The 13-year-old granddaughter had a couple of questions for her Senior Citizen relative last night, and they made me come up with answers that seemed to amaze her. I herewith share them for the benefit of other 13-year-old grandchildren who have never seen a transistor radio or a Number Three wash tub.
1. Describe a new technology that came out when you were young and any thoughts you had about it at the time.
I was about 12 when my uncle gave me a Sony transistor radio. It was cream-colored about the size of a pack of my dad’s cigarettes, with a gold screen over the speaker. It used a nine-volt battery for power.
We don’t hear much about transistors these days, but until they came along, radios and televisions had glass tubes about the size of light bulbs. A radio had to be about the size of a boom box just to play a couple of stations.
Then someone figured out how to use silicone and some other stuff to make “solid state” tubes — so-called because they were, well, solid. They did the same thing tubes did, but they were bout the size of pencil erasers and needed only small batteries for power.
So there I was with my pocket-size Sony under my pillow at night, listening to Cousin Brucie talk about the Submarine Races on 77-WABC in New York. And the really cool part (at that age I didn’t understand that transistors, themselves, were cool) was that I was about 500 miles away from New York, in the Maine woods.
2. What new technology made the biggest change in you life? How did it change your life?
That’s easy. Computers. Specifically a Kaypro 4 that was my first one.
I wrote and produced a radio show then, writing in long-hand and typing, and then crossing out and making corrections and retyping. A recorded show was about three and-a-half pages of double-spaced print, so all that rewrite was a pain.
But I had been using computers in the Navy, so when I got wind of the Kaypro being affordable for personal use, I had to have one. That was 1984.
It was about the size of a suitcase, with a keyboard that unclipped from its bottom to expose a seven-inch screen that displayed text-only, in green letters about like newsprint. It had 64 Kilobytes of memory, and two five and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks that held about 400kb each. One floppy held the operating system; on the other, you stored your work.
If I wanted to change something, I simply moved up the screen and changed it. If I wanted to move a paragraph, or several paragraphs, I cut them from where they were and put them where I wanted them.
Shortly after I got out of the Navy, Tandy Radio Shack came out with a TRS-102 that became my first laptop, with which I filed stories from pay phones to the paper for which I wrote.
I still remember how to use a pencil, but I avoid it whenever possible.
3. Looking back when you where younger, did you like the lack of technology or wish you had more?
I didn’t know about technology. Running water meant hustling from the hand pump to the kitchen. We took a bath once a week in a Number Three washtub, with water heated on the wood stove. I was 12, the year I received the transistor radio, before we had indoor plumbing and a shower.
Nobody knew what a computer was, except a few people in the space program, or at big name technical colleges such as MIT. Today, there is more computer power in many cell phones than sent Apollo 13 to the moon in 1970. I bought my first calculator from JC Penney in 1971, on sale for $120 — and all it would do was add, subtract, multiply and divide.
4. Do you think that if you had the technology that we have now while you were growing up that it would have changed your life significantly?
Maybe a little. I think life was slower then, and without video games and television, we had to use our imaginations to invent stuff only we could see. I had a rock that took me into space, and I spent a lot of time wandering the woods around home, learning — though I didn’t realize it then — about wildlife and the natural world.
But I read a lot, which took me to places I never hoped to see in real life. I enjoyed research papers in high school because they were an excuse to pore through encyclopedias in search of amazing stuff.
Now, when I want to know who was chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1985 (I needed to know that for a story I was writing the other night) I Google it, and in a few seconds I have it. Had I used Google in a high school paper, I’d have received a red mark from the teacher for using a word that didn’t exist.
There was a little more, but I’m out of space.
I’m waiting to see Morgan’s report.
© 2008
