Ahhh… The Good Ole Days
June 25, 2010
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Posted by Michael S. Langston
Anyone notice that throughout history, there always seems to be this longing for times gone past, regardless really to whether those by-gone days were really all that great. This is a common function of humans, you grow up during a time period which helps set you in your ways and the next generation comes in and starts changing all the scenery.
It’s almost as if you could see people during the Enlightenment, sitting around the local tavern table, chugging ale, screaming about how the Dark Ages were sooooo much better.
Remember the 50′s? When a multi-million dollar computer the size of a yacht, combined with 23 million punch cards…. assembled in the right order of course, using enough power to run a small prison, you could then calculate the square of 3 in just under 6 years.
Here’s another reminder via Boing-boing (here):
With a capacity of 5 MB, the IBM 350 disk storage unit could have stored about two MP3 files. This photo, showing a unit getting forklifted onto a plane, is from 1956.
IBM’s history website has more information about the drive.
Categories: Culture
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Tags: Culture, IBM, Technology
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I barely remember the 6o’s but I understand the sentiment. My daughter once asked me about how to dial a rotary phone. She wondered, if you circled the dialer the amount of times to represent the number! The 1956 photo reminded me of how women were not literally in the picture. I love that my 13 year old can do a power point presentation that is beyond what I ever imagined when I had a Commodore 64. The only thing I am sentimental about is that you could buy a Peanut Buster Parfait for 75 cents. I don’t think I have been to a DQ in years, but I can still taste them!
lol – I still had those phones when I grew up, though I am not old enough to have actually live in the 1950s. Sorry, that was just for the joke
Either way…. I’m as nostalgic and cranky (get off my lawn!) as the next guy about things changing around me, seemingly for the worse, I just understand that as a human I will have a tendency to do this even if there was nothing at all to look back upon.
But I think, say TV, with reality TV creating celebrities who are celebrities because they are celebrities, combined with an inability to think very deeply that’s to what I think is an incorrect educational model (though it’s the same basic model used in the 1950′s as well), has ended in society promoting the seemingly worst among us.
But even TV has much cooler things to offer than it used to as well – like the Discovery & History Channels…. because the honest reflection on technology should be that technology is just technology. It can do no good or bad, only be used as a tool towards either end.
This is where your philosophy of ‘Pathologically Pro-Freedom’ shines through: It’s not the technology, It’s the person using it. It is true that inventions are most likely the honest effort to improve the lives of man, but you only have to watch a few episodes of MythBusters to find out that was not always the case. I think kids know that tv is a fake. At least my 10 and 13 year old do. Interestingly enough, my oldest was on an episode of a real estate tv show and she sure as hell does!
Yeah – I like to think consistency is something good, even if one guy once said something about it being the hobgoblin of… simple minds I think, but hopefully the quote was intended to state that refusal to acknowledge something because of inconsistency is wrong, not consistency itself.
As for tv – yes. I watched all kinds of violent cartoons and I have yet to try to hunt wabbits, drop anvils on odd birds which don’t fly, nor shoot revolvers in the air out of frustration while screaming bad-word-sounding-non-curse-words like “risa-fricking-fracking”….
Where I think reality tv is bad is that it promotes the idea of celebrity for celebrity. When most people can’t name their governor, but came name several reality tv stars, you begin to wonder why people with absolutely no affect on their lives are more meaningful to them than people who have the power to actually restrict their freedoms….
What I will not say however is that TV did this. We did this. Whether tv came up with the idea and we followed or whether tv was simply following where society was going is irregardless. It is within our power to stop it.
Simply turn it off. Ratings drop, advertisers drop, shows drop.
In the end – in at least a mostly free society – we have the power. So our government, our celebrities, our music, our tv, our everything…. is our fault.