I'm only 33 years old, and I feel like an old man! (1 Viewer)

[Eric-S]

I remember reading about the first chip capable of decoding a dolby digital signal and thinking it was the coolest thing ever. You could connect a laser disc player and get 5 channels of full-range audio. I still think it's amazing to play a CD and have the signal carried by a beam of light.


Now we are talking about things like Dolby Digital TruerHD and toslink being a "legacy" connector.


I guess all I'm saying is that I'm amazed everyday by our hobby, and will never take it for granted.


Eric

 

[drobbins]

When my son was 8 yrs old we were watching Close Encounters. It was the seen with the mountain on the TV. I noticed my son studying the screen intensely. So I asked him "What are you looking at?" He asked " You used to have to get up and turn a knob on the TV to change channels?" Boy did that make me feel old! I told him that it was no big deal because we only had 5 or 6 channels. It was black & white and you had to smack the side to clear up the picture. Now I have the 109" screen with surround sound! Big improvement.
He still likes to tease me saying that I was born before calculators were invented. 43 isn't that old.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

I remember when Schnabel recordings were new to 33.3 RPM records, the old ones being on 78 RPM records...

 

[Alex-C]

Anyway, I'm not old, but I remembering my version of itunes. I'd go down to Licorice Pizza and get a 45 for 79 cents.

 

[Francois Caron]

It's funny. I'm over 40 and hip-deep in technology at home, at work and on the road (I've hacked my cell phone ). Yet, I'll go out of my way to find and potentially purchase and use "old machines" such as cameras, film projectors and hopefully one day a wind-up phonograph and a mechanical player piano that uses those old paper rolls. As an example of "use", some ten or fifteen years ago (i.e. before I turned 30) I had two 8mm cameras on which I created a few home movies. I also had an old Polaroid Land camera (model 800) which I've used at a family reunion a couple of years before my 94 year old grandmother passed away. It was a hoot! I even had the Polaroid picture duplicator to make copies for the family!

We just have to accept the reality that as we grow old, there will be more and more people out there who will have never known what it was like to turn a knob to change channels, use a phone with a wire attached to it, or spin a big black disc at a slow speed to listen to music. Just as long as we don't immediately shun any new technology that shows up on our doorstep (if we still have one ), we shouldn't feel so damn old.

Now get off my Astro-Turf you damn kids!

 

[johnADA]

HAHAHAHAHA, I know the feeling!!!
Dad how did you deal without remotes.
And his biggest deal is, Dad, you guys actually played hockey outside when you played travel. This was after a outside tourney we went to last year, one of very few left in the northeast. The kids complained of freezing to death when it was 20 out. Dam kid, we played into the minus digits with a good wind, this is warm!!

 

[Dave Mack]

I'm 39 now and we live in a college town sorta, (5 blocks from UCBerkeley) and even though I don't look my age, people call me "sir" sometimes and it totally freaks me out.

 

[Carlo_M]

Dave--very similar situation (32 and near a college town). Was very disappointed when the local bars stopped carding me. Luckily, no one has called me sir yet, that I remember. But it's funny, when I first graduated I looked at the frosh and was like "fresh meat" and now I think "jailbait" or "I'm getting too old for this s#$t..." [/Danny Glover]

 

[Dave Mack]

Yup!
My younger cousin just graduated from Cal and he still bartends at the campus Bar, the "Bear's lair". When I hang out with him and his buds I feel like the "old guy". I have clothes back at my mom's apt. in NYC that are older than his friends!!!!


doh!

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

The phenomenon you're referring to, the difficulty in keeping up with the accelearting pace of technological change, is called "Future Shock". The term was coined in a book of that name by a man called Alvin Toffler. But that was probably before your time. The book was published in 1970.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

You think you are old....

...when I first moved into my house here, I walked over and rang my neighbor's bell intending to introduce myself. This incredibly young looking woman answered the door, and I had to restrain myself from asking "are your mother or father at home?" Turns out she already has 2 kids. She looked about 14 years old to me.

 

[Jesse Skeen]

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Old Christine: You can't be a grandfather. Your hands don't shake and you know what TiVo is.



I'm not a grandfather, but thanks to my twenty-something niece and her husband I am a granduncle twice over. I don't know what I ever did to them.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Remember all those all Calvin and Hobbes strips where Calvin's dad would try to convince him that film was always color, but that world was actually black and white, and tell him other lies about the past?

Joe

 

[Francois Caron]

After watching that vintage RCA TV commercial (BTW, the movie playing on the TV was presented in pan & scan ), I was searching for old console television sets on Google and stumbled onto this page at http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/itxtv .

This ain't just an old 8 inch portable TV. It's actually a mini-ITX computer installed inside an old portable TV! When you think about it, it's the kind of gadget that both the very old and the very young can both appreciate.

Actually, why not do the same thing using an old console TV set? In fact, console TV sets are still being made today as a novelity item. So what prevents us from expanding the concept by installing a computer with an LCD monitor inside the console?

Time to scrounge the flea markets!

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

I once saw an aquarium built into an old console TV. And another coverted into a planter. They have many uses.

Joe

 

[MarkHastings]

I felt old when I realized that the young cutties, that I find attractive and want to date, should actually be the children of the women I should be dating.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Keep laughing. Obviously you never heard of the NEC Electronic Fish Tank. This was an analog HDTV and High Definition LaserDisc player combo, mounted in a tank full of water, which used special MUSE LaserDiscs to create a realistic aquarium for Japanese apartment dwellers, which never needed cleaning and which could be "stocked" with different varieties of fish depending on the owner's mood.

 

[MarkHastings]

Christopher, that reminds me; a co-worker said he was in Japan (at some technology show) and they had an exhibit with a bunch of HDTV's on the wall. They all were playing video of a fish tank, except for one. One was actually a REAL fish tank.

My co-worker said, they had a certain distance you were supposed to view the monitors and he said at that distance, you really couldn't tell which was the real fish tank.

 

[Jordan_E]

I remember loving the Jerry Lewis Telethon as a kid because it used to be the ONLY program that stayed on ALL NIGHT the Sunday before Labor Day, thus I would try staying up late as possible before school started. This was before cable, when you had those TVs with the channel dial that would strip and go bad from turning the channels too damn quickly!