Do you remember the first car you drove that had the high beam switch on the steering wheel column instead of on the floor? Everyone wanted a new car so you no longer had the dilemma of which to do first – step on the brake or depress the clutch, or dim the headlights.
Do you remember the first television remote? How it came with a cord that plugged into the TV? You didn’t have to get up to change channels anymore, but you had to sit on the carpet in the middle of the living room floor because you only had the length of that cord to work with. Everyone had to buy new televisions that had holes to plug remotes into.
Do you remember when VCRs came out? You could rent movies and keep them a few days. Everyone had to buy VCR machines and new televisions that were compatible.
Do you remember when Hi-Fi stereos came out and how everyone had to buy new record payers and albums that were 33 1/3 speed instead of 75s? Or when 45s came out and everyone had to buy those little yellow plastic centers so the 45 would play on the record player? Oh, the grand day when those hard plastic pieces came out that allowed you to play a stack of 45s!
Do you remember when 8-track tapes came out? How you had to buy all your favorite albums again, in 8-track format. Plus the player. Plus a new radio for the car.
Do you remember when cassette tapes came out? How they were so much more compact than 8-tracks. How you could now record your favorite song off the radio. Everyone had to buy their favorite albums again in the new format.
And then CDs came out.
And then digital came out.
And then Kindle appeared.
Little did we know, back in the days of high beam switches on the floor, that we, as a society, were being trained to not just buy the next new thing, but to buy all the paraphernalia necessary to operate the next new thing.
Little did we know that we were being trained to become a throw-away society, and that repairmen were a thing of the past. That one day it would become cheaper to buy new than to fix.
Little did we know that we were being trained to forget how to exist without all the fancy new things. How to light a room without electricity. How to cook without an electric or gas stove. How to have warm scarves and mittens for winter without buying them.
An Amish man once told me that he had nothing against modern conveniences. He just didn’t like not knowing how to live without them.
I wonder what new technological advance is on the horizon, and what it will cause us to forget.
Lisa Stowe - The Story River Blog 
i remember. love jani
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Remember how the picture tube always went out on the TV right before Walt Disney was due to start?
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I remember when in order to play a video game at home, you had to write out the code for it first. 🙂
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Ah yes! I remember my dad telling me if I wanted to write on his brand new Commodore computer, I had to type in pages of code to create a word processing program. Of course I could never get it to work. Thanks for the reminder of that one!
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haha my earliest memory was of a computer with floppy disks and this game of zeros on a green shimmering background, dial phones, my mom’s old portable record player for 45s where the volume would change by itself on a whim, my grandparents record player with the extra of putting several records on a stack to play after each other and stories on tapes. And then with my stepdad came our electronically evolution. We had a VCR and my brother and I got a Radio/tape player each… my stepdad repaired TVs, VCRs and knew tons about these kind of things. My parents got a TV into the bedroom and we kids were not allowed to touch his record player. And it went from there…. But as you know I still dont own a smartphone. I do not like to combine all of my functions into just one device. I still have a digital camera, a wrist watch and keep buying an old style flip phone when the last gives out. I am used to texting by hitting the number buttons several times to get the right letter, I dont need to speak into my phone to write the message. I can still write by myself, holding a pen in my hand 🙂 I wish I had the old record player to listen to my mom’s old 45s… oh and I have had new fancy rental cars that did not have any CD player in it anymore… WOW!! Too fast!
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Oh yes I remember most of these. I’ve been around long enough to know not to get rid of the players because you might want to watch that video or listen to that cassette again someday! I recently saw that they have brought back albums! I always liked the sound of an album.
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