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Tuesday, January 4, 2011

The Dark Ages


To historians, "The Dark Ages" refers to the era which ran from the decline of the Roman Empire in the 5th century A.D. up to the beginning of the Enlightenment in the 15th century.

But from the vantage point of the internet age, my own childhood is looking more and more like the Dark Ages. 

For entertainment, we had black and white TV. The picture quality wasn't great, and sometimes the image on the screen would scroll up or down, which meant we had to adjust the "vert hold" dial. There was no such thing as a remote control, so to do that, or to change the channel, you had to get up, walk over to the TV, and turn a knob.

There was less motive to change the channel, though, as there were only three channels. This is why Hollywood can make nostalgic movies from old TV shows like Get Smart and The Wild, Wild West and Starsky and Hutch: everybody remembers them, because there wasn't much else to watch. In the future they will be far less likely to do a remake of, say, Hoarders, simply because audience shares are less due to the number of choices.

Cell phones did not exist. Each family had one land line, ensuring arguments over who got to use it when. I knew of only one family that had two phone lines back then, and it struck me as the height of self indulgence. And without call waiting, getting in touch with someone often meant endlessly dialing until you finally stopped getting a busy signal.

If you wanted to contact someone far away (long distance phone calls were expensive), you used snail mail, or, as it was called back then, mail.

There was no GPS, so if you went for a walk in the woods you had to orient yourself. And if you did get lost, there was no calling for help on a cell phone. (It's a wonder any of us Baby Boomers survived to adulthood.)

To go for that walk, you would most likely have put on a pair of Keds, since there were no running shoes. That didn't seem like such a hardship, though, since jogging hadn't caught on yet.

Cars usually didn't have seat belts in the back seats, and there was no such thing as a crumple zone. No one would have imagined such frivolities as heated seats, or a digital readout to tell you what the outside temperature was, or another to tell you how many miles per gallon your car had averaged for that tank of gas.

(What the cars did have back then were personalities so distinctive that from a hundred and fifty yards away you could tell a Caddy from a Mercedes from a Mustang from a GTO. Nowadays you often have to look at the logo on the back to identify the model.)

There were no video games, so people actually played board games. Some of the games, like chess, actually required some brainpower. (You never hear a parent boast, "Oh, my Joey is really smart -- he's a really good Call of Duty player.)

To type, you inserted a piece of paper in the typewriter and pecked away. There was nothing you could do about typos other than put on some White Out -- remember that? -- reinsert the piece of paper, painstakingly line it up, and retype. Electric typewriters seemed like a luxury since you didn't have to tap on the keys that hard.

To listen to music, you used a record player. You had to be careful not to scratch the record, as a scratch could make the needle bounce back and forth, causing an endless loop of two seconds of music. Ironically, as the equipment to play it has gotten ever more sophisticated, the music itself has gone steadily downhill. Today you can use your iPod to listen to....rap. 

Computers were huge machines with names like ENIAC that only people at places like IBM used, and frankly, at the time they seemed sort of pointless.

Without the internet, the reference of choice was the Enclopedia Britannica. (Remember how grand that sounded -- Britannica? To be educated back then was to be slightly Anglophilic.) The information got out of date from time to time, but the encyclopedia was still the ultimate authority on just about everything.

With no Facebook, we figured we were doing well to have just four or five friends.

And special friends -- the kind with privileges? If you wanted to advertise for them, you had to do it in the back of some sleazy publication. (Decent people did not do this.) Or you had to actually go places to possibly meet people, like the local bar, from which you would return smelling like secondhand smoke.

Kids must think of the 1960's the way we thought of the horse and buggy days.

What will they have forty years from now which will make today look like the Dark Ages?

Addendum, next morning: I had honestly intended to keep all sentimentality out of this post, and just emphasize how much better things are now. But I see that despite my intentions, a little bit did creep in.

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

When I were young used to get up at three o'clock int mornin' and lick road wit tongue.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDaSvRO9xA
G

John Craig said...

Guy --
Ha! I guess I did sound a little like that. Hadn't meant to, but...

A joke I heard recently: When I was a kid, I had to walk six miles to school and back every day -- and it was uphill both ways!

That seems to be what I'm turning into.

Anonymous said...

Actually I'm just the same, as I suspect are most of us aging yuppies. But the Python guys are exactly right that the younger generation doesn't give a s**t, and why should they?
G

John Craig said...

Agreed. Did we care the the generation before us didn't have TV?

