the drying sheets.
I remember life without video games. Then there was a room with a street-facing door where these video games were available to play at 25 cents a game. Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Pitfall, all in 8-bit glory. It was hard to find enough quarters to play much, but it was so exciting. Then I bought a Sears off-brand Atari when it was new to the market (it was a Christmas present that I had to raise half the money for). You attached it to your tv and played whatever games you could afford (same as always), but it was new. Then my uncle got an Odyssey, and that was amazingly new and different. Then the ColecoVision was released. My freshman year of college, there was this new game called the Nintendo. PlayStation and Xbox were much later.
Then there were home computers, and they were new levels of interesting. I got an ADAM, and my model had to be hooked to a ColecoVision to work. I immediately set out to learn AppleSoft BASIC, and I was drawing helicopters in high-resolution (now very basic) graphics. My friend got an TI-99 4A, and (unrelated) I remember touring an Texas Instruments (TI) factory, which was a wonderland of technology at the time. There was the TRS-80, and in my teens, my friends started getting Vic-20s and Commodore 64s with the related games. My ADAM had a couple of games, but most of them were ColecoVision games, not real computer ones. I was totally fascinated by computers, but they were expensive and not central to life. They didn’t even exist in homes until I was a teen. I also remember a church member showing me their new computer, with 4k of memory, with a 16k expansion pack, and how little it could do and how exciting it was. By my sophomore year of high school, I was taking computers class with Apple IIEs, and eating lunch as quickly as possible so I could join my friend in the computer lab to play Wizardry and Bard’s Tale on the same Apples.
Television was very different. The VCR didn’t appear until I was a teen, and the DVD was years later than that. Streaming? Much later. Frequently, I used tvs that didn’t have remotes. I remember my family not having cable until I was 16, though my grandmother had it sooner. I remember watching MTV at her house when it was brand new, in its first few weeks, and how amazed I was by it. But generally, I had to settle for the three networks and, occasionally, I might get reception for PBS, which would show some British shows: Doctor Who, Benny Hill (late at night), Masterpiece Theater. And if you found a show you really liked, you had to plan your life around being home on the night and time it was showing. If it was on a network you didn’t get well, you might have a really hard time watching an episode if it was storming, and if you missed an episode, you had no option to watch it again until the summer reruns. If you missed it then, you missed it completely, unless it was syndicated. You could always count on being able to watch “The Little Rascals,” for instance, or “The Three Stooges.” Scooby Doo, Bugs Bunny, The Addams Family, The Munsters, MASH. Stations went off the air overnight and resumed in the mornings. Kids’ shows happened on Saturday mornings only, starting by 6 or 7 AM and running until noon or so. Outside of that, you had a few kids’ shows (Little Rascals, Three Stooges, maybe Scooby Doo) after school on weekdays, but there were no channels catering to kids. You had to be strategic to see your shows, or you had to watch the adult stuff or do without. And then Nickelodeon came along, with little kids’ shows in the mornings and older kids’ shows the rest of the time. Stuff like You Can’t Do That On Television. But in general, big shows in my lifetime included All in the Family, Carol Burnette, The Dukes of Hazzard, Solid Gold, Three’s Company, Mork and Mindy, Dallas, The Muppet Show, and Hee Haw.
News was at 6 AM, 6 PM, and 11 PM. Then TBS came along and colorized some black-and-white shows, and then the owner of TBS started CNN. 24-hour news (cable only, from what I recall), and it was revolutionary. Not that I cared much about news when that happened. And there were big events on television, like Roots and Centennial, shows that would air for several nights in a row. The Day After traumatized whole groups of my generation, showing the horrors of nuclear war on a very personal level, during the Cold War 80s. We weren’t hiding under our desks (that was before our time), but we were constantly under some low-level fears.
In the 70s, commercial Halloween costumes were plastic sheets and plastic face masks that only covered the front of your face. Libraries were usually very quiet places, and you had to know how to use the card catalog to find things. In the 80s, I remember tanning beds first appearing; not that I cared, but it was suddenly a thing. Cameras were on film only, and if you didn’t have a Polaroid, you had to wait to see how each shot looked. Most cameras, early in my life, had a camera cube or bar rather than a built-in flash, and you had to buy new ones every time you wanted more flash pictures. And of course, the quality of the pictures were lower, though you could do pretty well; there were just a lot more bad photos tossed out.
Musically, I came from a home with a collection of vinyl, and that was the best way to buy new music. 8 tracks were around, but not for long, and then cassettes were the big musical technology for me. CDs appeared in later high school, but they were expensive. I would record lots of music off the radio, at first from a separate tape recorder. After a couple of years, there were radios with tape decks, and then double tape decks, built in, but it wasn’t simultaneous technology.
In classrooms, we didn’t have VCRs yet, so there were lots of film strips, maybe slide projectors. My freshman year of high school, my geography teacher showed us so many slides of countries he’d visited. My parents had a slide projector, too, and they pulled it out and hung a sheet on a wall so we could look at them every few weeks.
I was a kid when Elvis died, and I had no idea who he was, but everyone seemed to think it was important. The Berlin Wall came down in early college; I remember Tianmen Square the same year. By later college, the first Iraq War. 9/11 happened when I was 30. I first noticed politics during the Hostage Crisis of the Carter presidency, but it didn’t interest me for a long time. I remember lots of news about acid rain, and the hole in the ozone layer (which we fixed).
The internet was a thing at colleges when I first got there, and commercially within a handful of years. You had to use your (landline) phone to dial in, and it was a status symbol to have two lines, one just for the internet. And it was very slow. Obviously, no cell phones until much later. That technology was only really picking up when I was 30.
As a small kid, I thought McDonald’s was amazing, but there were no McNuggets for years. I had McDonald’s posters of all their characters, which all (but Ronald) vanished in the 90s. For knowledge, your family might have a home encyclopedia set. I remember when photocopiers really showed up, and before that, using mimeograph machines. I remember smoking sections in restaurants and airplanes, grocery bags that were all paper, soda bottles that were all glass. I would gather soda bottles and return them for extra money. Choose Your Own Adventure showed up in my childhood. There were so many joke books, it felt like, and racism felt more open, though maybe that was where I lived. But I remember Pollack joke books, and that was considered to be acceptable.
I’m 53, and all of this (and all of the stuff I forgot to mention) was in my lifetime. I’m not being nostalgic here, though there are some fond memories within all of that. In a lot of ways, I’m just thinking about how much things change in 50 years, and I want to think more about how things will change in another 50. Change is a constant; growth happens. I’m not making predictions. Looking back at some of the predictions made can be hilarious. But I’m fascinated by all of the changes, and how they keep speeding up.
Bill Abbott, poet, web page 