a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by cgod
cgod  ·  4838 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What was daily life like before almost everyone had cell phones?
My sister in law is only about ten years younger than I am, but it's a huge gap technology wise.

When telling stories about high school and college years she asks things along the lines of "Why didn't you just e-mail them?" Uhhh, because e-mail hardly existed back then, because we didn't have cell phones.

Growing up my family had a black rotary dial phone and a tiny black and white TV for untill around the time I was about 12 years old. I'm not even forty years old!

One time I asked my grandparents, who grew up without electricity, indoor plumbing, or central heat if they thought that the world would be, when I was became thier age, as different to me from the one I grew up in as their world is to them when compared to their childhood. You could see them both give a little jerk at the thought and they got strangely creepy knowing smiles and said "yes, yes it will be." I found it a bit unsettling, they memory will hopefully help me keep in touch with changes in technology.

I think the internet is changing our lives as much as any invention ever has, in ways that we can't even yet comprehend, and it is a technology still in it's infancy. The mobile phone is mostly a just another gate way for the internet to act upon our lives.





steve  ·  4837 days ago  ·  link  ·  
I recently acquired a rotary phone. Nothing was more fun than watching my three oldest kids pick it up and try to determine what it was. Even after they realized it was a phone - they couldn't fathom how it worked.

it is one of my prized pieces of nostalgia.

Wed7pm  ·  4836 days ago  ·  link  ·  
How funny :) Now that you've mentioned it, I suppose the design of those telephones really is pretty strange. The idea of dialing a number by making a circle thing go around... That's just weird, really. It's probably not something that's used on any other piece of equipment, so it's not like you can transfer a skill from somewhere else to work out what's going on.
Wed7pm  ·  4837 days ago  ·  link  ·  
"I think the internet is changing our lives as much as any invention ever has" - I think you're probably right about that, at least for people in the West (and presumably the changes will move across the whole world eventually).

It's a pity most history is written about the past, really. A lot of our lives are spent looking forward and wondering what's coming or trying to influence it, but that probably won't be recorded, even though it's probably shaping what we do.

Re those old rotary phones: can you remember how slow they were to dial?! I can't imagine using one now. It would seem like forever to wait for that circle thing to return after each number is dialed. Just thinking about that makes me feel impatient :)

mk  ·  4836 days ago  ·  link  ·  
My childhood number was 979-9471. Those first 9799 were brutal. :)
Wed7pm  ·  4834 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Haha! That would seem SO SLOW now.
mike  ·  4836 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Mine was 375-0517. A number burned into my mind. Last week I found out it's a prime number.
CC440  ·  4834 days ago  ·  link  ·  
I still have a list of childhood friend's numbers burned into my head but I realized the other day that should I somehow be without my cell phone and its saved contacts, I would have no way to contact my girlfriend or anyone else I've met in the past 10 years.
mk  ·  4834 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Scary isn't it? I know one friend's #, and my wife's. Probably should remember your girlfriends. :)

I also know a bunch of landline numbers that don't exist anymore.

Wed7pm  ·  4834 days ago  ·  link  ·  
You've got a good memory. The only way I can remember my current phone number is to list it as a contact in the phone's address book.