This is something that just occured to me at the store yesterday.
We are so busy with living our lives that many changes around us and in our lives go un-noticed or we just take them for granted. We, well many of us boomers at least, remember having reel to reel tape players and then came along the 8 track players, then cassette players and then on to the cds and yet again we now have digital players. i-pods and mp3 players. Oh, and not to be forgotten, our 45 collections we used to swap and trade with eachother.Remember the first transister radios with their painfull ear pieces? I had one tucked under my pillow many nights just to listen to the music.
We are so busy with living our lives that many changes around us and in our lives go un-noticed or we just take them for granted. We, well many of us boomers at least, remember having reel to reel tape players and then came along the 8 track players, then cassette players and then on to the cds and yet again we now have digital players. i-pods and mp3 players. Oh, and not to be forgotten, our 45 collections we used to swap and trade with eachother.Remember the first transister radios with their painfull ear pieces? I had one tucked under my pillow many nights just to listen to the music.
Remember going to the grocery store and seeing near the door the Tube stands? Bunches of different tubes for different TVs and Radios and there was usually a tube tester next to that.
Film for our cameras went through lots of changes as well. I had to close myself in a dark closet to load my Brownie camera and then we got the 110 cartridge cameras and Poloroid cameras and those really expensive 35mm cameras. (I have a package of flash bulbs in my collection) I always thought it was fun to try to catch those bulbs as they popped out of the camera but then the cubes came along and ruined that fun.
The way we keep our photos has gone through changes as well, from licking those little white corners to hold your pictures to a page, to those "magnetic" pages (that turned out to ruin your pics), to albums with Pockets you just slide your photos into. During Thanksgiving I was loading my Mothers digital picture frame with the pictures we took while visiting while listening to some of my favorite music on my i-pod.
I embrace and love most of the changes in technology and look forward to other changes to come. Somehow though, it seems that no matter how I try I can't remember the change over. The point where you no longer saw the tube testers, or the reel to reel tapes, the 'cube' flash bulbs or the 45 records in the stores.
What got me to thinking about this stuff was I kept noticing that something was missing near all the registers this year (at least at the stores I was in). Film for Cameras! During the holidays we'd see those portable racks on every other aisle or register loaded with film in multi packs. I had totally forgotten about digital cameras replacing film.
Maybe this is a leason to us all to keep our selves alert to the changes around us and not take so much for granted, after all nothing lasts forever and who knows what else we are missing while we are so distracted by all the progress of our time?
