Progress?

Hi Readers,

A different stimulus for this post, and from the most simple of sources.

I was having a FaceTime call recently with one of our Grandsons from NYC, and we were talking about one of the books that I had recorded online for him. It was all about a car and some animals that were hiding in it. At one point he said "This car is very different to our car", and this got me thinking.

If a 4 year old can easily pick out how things have changed in cars over time, what are some of the things that stick in our minds over time?

 

And do we consider it progress???

For some things my mind boggles at how far they have progressed, but at the same time I'm still perplexed at how to make the most of them as my mind isn't really keeping up at the same speed!!

There are things around the house that we take for granted, but have developed so much over time that we tend to ignore them or just not think about them.

Consider your cars and the technological advances in them.

What about the different devices around the home? In the kitchen? Listening to music? 

Security?

Leisure activities and equipment?

Food?

I could go on and on, but for today I'm just going to focus on a few that have really stuck with me, and tended to amaze the kids at school when we would occasionally talk about things like this.

So, here we go!!

TV

A few weeks ago I heard on the news that it was the 50th anniversary of colour TV in Australia. Something that we just take for granted so much now was a big deal back in the day, and I remember it well. I was just in JB HiFi this morning and was blown away by the colour tv's at our disposal now. The size, the sound and the connectivity they have to so many sources is something that we didn't even dream about back in the 70's.

A fairly upmarket version of the old tv's

We usually had only 3 channels, and for most of the day it was the test pattern, as shows didn't come on until mid to late afternoon.

Black and white test pattern. Little wonder we were often outside playing.

At the time, our parents owned the local pub in our small town, and it was one of the first places to get a colour tv. As such, when we got it, mum and dad decided that it was better to have it in the bar for the customers rather than in the private lounge where the 8 kids sufficed with the black and white tv.

In the days beforehand we would get off the bus from school and rush home to see if it had come yet, all to no avail. I kid you not Readers, it was more exciting than the night before Christmas!!! This was something we had never experienced before, and in some ways we thought that it was still not possible.

When we did get home one night Dad announced that it had arrived and was now mounted high up in a corner of the bar. As most customers didn't really start arriving from around 5.00pm, we all went in and had a look at it, in total awe at seeing COLOUR!!!

Just to see what colour the clothes were on characters or the sets was causing such excited chatter, and the next day we'd tell everyone at school what colour certain things were. The bar was certainly more crowded for the next few nights!!!

Colour TV comes to Australia

For the next few weeks we would get up super early and go into the bar before we headed off to school just to see if there were shows on of any sort, just to experience the colour again. Pretty soon things began to change a lot more quickly, and it wasn't long before nearly everyone in the town had a colour tv. And the folks even bought one for us kids to have in our own living area!!

But I still remember that excitement leading up to that first day of having a colour tv.

Music.

My eldest brother, who was always known as 'Moose' was given the most amazing present one year for his birthday. He must have been around 15 or 16 because at the time he was off to Boarding school, something that 7 of the 8 kids endured.

He was given a Cassette player!!!

I hear some of you thinking "What the...?", because cassettes are something you may be totally unfamiliar with.

A fairly whizz bang model, as it also had a radio!!!!

And the standard cassette that we would insert to play songs.

We thought the cassette player was just the duck's guts ( ie the best thing ever!). If you didn't want to hear a particular song you could just push the fast forward button and try and find the start of the next song. If you were really savvy, you'd use the tape counter, a type of countdown meter that would stop at the start of the next song if you knew what number to stop it at. I know this all sounds so weird to the younger readers, but this was our technology back then. We could also use blank cassette tapes to record songs from the radio, leaving every song missing part of the start and end as we tried not to record any voiceovers from the DJ's.

And for those who know what I'm talking about, the picture below needs no explanation!!

Over the ensuing years, the cassettes were still king compared to records, due to their portability. I remember having a large box in my little car that held around 40 cassettes as I fitted a cassette player into it. 

Fast forward ( even these terms entered into our everyday language) to the mid 80's and our technology changed again. I distinctly remember being at a friends house and he showed me the new way of listening to music...CD's!!!!!

No more pencils and tapes! Everything was magically on the disc! A little tray would pop out of your stereo and in your disc would go and play crystal clear music. The world was going nuts!!!

Soon we were buying stereos where you could 5 cd's into the one tray!!! 

We could have mini stereos fitted into our car dashboards that even had a cd player. One of our cars went so far as to have a cd stacker under the front seat where we could have 5 cd's to choose from!!

But this also meant that where we once had a box load of cassettes in the car, now we had even more cd's rolling around. And if anyone put a cd back into the wrong cover, well that was a crime worthy of starting WW3!!!

Technology was now moving at an astronomical pace, delivering ipods of various sizes so that we could now save all our music onto a device as small as a cigarette lighter and plug it into our car sound system.

And look where we are today where all our music is pretty much played through the cloud with the advent of Spotify. We can virtually listen to whatever we want, wherever we want and with few or no restrictions at all on availability.

I remember a few years ago making a flippant remark in class about playing 'records', and I noticed a few blank/puzzled looks on the faces of so many kids. I asked if they knew what I was talking about, which they didn't, (nothing new there!!) so the next day I brought in a batch of records and a turntable and we spent ages discussing the changes in technology. It was great telling them all about the olden days!!

School.

When I was going through my own primary school years, we would occasionally be given a worksheet to do. Not like the ones of today that are photocopied en masse, but ones that the teachers actually created themselves.

