You Know You Are Living In 2006

[Iolaus]

...you overhear kids talking about the giant CDs their parents have out in the garage.

[Southern Breeze]

You know it's 2006 when you have to search online for record player needles.

[Livingston]

...you overhear kids talking about the giant CDs their parents have out in the garage.

The giant BLACK cd's. Of course I talk about the really thick ones my parents have.



For those of you much younger....78's

[SSgt Baloo]

When I went to college, the professors were deeply suspicious of (some openly hostile to) electronic calculators. They would not allow them to be used in class. You had to demonstrate that you knew how to do it on your slide rule. "Slide rules have always been used for scientific calculation and electronic 'calculators' will fall out of fashion just as soon as the public realizes just how unreliable complex electronic equipment will be." (I'm still waiting -- good thing I didn't hold my breath, huh?)

The computer on campus was a series of cabinets with enormous tape drives (used for loading programs) and a washing-machine-sized housing for the processor. The processor was not a chip, but consisted of several circuit boards with "solid state" components. They had a new hard drive, donated by a now-forgotten business. It was proudly displayed in the window of the Computer Science building. Someone had installed a transparent panel on the HD cabinet so you could see the disks spinning at a leisurely one or two RPM. ISTR being told that it had 64 kilobytes of memory.

The first computer I ever owned was a Radio Shack PC-1, with an impressive 1 kilobyte of memory. It was programmable in BASIC and had an LCD text-only display.

I suspect that my scientific calculator ($14.00 @ Wally-world) has more processing power than any of the above-mentioned items.

I wish I still had my slide rule, though...

--SSgt Baloo

[David Dalglish]

When a young mechanic has never seen a set of points

[canawler]

When a young mechanic has never seen a set of points

At this point, its getting hard to find new cars that even have a distributor (the place where points resided, for those not into cars)

[neo71665]

At this point, its getting hard to find new cars that even have a distributor (the place where points resided, for those not into cars)

Aint that the truth. The hemis make me laugh even though I'm only 26 and hate dodges there will never be a hemi like the 426. Now in these days of double overhead cams and such I would love to drive an old flathead into a shop and laugh at what they do know.

[Bill]

How about the youngsters that have grown up never changing the station on the boob tube without a remote or not knowing what it was like to talk on a phone that was attached to the wall (not even cordless ). I had a teen the other day ask me who Sean Connery was!

I have in my possesion a comptometer once owned by my late Aunt 'Nez, anyone know what that is?

Bill

[Southern Breeze]

I have in my possesion a comptometer once owned by my late Aunt 'Nez, anyone know what that is?

Bill

I've seen a few of them in different places so I know what they are. I'll hang on to my Curta, it fits easily in a sporran.

[neo71665]

How about the youngsters that have grown up never changing the station on the boob tube without a remote or not knowing what it was like to talk on a phone that was attached to the wall (not even cordless ). I had a teen the other day ask me who Sean Connery was!

I have in my possesion a comptometer once owned by my late Aunt 'Nez, anyone know what that is?

Bill

Back when nothing had buttons, it all had knobs and the phone was rototary (did I spell that right). When I was a kid we were the remote.