My Bride and I began calling ourselves Friendly Stegosauri because we kept running into clerks at stores who had never processed a check before. The computer revolution puts in the shade the industrial revolution of the 19th century when it comes to the impact on day to day life. There is a vast difference in mental habits, skill sets and a myriad of other ways, between people born before the computer revolution and those born after. I hope that the words of Talleyrand will not apply to this revolution: “He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life.’
Twenty for Me
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I’m 43 and I’ve done 24 of 24. Granted, those of us born during the early to mid 80’s may be the final set of people who can say that.
Of note, I remember my grandmother’s white Western Electric rotary phone. It had the loudest bell ringer ever. No matter where you were in her house, you could hear that blasted phone!
23 out of 24. Never bought anything from Columbia House. Does Tower Records substitute?
20. Yikes. I miss CDs. And CD stores. Looking at the artwork, reading the lyrics, the credits… I still have my CD collection in the garage cupboard. Just don’t have anywhere to play them. Spotify killed all of this. My kids love Spotify.
Also I remember when mum used to write checks to pay bills. I love how she would draw two diagonal lines across the check and scribble “non-negotiable”. I used to think that was cool and I want to do that when I’m older. Then when I got older…the checks disappeared. The world you grow up in doesn’t end up being the world you live in as an adult. It’s kinda sad.
Only 21 for me.
22 of 24. “Party lines” were still in existence when we lived in Fort Wayne Indiana. S & H green stamps were collected and used to purchase items from catalogs. My grandmother had a drawer in her kitchen filled with them. One of the best memories that I have is my grandfather walking me to the 5 and dime to pick out a paper kite, string and three sticks of green licorice out of a bin, that by today’s standards would never pass health department codes. My childhood was lived in an atmosphere void of technology and yet filled with imagination and friendships. Friendships similarly found in the movie Sandlot. Our neighberhood was flooded with children who played outdoors.
A great time in my life.
oh….
for those who are unaware of Party Lines…
It’s a telephone line system where your neighbors shares the line. You go to make a phone call and before to use the rotary you listen to hear if anyone is talking. If not, quickly make that call you wanted. There were days when I’m sure somebody wanted to “reach out and touch someone” because the other party was very slow to exit the line.
Every one except MySpace. Brontosaurus reporting for duty. 😁
I will be 62 in four months. 21 of 24 for me. I had a portable CD player but not a Walkman. No My Space account. My mom had a subscription from Columbia House for 8 track tapes.
I had an 8 track player and a cassette player I put in my 1969 Chevy truck
I still have the Kodak Instamatic 126 camera I got for my 10th birthday…took pictures with it as recently as the late 90s.
I still write checks. Played Intellivision, not Atari.
Subscribed to a newspaper and or magazine should be on the list. How about owning a black and white TV? I did all three.
I score 17 out of 24. I have no idea what a ‘mixed tape’ is, never owned a Walkman; have in my sorry assed life played PacMan once, Pong once, and some other forgotten game once (hardware belonged to friends and do not recall the brand); and have no idea what “Columbia House” is. (Sounds like a brand of coffee). We interviewed a man of 25 in 2007 and one topic of discussion was his knowledge of Facebook and MySpace and the features of each. (Alas, he was an Indiana partisan and did not wish to move to central New York if he could work at home). Never had an AOL address because I used my company e-mail up until 2012, gmail later. There were two modems in our office in 1992 and neither was on my desk; neither did my work assignments make it necessary to use them, so I didn’t. I’d be pleased to send you and Dale Price a postcard, but I’m a stick in the mud and traveling requires I take blood thinners. I write checks every month. I lost my typewriter and encyclopedia in an unfortunate set of events involving a storage vendor.
==
Fun fact: my daddy was a systems analyst. We had decomissioned card readers taking up space in our basement and I can remember playing on the floor in the work area of his office ca 1970 with its mainframes and blasting air conditioning. My dearest friend at the time was a programmer he’d hired a decade earlier.
Was the son of a programmer he’d hired a decade earlier.
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21 items for me. I come from the days of Holerith punch cards, Winchester 8-inch disk drives for a PDP-11/53, Fortran-4, vacuum tube reactor incore instrumentation, magnetic amplifier steam generator water level control, and pneumatic level and temperature feedwater heater controllers.
Engineers nowadays complain that I make them do software QA for their analytical and computational software programs which they use for nuclear fuel burnup analysis and for calculating critical rod position; but in 1978 all I had as reactor operator on the old submarine was a slide rule. So suck it up, boys and girls!
I’m going on 68 and did 17/24. Better than that: I actually used Hollerith cards for FORTAN in the 70s. From 1981-1984 I taught intro computer science to middle school kids on the APPLE II Plus: green screen, dot-matrix printers large floppies, the whole lot.
We have Dad’s mom’s old rotary phone hooked up in the basement. Still works.
I recently threw away a pocket dictionary. For the life of me I couldn’t imagine me or anyone else ever using it.
I still keep dictionaries in my classroom. Whenever a kid has difficulty with a word, (which to be fair, theology has some difficulties with terminology) I will hand him or her the dictionary to look it up.
22
Never used AOL. Never had MySpace. Still don’t exist on social media.
Still use checks, still use fax for business -can’t be hacked.
My children learn cursive and listen to CDs. The ones under 18 do not have smartphones.
In an era where fewer and fewer have any books, I possess a library – though sometimes I suspect it might be vice versa…
I come here because only because it’s not possible to find a cracker barrel, water cooler, coffee house or bar conveniently located for all of us!
22
I’ve done all of them except MySpace and Columbia House. In junior college (1981-83) I took business courses that included BASIC and COBOL programming and even Gregg Shorthand!
@Elaine I absolutely hated COBOL! Fortran and Basic were fine, but NOT COBOL! Argh!
I have reviewed the list and have determined that those items I missed had no real effect on myself or my modest accomplishments in my 82 years. Sic transit terra.
Kind of OT, but related:
When I turned 30, I realized I’d never play major league baseball. I was older than most players. Several years later, I realized that I was confessing to men much younger than me. A few years later, I realized that the doctors who were treating me looked like children. And now, the pope is younger than me! I guess I am now officially old. 🙂
I appear in front of a Judge, a good one. I have been practicing law longer than she has been alive. I am thankful that the Pope is barely older than me!