Hello, Baby
Hey Big Actioneers:
I'm writing a letter to our soon-to-be-born baby, and I'm telling her all the things that have changed since I was born. I'm not really talking about the big social movements here -- the fall of Communism, or whatnot. I mean the bits of the future that have worked their way into our everyday lives, sometimes without us noticing. The things that you never would have expected to see when you were a kid, because you were busy waiting for the jet-packs and the cities on the moon.
Here's what I have so far:
- Phones used to only come attached to houses. There was only one company you could get a phone from, and it was called the Phone Company. Also, you couldn’t buy your phone – you had to lease it from the Phone Company. If you weren’t there to pick up the phone when someone called, it just kept ringing until they gave up. No voice-mail, no answering machines, nothing. If there was no one there to answer the phone, then there was no one there to answer the phone. And dialing a phone meant putting your finger in one hole on a small wheel, then dragging it around in a circle until it spun back from the number you wanted to zero. You did this anywhere from seven to eleven times, starting over every time you screwed up or wanted to dial again. You didn’t call outside your local area very often, however. Calling someone in another state was a decision that had to be weighed carefully: phone service was expensive.
- Nobody had a personal computer, unless they built it themselves. Most computers were enormous, bulky machines that filled entire rooms, costing hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of dollars. Your uncle Bryon and I didn’t get a computer until I was eleven. It was a Commodore 64 that hooked up to our TV for a screen, and didn’t have a hard drive. The phone I use now has 134,000 times as much memory as it did.
- Most people got their TV for free, through an antenna on the top of their TV sets. Some of those TVs only showed black-and-white pictures. In most cities, there were only three channels, and they stopped broadcasting around 1 or 2 a.m. My hometown didn’t get cable TV until I was ten, and it seemed like an amazing amount of choices: 36 channels. And if you missed a TV show, it would be months before it came on again in reruns – or maybe never.
- Music came from large, vinyl discs, or magnetic tapes. You had to go to the store to buy it, or order it by phone from the TV. It would arrive in 4-6 weeks. (However, some people, like our friend Steve, still insist that vinyl is the only way to listen to music. We will go visit him in the crazy person’s home and he can tell you all about it.)
- Coffee came in one flavor: coffee. And you didn’t go to a coffee shop to drink coffee – you went there to eat.
- Your Grandma couldn’t get a credit card, because she was a single mom. Banks were reluctant to loan money to women, who were not really supposed to have jobs then. Before I was born, she was actually required to leave her job as a flight attendant because she got married, and her employer fired married women – because they might get pregnant and have babies, and they didn’t want to pay for that.
- People typed on typewriters, which used paper, and had no screen.
- People got their news from newspapers – which were delivered both in the morning, and the late afternoon. Or they would watch the TV, which dedicated just a half-hour every evening to the day’s top stories. You sometimes had to wait hours, or even days, to find out what was happening across the planet.
- The Internet didn’t exist.
I know I'm missing things. I would love to see what you can add in the comments, or in your own posts.
Baby Farnsworth and I thank you.
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