My Dad has always been a technology guru. I grew up in a home with 20 telephones, including the 3 in the kitchen, 2 in the family room, and the red rotary phone in the unfinished basement..you know, just in case you wanted to hang out in the dark, cold, scary basement and carry on a conversation. I'm pretty sure we were one of the first families in America to have Caller ID. I remember being totally amazed at that technology.
I still remember when the giant double tape ghetto blaster that sat on the kitchen counter was replaced by this new thing called a CD Player. I think I was in 6th grade. I can still hear that thing blasting "Love is a Wonderful Thing" by Michael Bolton early in the morning and can still see my Dad dancing to it.
My Dad had the first "car phone" ever. It took up the entire center console of his yellow Chevy Blazer (matched the yellow boat, of course). You had to wind something up in order to make a call on it. I only saw it in use a couple of times, but I remember being totally amazed that we could call someone from our car.
Before cell phones became all the rage, there were pagers, remember? I still remember paging my high school boyfriend, typing in my number, and waiting for him to return my call...that was late 1990s. Probably a decade earlier, my Dad had a pager. We would call the pager, leave a 5 second audio message, and hang up. On my Dad's end, it would beep loudly, then a static-filled audio message would come through...usually saying something like, "Dad, call home." That's probably when he'd wind up the center console car phone. I have a vivid memory of hearing that pager beep and watching my Dad scramble to whip that pager off his belt and put it up to his ear so he could decipher the static.
For Christmas as a senior in high school, Santa brought me a first generation Sony Discman. I thought I was pretty cool. I even got the car audio tape attachment so I could listen to it while driving my sweet 1989 Honda Accord. I left on my mission to Japan in 2000. Mini-discs were all the rage there. I came home with a sweet electric blue mini-disc player that was never used. I remember the elders in my district coming to a meeting with a brochure of this Apple iPod, first generation. They would spend their p-days at the electronics stores checking out the latest and greatest stuff. They clearly didn't have a clue what was going on in America, because they were the ones that convinced me to get a mini-disc player to take home. However, despite the mini-disc issue, Japan really was a good 2-3 years ahead of the States.
Many hours were spent on trains in Japan. The passengers would board, sit, then immediately pull out their cell phones and start doing stuff. I always wondered what they were doing and what on earth was so interesting on their phones. My last companion was Japanese and she had brought her phone with her on the mission to use as her alarm clock. It was all colorful and played cool alarm music. She told me that they could write to each other and listen to music on their cell phones. I told her that cell phones weren't like that in America, they just called people.
I returned from my mission in 2002 and got my first cell phone, I was 22 years old. It was a small Nokia gold/silver brick. It dialed phone numbers. Period. Later that year I returned to Japan and met up with that same Japanese companion who took one look at my cell phone and said acting shocked, "You were right. It just calls, that's it."
I got my first email address when I was a freshman in college. I literally watched email and the internet evolve over the course of my college career. I remember sitting in my apartment bedroom and logging on to my computer and waiting for the dial-up to connect. That sound, in fact, was a lot like my Dad's static-filled pager message.
So where does this homage to technology come from? I saw the cover of Time Magazine. In honor of Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, Time's Person of the Year for 2010, it got me thinking about how far we've come in just my lifetime. I didn't actually join Facebook until this year...and I've been trying to collect friends ever since.