These were usually a purple colour on white paper, but the thing that stood out was the smell. They had a very strong aroma of methylated spirits, or something similar. The teacher would design the worksheet, writing it on paper that had a carbon sheet in between the 2 pages. This would create a further copy on the other page and this would be fed onto a roller in a type of printer that would then be hand cranked to produce the desired number of copies. Sometimes you could buy sheets already prepared and feed them in the same way.

I remember them being called Gestetners or Roneo machines.

Now Readers, here's the good bit!!

Because they used metho or something like it, often when you got the sheets if they were fresh off the printer, they would still be a tiny bit damp, but reeking of the chemicals used!!!! We'd have our noses going all over the pages having the longest sniffs and soaking in all manner of toxic poisons!!! 

I can still remember using one of these in my first year of teaching. It was a nuisance creating the sheets, but a bit of fun smelling the fruits of my work.

Imagine doing that today!!! It probably explains the behaviour problems of some of the kids back then, or why others were so relaxed!!

Oh those smells 🙄

Leisure

When we were kids our bikes were very rudimentary to say the least. 

One gear only. Good on the flats, but a killer in the hills!

If you wanted to brake, you just pressed backwards on the pedals. Great for doing skids.

                      Not great for doing mono's, but great durability and good for dinking!

These day we have multiple gears and we can go up the steepest of hills with ease.

Our brakes are all hand brakes now, so the days of doing big skids are practically gone.

Not totally gone though as I discovered recently. 

One of my new bikes has disc brakes on the front and back and I recently had to make sudden use of them when a driver decided that he didn't need to stop at a roundabout that I was going through. I quickly squeezed the levers on my handle bars and was surprised at how quickly both wheels locked up, saving me from another injury.

And not only do these levers act as brakes, they also act as gear changers, enabling me to sort through any of the 12 gears at my disposal. A previous bike gave me 15 choices!

And to think that we would be amazed at these Dragster style bikes that gave you 3 choices of gears. Yes, 3 !!

As I try to do a lot of cycling now, both on the road and on the roller frame, it's no longer a matter of just picking the bike up from the yard and heading off. On goes the lycra (Yes, I'm a MAMIL - Middle Aged Man In Lycra), on go the riding shoes with clips to attach to the pedals, set the bike computer on the handlebars that measures everything from speed, distance, temperature, duration and what to cook for dinner for the next few nights!!! Then there's what to put in the drink bottle, what goes in the shirt pockets, and once I'm ready to go I log my ride into the Strava App that records everything.

Here are some samples below from walks, rides and paddles.

The standard lycra - be seen or be hit!!

I can see where I've ridden, how long it takes etc.

Great way to time my paddles, even though it looks like I'm going in circles!

Even a walk can be recorded.

Because I can no longer run, I wish that I'd had this technology when I was training for marathons as it would have been a brilliant training aid.

Cars

Over the past 44 years I have owned, or part owned with Jen more cars than I care to remember. We'd change them over fairly regularly as we tended to really clock up the k's on holidays, sport with the boys and visiting family.

My first car was so memorable and some of the things I added to it are not even included in cars these days!!

For instance, it had a push button radio that would only pick up AM stations, and generally the reception was pathetic. That might be partly due to the coat hanger that was used as a makeshift antenna! The antenna on my latest car is just a smooth plastic lump on the roof.

I did add a cassette recorder to it, but this had to be bolted underneath the dashboard.

The windows were the old wind up model, but the driver's side would only go up if I held the glass from both sides with the door open while i tried to use the winder at the same time. As for the heater, it only blew out cold air, and when living in Ballarat for 3 years I became very accustomed to cold air. I remember once driving home from Ballarat with my brother to go and visit our parents and we both had socks on our hands and were wrapped in blankets to keep warm. The rubber around the gearstick was non-existant, meaning you could see the road as you were travelling. Not great in the wet!!!

But it served me well for 4 years, and I nostalgically wish that I still had it now.

Fast forward again ( there we are, using terms from our past in the present) and I am now totally spoilt with my latest set of wheels that I am still discovering things about. 

Both the van and the car have more bells and whistles that I ever thought were possible, and at times I wonder if I really need them to start with. But when one finds a time that they are needed, then they suddenly feel vital, and I wonder how I might have coped without them.

Back in the day when I was in the Datsun 120Y, if you had told me that in 2025 I'd be driving what I'm driving now I would have put you back in your straightjacket.

Yes, I am just so fortunate and that's not lost on me, but I'd swap all of these technological advances and material goods just to have someone back again.

Readers, I could just go on and on reminiscing about all of the progress I have witnessed in my life, and I hope I haven't sounded like one of those people who says "Back in the day when I was young...".

Much of it has been unavoidable, and I must admit that just about everything has made our lives easier and more comfortable. As I think back to what our Grandson said to me, I wonder what things he and his little brother will experience in the next 50 years? 

Just as I sort of wished for things like mini movie cameras on our arms, or cooking meals in a minute or less, we now find these things as standard for us.

Time travel?

Living even longer lives?

Self schooling?

Food being just pills?

No wars?

Richmond winning the flag this year?

They sound like pipe dreams, but as we all know, things that we once considered impossible or unrealistic are now par for the course.

Have a think about the things that have happened in your lifetime that you now just take for granted, but at one stage would have been considered impossible?

And what are your hopes for the future?

Another bit of random babble, but a great way to spend a few hours reflecting on years gone by while utilising a number of technologies that were not so accessible even as recent as 10 years ago.

The next few weeks have some big things happening for me, so I hope that my next posts will be a bit more interesting to read.

Until my next post,

Cheers😁