The Things I've Seen

Sometimes I sit back and think of all of the things I’ve seen and the technological advancements that have taken place in the 54 years I’ve spent on this blue ball we call home, and it never ceases to amaze me.

I remember when the TV in our living room was a big Zenith black and white set, the kind you had to turn on a minute or so before your show came on to give the tubes inside a chance to warm up. I also remember watching the picture fade into that bright little dot in the center of the screen after you turned it off; the dot would glow brightly for a moment or two, and then fade away. And you had your choice of THREE CHANNELS to watch; in my case, those channels were 6, 8 and 12 in Richmond, Virginia, and when you wanted to change the channel you had to get up, walk over to the set, and actually turn the knob yourself.

As with everyone I’ve ever known in my entire life, I used to watch “The Wizard of Oz” on the TV every year. (Everyone except my wife, that is, and I still can’t believe she’s never seen it! But then, she’s never seen “Deliverance,” either…) And up until 1968 or so, we always watched it in black and white. And then, one year, we all climbed into our Ford Falcon station wagon and drove over to a friend of my parent’s house, where we sat in the rec room that once upon a time was his garage and watched the move in color! We saw the fantastic effect of Dorothy opening the door to her house after she’d landed in Oz, with the inside of the house being in black and white and the view outside the house being in color! That was nothing short of amazing, and I think it’s still my favorite movie special effect to this day.

In this day and age, you not only can’t find a black and white TV set anymore, you can watch TV and movies on your computer or your cell phone. And I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t have a remote control for their 56-inch HD TV, do you?

And speaking of that old Falcon station wagon, I remember my father cussing the vacuum-powered windshield wipers that would change speed with the revolutions of the engine – if the engine slowed, the wipers slowed; if the engine revved the wipers would speed up. When you were sitting at a light waiting for it to change the wipers were practically useless, they were moving so slow. And the wipers had two speeds, those being slow and slower. Then Ford pirated the idea of intermittent wipers, and a new age of convenience was born – but only if you had the bucks to afford it, because that was an expensive option at first.

Nowadays intermittent wipers are standard equipment on a $12,000.00 Kia.

In the early 1970’s my family and I got very heavily involved in the citizen’s band radio hobby, and as with anything my father ever did he went at it whole-hog. We had a mobile radio in both cars and a base station set up in the kitchen with a 4-element Moonraker multi-directional antennae a hundred feet or so up off the ground in the top of a pine tree in the back yard. And when my father won an ABC 500 watt tunable linear amplifier from another CB’er in a poker game, we ended up with one of the most powerful – if not THE most powerful – base stations in Raleigh, NC. When we talked, everybody listened! Our signal was so powerful it would bleed over two channels on either side of the one we were on, and when the cloud cover – or “skip” – was just right, we could crank that ABC up to the max and talk to Brazil, no sweat.

Nowadays you can hardly find a CB radio on the market; they’ve been replaced by cell phones.

And speaking of cell phones, remember when the first ones came out in the late 1980’s? Only they were called “mobile phones” or “car phones” back then, because they were so big that you either had to carry them around in a bag like a tool kit or you had it installed in your car. And then, in 1991, they came out with a true cellular phone that was very portable with no bag to lug around. Sure, the phone was the size of a brick and had a 9 inch long antennae, but you could carry it in your hand! Never mind that it weight about three pounds…

Nowadays they manufacture cell phones small enough to fit in a jeans jacket pocket and weigh about six ounces or so, and not only can you make phone calls on them, you can surf the Internet and make video calls – that’s right, video calls – from them just like on your home computer.

Hell, they’re not cell phones – they’re hand-held computers that make phone calls.

Last but not least – I could go on, but I think y’all get the point by now – is the GPS device. When those gadgets first came out right after the Gulf War, they too were the size of a brick but they were just amazing in what they could do! They first appeared in the US military, but the manufacturers saw the potential in the civilian market and it wasn’t long before they were available outside the military. Bad thing was they were tremendously expensive, so they became a toy for the rich. But as with anything electronic – like the hand-held calculator and digital watches, for example – the longer it was around the more it was improved, and the lower the price dropped until now you can pick up a portable GPS for your car with a 9 inch color HD screen for about $150.00 or less. And when the car manufacturers first started putting them in cars, they were just like intermittent wipers – they were expensive options that only the rich folks had.

You know that $12,000.00 Kia with the intermittent wipers standard? Yep, it’s got a GPS in it, too, and that’s also standard. Oh, and that cell phone I was talking about two paragraphs up? It’s also got a GPS program on it, standard. Standard.

Sometimes I look back on all this and it just amazes me at what I’ve seen, and then I think of two things: I think of all the things my 82-year old father has seen – like TV showing up in the first place, replacing radio as the main form of entertainment – all the things I’ve seen seem to pale in comparison. And then I think of all the things I’ve yet to see, and all the things my children and grandchildren will see, and that just amazes me more.

Ferris Bueller summed it all up pretty good: “Life goes by pretty quickly; if you don’t stop and take a look around, you could miss it.”

IHC