I wasn't trying to deny that we were spoiled, just point out that life is a lot more convenient now. I was born forty years too early. And this generation will probably be thinking the same....

I actually hadn't even thought about that product White Out for at least fifteen years.

Steven said...

Quite a lot of that applies to my childhood in the 80's and 90's.

No internet, no mobile phones, record players and tapes, four channels a see couldn't afford sky. Hey, our landline phones still don't have call waiting! And I've never heard of anyone with two lines in my life.

Typewriters were still around but so were the first personal computers and games consoles.

I'd prefer to grow up then than now. Life was a little simpler and we kids still spent a lot of time outside. Internet and especially games are too immersive (and violent) now. However, we had some better stuff than when you were a kid, including colour tv and VHS, so I figure my time had a good balance. The eighties had such good movies too and we loved our computer games- mario brothers 1. Ha

Your kids are about my age, right? Your son probably had a lot of the same toys and stuff.

Steven said...

Elon musk said something cool about the internet. He said it's like humanity getting a nervous system. Every part has access to essentially all of human knowledge, the info of the whole. In the past you had to be near a big library or something. It was more like info was transmitted via osmosis, like in a simple multicellular organism with no central nervous system.

John Craig said...

Steven --
Time to get call waiting!

Interesting question about which was a better time to grow up. As far as childhood, meaning up until age 14 or so, then may have been better, with all the outdoor stuff. As far as being 15 or over, however, I think now is a much better time, what with Tinder and Facebook and the like. The world is much more interconnected now. I'm evidently old-fashioned because I use email, but in my day we only had snail mail, which seems extremely quaint and inconvenient now.

My kids are younger than you by a bit; if I recall, you're 29. My son is 22, my daughter 20.

Yes, great comment by Musk. There was far, far less information available in the old days. And what was available was effectively censored. Now, with the internet, we can read the unvarnished truth about a lot of stuff we couldn't before.

Steven said...

Yeah the democratic and empowering aspects of the net are really cool.

I remember when I started going online, about age 14. My friends and I went to the central library and went on the computers there. We went in chat rooms and spoke to Americans (asl!) and conversing with Americans was an amazing novelty.

I remember snail mail. I had a pen pal in Portugal, inconceivable now.

I'm 30. June.

The internet age is definitely better for hook ups and meeting females.

I wonder if landlines will disappear from homes. No need for them really.




John Craig said...

Steven --
I know of no one who doesn't have a landline where I live, but people do seem to use them less. They could well go the way of pay phones.

Steven said...

Just googled it. For some reason the centre for disease control and prevention in the US has been tracking phone use for over a decade. They think 41% of homes in America don't have landlines (25 in the north east where for some reason I imagine you live). The figure was going up 5% a year, now it's dropped to 3%.

I guess that's our answer. Surprising.

John Craig said...

Steven --
Going up? Yes, that is a surprise.

And yes, I live in the Northeast, in Connecticut.

Anonymous said...

This post made me laugh. Thank you. I've told my kids that I typed all of my college papers on a typewriter, that they are fortunate to have computers. When I needed to correct a typo, I would use either an eraser or white-out to make corrections to any errors. There are so many things that exist today that would have been great to have had back in the day.

-birdie

John Craig said...

Birdie --
Yes, White Out is now a distant (and not fondly recalled) memory.

But most of all, in retrospect, I wish I'd had the internet back then. Knowing that like-minded people are out there would have been a godsend to the 17-year-old me.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I agree (about the internet). With the help of the internet, many of us could have avoided some pitfalls in life. Also, it is helpful to know that their are others who resemble you in their thinking, outlook. When I was young, I had (and still have) a twin sister who helped me to feel less alone.

-birdie

John Craig said...

Birdie --
You're lucky. A twin brother would have been fun. I got a great younger brother, but when I was young, he didn't influence my outlook on anything.

Anonymous said...

This post caused me to have a memory. In possibly 6th grade, my best friend, Linda, took a vacation, visiting her relatives in Oregon. She came back to Ohio with a pair of good looking green Nike sneakers. That was the first time I'd ever seen or heard of the Nike brand name. I remember Linda telling me that all the new things reached California first and then the other states later.

-birdie

John Craig said...

Birdie --
Back in the 60's, that was actually true. California was on the cutting edge of a lot of trends, in a good way:

http://justnotsaid.blogspot.com/2010/04/kit-horn-and-california.html

Now, it leads the country in a number of bad ways, unfortunately.