Posted on 01/19/2019 9:36:36 AM PST by NRx
Reminded me of the scene in “Zoolander” when those two geniuses tried to figure out how to get the computer to give them the information they wanted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2uHBhKTSe0
They do watch old movies. They watch The Breakfast Club. They watch Scarface and Full Metal Jacket.
Like some old Route 66 or The Naked City episode.
I actually saw a working rotary phone in a guys house last Friday! I still see them periodically.
-PJ
The “Good Ol’ Days”...
...after the Trimline Phones came thru,
I had a company-owned Motorola “Brick” Phone, for a year, when I worked in Midtown Manhattan,
And I had a Motorola “Bag” Phone, for a couple years, until the clamshell cellphones arrived.
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My first car phone was a trunked radio system. 1988 maybe. You had a different phone number for every tower you passed if I recall correctly. A buck a minute if you were away from home. Maybe fifty cents a minute at home.
I have restored 2 of them. The blue Bell Telephone glass panels weren’t easy to find.
With technology changes, there are lots of things young people don’t know about.
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About 5 or 6 years ago my son was buying a house and needed to fax some stuff to the bank. I told him to go to my office and use my fax machine. Later that day he called to say it didn’t go through. I figured out why. He needed to dial a 1 before the area code and number.
He is a senior software analyst and I rely on him to help me through all this new computer stuff. But the yutes don’t know how some things work because they never used them.
It would have been the mid 80’s. West side. Heading toward the Hudson.
Huge difference between watching one or two movies a year and seeing your mother use the telephone several times a day.
They already can’t read or write cursive. How long until kids won’t be able to read an analog clock, or know which way is clock-wise?
If I’d never seen a rotary phone before, I doubt I’d do much better.
There was a 1930s Betty Boop cartoon where Betty used a pay phone. Then she hung up and left the scene. A few seconds later, she rushed back in and checked the coin return slot.
This was funny if you grew up in that era, but would be baffling today.
Laugh at your peril, because the joke is on us. The young are the future, and they know almost nothing about the past, as this video so perfectly demonstrates. The rotary dial telephone is merely one example of something we take for granted but is hopelessly out of place in the present. Sadly, it is a symbol for so many other things, including past standards of behavior, self-evident truths, and assumptions, which are likewise now hardly recognized and out of place in the present, and which will be completely unknown in the near future.
I worked at Rock Center and on Madison Ave during those years, in the advertising agency world, so I can’t say for sure it was me. Most of my clients - BMW, Ingersoll-Rand, P&G, BFGoodrich etc - were all over the world, so I was traveling 250-75 days a year in North America, Canada, Europe and Asia.
Like I said, there were a few of us that had those brick phones, which had to go back in the massive charger, every 30mins. The batteries socked back then.
Any older technology rapidly becomes obsolete.
For centuries colonists and then Americans, made fire with flint & steel. How many of us have even the vaguest clue how that might work?
Who among us can plow a field with a horse or mule? In fact, how many of us even know the difference between a horse and a mule? Or even better, could pick out the best deal from 12 offered for sale?
I missed out on the TI computers. As a matter of fact,
I am posting this from a slide rule.
They’ve stopped teaching kids how to read a clock face.
Would a rotary phone work on a touch tone system?
Remember it? I thought I invented it. There was a beer joint (that’s a tavern for you yankees) that had a phone for incoming calls only, as it had no dial. Tapping out the numbers to make a free call was high subversion back then.
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