Living in a time of constant, and rapid, technological change is not for the faint of heart.
How Many Have You Done
- 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.
You forgot using a Hollerith punch card machine for 1970 era IBM computers, and replacing vacuum tubes in a TV or radio. 😉
In Fort Wayne Ind. while attending Elementary School, I recall distributing fresh copies to classrooms for the administrator. Copies made from the mimeograph machine. I can still remember the semi-sweet scent from the ink.
Score- (0)
Scored 0.
LQC,
I remember my dad changing vacuum tubes in our black and white TV (get up to change the channel and volume.)
Philip,
All the students loved when the nuns freshly mimeographed something for the class. 30 kids sniffing paper at once.
An easy 20.
20 for me as well and LQC’s 2 bonus points. And for an extra bonus point, knew and used all of the Latin Mass responses before VC Ii.
5.
My little brother stumbled across an floppy disk a bit back and couldn’t figure out what it was.
There was a meme going around about kids today discovering the floppy disk and thinking that they had found the “Save” Icon in real life 😀
Don’t know if #7 is fair though. Vinyl records are making a comeback.
Surprised they didn’t put using a slide rule on the list.
Give yourself a point for each thing you’ve NEVER done.
David & Lead…. you may want to recalibrate.
😵💫 or it’s just me being amazed at your score.
I’m one of those tweener “X-ennial” types (born in 1982), but I have done all 20 of those, and when I started teaching in 2004, our faculty lounge had a mimeograph.
I loved that machine and it was so easy to make quizzes on. Too bad the one guy who maintained them in the whole DC area died in 2006 and we had to get rid of it.
I’ve done all of them except for listening to a Walkman (I never owned one of those) plus I actually took courses in Gregg Shorthand and BASIC computing at community college!
All the one of the – #7. I have never owned or listened to a vinyl record. But boy have they made a comeback in our local electronics store.
We have a cupboard full of every DVD animation I have collected over the years for the kids. But thanks to movie streaming ie. Netflix, that cupboard does not get opened. At all. That makes me sad 😢
I get four points. Never owned a Walkman. The boom box in our family was owned by my mother and kept in the laundry room; I think I was about 20 when she bought it; she fancied opera and concert & chamber music, full stop. I’m sure someone in our household recorded music on a cassette, but it wasn’t me. Two or three people in my office ca. 1990 had a modem on their desk and I wasn’t one.
Have done? How many do I still do is the question.
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Did 5,11,16&20 LAST WEEK!
Is the initiation for the Order of Stegasauri rigorous? 🙂
Nineteen for me but only because I never had a Walkman.
All 20.
All 20. I remember the times before six of them.
Everything but the Walkman.
All 20, but several years ago I had a coworker who had never seen a black & white film, and another for whom Run DMC was before her time…
I’ve recorded from vinyl, other cassette, and CD to cassette, but somehow I never did radio to cassette. I’m surprised that some of these are unusual.
The paper map is underrated. My parents gave me a street directory to keep in my car when I began to drive.
I much prefer it to the satellite navigation in the car or on the phone. It forces you to work out how you were going to get to a destination prior to leaving and you consequently would remember streets and areas better afterwards. Satellite navigation, I feel, is mindless and you end up getting to your destination via the most inefficient route.
Like many things, technology hasn’t necessarily made our life easier. Frustration with technology not performing immediately is a daily struggle…
I would get 3, due to not having sent a fax, rented from blockbuster, or recorded from the radio.
I do have in my possession tapes that were recorded from the radio; I just never did it myself. I lose the rent one because it specified blockbuster; I rented plenty of tapes from local rental joints. No experience with faxes though.
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I like maps, especially for travel off the beaten track when GPS doesn’t cover. Probably the best use of our AAA membership. That and the occasional tow.
My parents first TV, a Dumont, was set in a mahognay cabinet with a phonograph and radio. The cabinent is now used for books. The TV had a huge picture tube. The Russian military used vaccum tubes much longer than our navy did.
Things I’ve NEVER done??
Well, …it depends.
If the Walkman in question required having either a tape or CD player and/or being made by Sony in particular, no, I never did that. …I opted for the less expensive AM/FM portable radio with headphones from Magnavox… or Panasonic or… . ..I rode my bike all over town with it. I think I may have ultimately bought a portable radio with a tape player in my late teens. …I did get the boom box with the dual tape deck because I won a Nintendo(?) at post-Prom, sold it back to the store, and bought a boom box with the dual tape deck. I think I finally bought a boom box with a CD player late in college.
Strictly speaking, I have never owned an encyclopedia. My parents had a large(ish) set of Funk & Wagnall’s encyclopedias throughout my childhood. I had considered an Encyclopedia Britannica during college. All these mostly disappeared by my late 20s; internet searching became the typical means instead.
So, I guess technically I get a score of 2.
Regarding the maps, …
I guess I’m an old fart. I own both GPS and smartphone; I have used both a good bit. I use Google maps to help me find a good route, if I can. Even so, …
I still have a state road map in the car. I still take a compass lwith me.
Electronic widgets are fine, yet they are electronic widgets. They can fail.
Maps don’t.
Incidentally, my routine-use radio is still a small-ish boom-box which is usually plugged in, yet I can take it outside and use batteries…..
CAM, you make me think of when I used to see the Curtiss-Mathis commercials. I believe one of our neighbors used to own one.
Thermofax, anyone?
This post has brought to remembrance so many of the “joys” of my youth:
Calibrating the magnetic amplifiers in our submarine’s steam generator water level control system and in the analog reactor protection system of the first commercial nuclear power plant at which I worked.
Calibrating the old WKM and BS&B pneumatic transmitters and controllers in feedwater system of that commercial nuclear power plant. I wonder if thy exist any longer?
Fixing torn paper punch tape to reload software into the PDP-11/53 security access computer at that nuclear power plant.
Fixing assembly language code in the Leeds & Northrup Conitel telemetering system at that nuclear power plant.
Programming my first DEC data logger for generator stator temperature monitoring by hand – one keystroke at a time on the front panel.
Replacing Intel 8086 microprocessor mother boards in our plant’s first set of digital radiation monitors (we had what was called a 10 CFR 21 defective part / software notice – weeks of 12 hour days resolving that problem with which the NRC was less than pleased).
Loading software into “bubble memory” on an IDT for programming the plant process computer with emergency operating curve envelop data – yes, bubble memory!
None of that stuff is either made or supported any longer. And I am sure everyone here has similar experiences. The young people today have no idea what it’s like to write code in Fortran-77 to specify where each pixel on a screen is located, gets illuminated, and with what color.
John Flaherty, our older son has two Curtiss-Mathis types in his small SF apt. In the Bay when people move they just put stuff out on the curbs as gomi piles.
Anyone had a car with 8 tracks?
All of them – including the punch card coment.
Yes…8 track.
In 1977 I received a 1971 four door Cutlass Supreme..same color as the one in the snapshot.
I had a small collection of cassette tapes at that time; Foghat, REO Speedwagon, Wings, Chicago and the like. I took the 8 track out and replaced it with a very inexpensive cassette player.