I loved reading the comics when I was a kid. My favorite was Dick Tracy. I thought the coolest thing about Detective Dick Tracy was his watch, which other characters on the police force also had. They used these to communicate with each other and could see one another as if on television on that watch! So cool until about a month ago when I saw that very gadget advertised on television.
The communicator pens used by spies Napoleon Solo and my heartthrob Ilya Kuryakin on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. television series were über-cool. Then Bluetooth arrived and that fantasy became passé.
Mr. Spock’s and Cap. Kirk’s communicators on Star Trek were futuristic-cool until modern cell phones made those outdated anachronisms. My fantasy past became reality, and my reality has become obsolete. Ask my editor.
Once at a luncheon he told us he saw his current model of cell phone, with a slide out typing pad, in the Cal Poly Communications Department display of antiquated technology. I declared that I had him beat and proudly flipped out my flip phone! God, I loved that phone. It was as close to going to where no man has gone before as I had gotten (other than the ladies’ room).
Technology is progressing so rapidly that I can barely keep up! I am one of those baby boomers who has one foot in the past, one in the present, and both leaping the generation gap into the future. I remember when the Internet was an incredible innovation! Computers were these newfangled boxes of confusion that replaced my electric typewriter (with self-correcting ribbon—ooo!), which has replaced my reliable manual typewriter on which I had typed many a term paper.
I remember researching my master’s thesis using microfiche footage to find information in old newspapers. Now I Google everything. The world is at my fingertips.
The other day I saw a 2-year-old child drawing on an iPad! When I was 2, I drew on a Magic Slate, a pad with a gray film on which you drew with a wood stylus, then peeled back to erase and draw again. Imagine my excitement when the Etch-A-Sketch was invented!
Flat screen HD televisions just dazzle me! My childhood was spent sitting in front of a black-and-white TV with rabbit ears. That is what we called the antenna. Sometimes it was hard to get a signal, so out came the tin foil. We would roll it long and thin and attach it to the rabbit ears, then move it around until we could pick up a signal.
Our television had a dial which went “choonk, choonk” when you changed the channel. The on/off switch was also the same dial for the volume. Sometimes a dial would come off and get lost, so out came the pliers! My youngest brother was our remote control. “Hey, John-John! Hurry and change the channel! Rocky and Bullwinkle is on!”
Going to Grandma’s was a big deal because she had a color television with a real remote control that had buttons on it that clicked!
We knew we needed a new TV when the picture started to fade. We couldn’t see it at all in the daylight or when the lights were on. It was fine in the dark, though. So out came the blankets! My brothers, Mikey and John, created a sort of tent that they put over the TV and crawled into with their bowls of cereal to watch Saturday morning cartoons.
I became one of the coolest girls in school when Mom bought me a portable stereo record player for my birthday. I could carry it to my friends in its little suitcase. The cover held two speakers and it played LPs as well as 45 records!
But the epitome of awesome was the console stereo! Mom saved up her money for months so she could buy it. This thing was the size of Rhode Island. Thank God she picked one of the smaller states. It was a rectangular box that contained a turntable, radio (AM and FM), and storage for plenty of records. The base held the speakers, hidden behind fancy brocaded scrollwork.
The turntable had a spindle that let you stack up to five records at a time. It would play through one, then the needle would automatically move, the next record would drop, and the needle would neatly reset itself and play that record. Mom would pile on records by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Perry Como, and Herb Alpert. When possible, I piled on The Beatles and The Moody Blues.
Our house had this cool intercom system that was the height of 1960s modern domestic technology, but we never really used it. One day Mikey had an idea—why not hook it up to the console stereo? We’d have the only house on the block with stereophonic sound!
As Mom drove home from work that day she thought one of the neighbors was having a party. The heavy metal sounds of KISS boomed down the street. Her curiosity turned to alarm as she neared the house and realized the noise was coming from her living room. Mikey had rigged up the wiring from the intercom to the console stereo and cranked up the volume and bass as any 13-year-old genius would do. Mom entered to find the genius playing air guitar, but before she could act there was a loud crackle and pop as every fuse in the house blew. Then Mom blew.
Unlike the electric system of the house, Mikey was grounded. She was, for a while, inconsolable over that console, which was given a decent burial—only appropriate since the stupid thing resembled coffin! Mikey was lucky she didn’t shut him in it first!
That was in the 1970s. In 1994 Mom moved to a lovely new home in Phoenix. Mikey had leave from the Navy and came home to help her move. He also bought her a beautiful stereo system and installed hidden speakers in every room, which were hooked up to the stereo. She could listen to Sinatra and Dino in every room of her home. That day Mikey truly became a man because Mom finally told him that he was no longer grounded.
Ariel Waterman has more to say about technology once she figures out how to use her new laptop. Send an IT via her editor Ryan Miller at rmiller@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 5-12, 2015.