But I Lived It...

I am amazed at how much the world has changed when I look back over the relatively few years of my life. Granted; I never knew a world without airplanes, cars, electricity or any of the thousands of other things we take for granted every day. I did, though, grow up in a world vastly different than the one I live in today.

We only had a few channels on our television and we had to get up and walk to the television to change the channel whenever we wanted to watch something else. Of course, a remote would not have been much help, anyway, since we always had to adjust the antenna or tweak the horizontal and vertical hold settings slightly when changing channels.

Even the thought of cable television - much less the satellite television we enjoy today - was so totally foreign to us that we could never have dreamed of hundreds of channels with on-demand programming.

My boys consider broadcast television to be ancient history, but I lived it.

We had one telephone in our house. It hung on the wall in the kitchen and it had a long coiled cord between the handset and the wall. You had to either find or know the number you wanted to call and patiently put your fingertip into the proper hole on the dial while rotating it to the stop. Then you waited for the dial to return to the start position so you could dial the next number. There was no call waiting, caller id, call blocking, cordless phones or cell phones. There was just the one phone on the kitchen wall.

Even the thought that we would someday carry a telephone in our pocket that is more powerful than the computers that ran the Apollo spacecraft was totally foreign to us.

My boys consider plain old telephone service to be ancient history, but I lived it.

I typed all of my papers in high school and college on an old typewriter. I was thrilled to get an electric typewriter from Sears as my high school graduation gift so I could type faster. Mistakes required us to either use a correction tape and backspace over to the incorrect character and retype over it once to cover the mistake with white followed by another backspace and retyping the correct character, or rotate the platen to raise the incorrect letter above the type carriage so we could paint over it with White-Out, blow on it to dry it and then get the spot back under the type carriage to retype the correct letter. Spell check consisted of a dictionary always kept close at hand. It was far easier to look up a word before typing it than to correct it after. One of my college professors used to collect our writings and hold them up to the light. The papers were merely handed back to us to be retyped if there were more than three corrections on any page.

Even the thought of a word processor; much less a high-powered computer with auto-correct and formatting was totally foreign to us.

My boys consider typewriters to be ancient history, but I lived it.

I think of all of the things we take for granted ;that were totally foreign to our parents and grandparents, and the new technologies we embraced that will be ancient history to the next generation. The steam locomotive was high technology to one generation and ancient history to those of us living just a couple of generations down the line. What will our grandchildren think of the "new inventions" from our lifetime? It will be just ancient history to them; stories told by old people trying to relive the good old days, or questions on a history quiz.

My life, too, will someday be just ancient history to my descendants.

But I lived it.