thems were the days

Date: 06 March 2009 04:44:37

You know, people who've been around for the last 27 years have been witness to some amazing developments in technology, or in the widespread availability of certain bits and pieces. I was thinking about this yesterday - the inventions that my generation will be able to tell our grandchildren about...

When I was a little kid in the early 80s, we had no:

CDs, DVDs or any other optical discs
USB drive
mp3 players
optical mouses
easily accessible internet for the non-geek
plasma or LCD screens (and often not even polychromatic CRTs)
train tickets that went through machines
EFTPOS (erm, for those furriners this is what we call the system that allows buying of things using electronic transfer of funds from a non-credit account
Hard drives with volumes in terabytes
mobile phones that fitted in shirt pockets
digital cameras
Pixar animation

NB. some of these items were in existence but not widely used/available or anything near affordable for individuals, others might have been widely used overseas, but not in my little world.

On the other hand we had

water restrictions that allowed us to play in sprinklers, often nude because we weren't so concerned about slimy strangers taking photos to post on the internet
none of these new fangled "safety" rules about everything
cameras that encouraged thoughtful photography (it seems likely that I would have had fewer photos of Pooka in the 80s...
more ice cream trucks
toasters that lasted more than a year
public libraries lots of books because they didn't have to have computers for internet use or DVDs/CDs to lend out
multi-volume encyclopaedias in our homes!hypercolour clothing
lots of fluoro things
leg warmers and big hair
no rages about writing blog posts in UBB instead of html and having to change all our frigging tags over after making two lists in a post!!!