Anachronism

My son and I have started a regular Sunday afternoon phone call to keep in touch. He’s moved out, off to college. We talked about this blog, this wall of text. I am, this blog is, an anachronism. The Interweby thingo favors audio or video content. YouTubes is the blog medium of choice. The yungins film themselves with webcams or whatever and post them there. This, in WordPress, with over 60 posts so far, is so 2005, says my son. In the year that I was born:

  • Castro took over the city of Havana, Cuba and made our Caribbean playground communist. La Familia was not pleased.
  • Sleeping Beauty is released by Disney.
  • Buddy Holly died in a plane crash.
  • High tech audio was stereophonic vinyl record players. Buying a single song meant purchasing a 45rpm single pressed on vinyl. It usually had an A-side with the song you wanted and another song on the B-side. Magnetic tape was still a leading edge, expensive technology that only corporations and government could afford.
  • Televisions were black & white, mostly. Widespread adoption of analog color tv was a few years off.
  • Telephones were rotary, with dials instead of buttons. The cool, teenage phone accessory was a 20’ coiled cord between the handset and the phone so you could talk away from snooping, parental ears.
  • Mobile phones were too big to be practical as something you could carry around as you walked. Bluetooth earpieces were science fiction. Many mobile phones required an initial call to an operator who would in turn, connect you to your party. Because of their size and weight they were most commonly installed in cars.
  • There was no Internet. Al Gore was 11 years old. Computer networks existed but with some exceptions, were not interconnected. Communication between networks could be difficult and expensive.
  • Computers filled rooms, were expensive to operate, and mostly owned by large corporations and governments. The best printers used steel bands embossed with the alphabet, were the size of a small table, noisy and heavy. Printing images involved using repetitive typing of letters in the shape of the desired image. Laser printers would not appear for another 26 years.
  • Hard drives had been introduced three years earlier with the IBM 305 RAMAC. Storage capacity was 3.75MB, massive for the time. Punch cards were still a primary data storage medium.
  • The primary tool for writing was either pen and paper or the typewriter. If you made a single mistake the whole page would have to be redone. Except for large enterprises the primary data storage medium was paper and file cabinets.
  • Combining images and text on a single page was an involved and difficult process. The first Macintosh computer would not appear until a quarter century later. The most common method used photolithography to produce copper plates that were assembled along with line-cast type into chases. Higher volume printing used photogravure and web presses. Graphic design shared much of its technique with mechanical drawing.

I come from an anachronistic time. I’m old enough that the angst I’d experience trying to compete in the marketplace of ideas of my son is more than the angst I experience writing a blog no one pays attention to. So, in 500 words or so, ‘eff you. I don’t care that this blog isn’t relevant to the youth of 2014. It is relevant to me. That will have to be enough