I remember the first TV I ever saw. It was a small 9 inch black and white picture tube built into a standup Philco box mainly used for the old Philco radios. Now we have 75 inch flat display color TV sets. Early TV sets had blurred pictures, now we have Ultra High Definition pictures that are superb.
Telephones were large and bulky. There sat on what was called a gossip bench, a table with a drawer for a phone book and a seat built into the bench. Now we have phones we carry in a pocket or purse. Long distance calls were expensive, roughly $1 per minute at a time when $1 an hour was a good wage for working people. Phone plans were set up in stages. The cheapest was a 40 call limit plan per month. Now we can call all over the country with no call limits and with no long distance charges.
Cars were huge behemoths with real bumpers. A 5 mph crash was just a bump; neither car was hurt and the bumpers weren’t bent out of shape. The cars were all steel. No padded dashboards, all steel. Cars were purchased with little to no options. A radio was an option. Many models didn’t come with a heater. You could get one as an option. New cars could be bought for less than a thousand dollars. Cars when I was a boy all had a standard transmission. They all had a shifter on the steering column; they had 4 gears, reverse, first , second and third and you had to engage a clutch pedal to shift any of the gears. Chrysler corp. invented the first automatic transmission. It was really a semi-automatic transmission, called a fluid drive. There was still a clutch, but it was only engaged to start the car. You let out the clutch and when you pressed down on the gas pedal, the car pulled away in low gear, then when the engine revved up and you were moving along nicely, you let your foot off the gas pedal and the car automatically shifted into high gear. There were only those 2 speeds. Now I wonder how many people could drive a car with a standard transmission? They don’t need to know that because very few if any are made here in the U.S. Now new car prices start at nearly $30,000 and they are loaded with options that add another 2-3 thousand dollars. They have air bags all over the vehicle to help one survive a crash. They have good heating and air conditioning systems and heated or cooling seats. There are satellite radio stations available. Radios have AM and FM stations. The old cars had just AM radios.
Computers go back as far as WW-2. They were all analog machines, gears and dials spun around to work out a problem. In 1945 the first programmable digital computers were made. They were nearly as big as a one bedroom apartment. They didn’t have cooling systems, so they overheated and shut down after a few computations. On the first trip to the moon there was a computer aboard for calculations and controls, limited as they were.
Now you have a computer (your cell phone) that you carry in your pocket or purse that is 100,000 times more powerful than the computer used on the first trip to the moon.
Now we have computers programmed by artificial intelligence that can control factories, robots and who knows what else. The world will change dramatically in the next 78 years. Who knows what the world will be like 78 years from now?
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