Tech

It was the Christmas of 1960.  I was in the 8th grade. The one Christmas gift that I recall from that year was that we had a phone installed in our apartment. The place was wired for only one phone and it was in the living room. The only phones anyone had were the rotary dial phones. Ours was black.  Actually everyone's phone was black. There was no other choice.  Luckily we were not on a party line so nobody else could listen in on our conversations.  The phone bill was around six dollars per month, but we would have to pay extra for long distance outside our area of Elberton and Royston.  That put us on the cutting edge of communication technology.  It could not get better than that.

Going back a couple of Christmas seasons the one gift I remember was a toy car.  It was big, maybe 10 to 12 inches long.  I have always been a car nut so this was the right gift for me.  The one thing that set this car apart from any other toy cars was that it had a phone receiver attached to a string that recoiled into the dash of the car.  The idea of a phone in a car was just not possible.  Phone lines could not be attached to a moving car so the idea was impossible, except in one's imagination.

For all my life, the first thing I look for in the newspaper is the comic section. As a child one of my favorites was Dick Tracy.  He was a city detective of a metropolitan city.  In the early 1950's he had an edge of fighting crime by the use of a two way radio strapped to his wrist. I worked much as a walkie/talkie or cell phone would today.  By the mid 60s with the implementation of the cb radio and actual walkie/talkies, Tracy was forced to upgrade to the two way television where he could see and likewise show people and events in another part of town. I could not help but wonder if and when we would ever be able to see such devices as the two way television.  By now I was beginning to realize that the cutting edge of technology would need forever to be made sharper.  There would be no limit.  If it could be imagined, it could be.

The day before Christmas Eve Anne and I were in our car.  I pushed one single little button on the steering wheel and simply said, "Call Allen Hall".  After a brief  moment of silence we heard his phone ring twice and he answered.  We had a nice conversation while we were in route to finish some last minute Christmas shopping. Oh, I failed to mention that he was in Shanghai, China; and we were here in South Carolina, totally on the opposite side of the planet.  A few days later I walked into our study to see Anne at her computer talking with Allen.  I joined in the conversation.  With the use of Skype we could see and hear him perfectly and he could hear and see us as well.

In my teens and for years after we were limited to 3 or 4 tv stations for our entertainment.  Today we have well over a hundred.  We also have Netflix which allows us to watch our choice of hundreds or even thousands of movies and thousands of old television shows from our television, our computer, our tablet, or iPad, or even our cell phones. With the use of a good head set we can watch a movie with sound quality as good or even better than available at the theater.

The old board game of scrabble is now available for play on the internet with computer, tablet or cell phone. One can play as many as twenty games at the same time with up to twenty other players.  I play regularly with a lady with whom I was in school almost fifty years ago. I have not seen her since our school days, yet we play the word game regularly and from time to time comment about things important to us today through texting.

We used to get in trouble at school for passing notes to our classmates. Today kids simply use their cell phone to text messages around the classroom, to other classes, to home, or wherever anyone wants to be. I will confess that a few years ago I had several long texting conversations with a friend who was in his college class during our conversations.   Oh, yeah, I was working at my desk as well, or was supposed to be working.

Yes, things have changed drastically from the mid 1950s until the mid 2010's.  A few years ago, I had someone who was supposed to have special gifts and powers tell me that I would live well into my 80s.  The  age he predicted will give me at least another twenty years.  I hope he was right.  I cant wait to see what things will be like then.