Common Question #1
How old are you?
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[ Jpn=>Eng ]
... rough machine translations ...
[ Eng=>Jpn ]
I am often asked, "How old are you?". Here are some rather vague, but hopefully interesting, answers :
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When I was born, there was NO Disneyland and Harry Truman was President of the United States.
There was NO satalites. Nobody ha gone inot space yet. There was TV, but it was black and white (like the one in the movie Back to the Future). There were no VCR's. All tape recorders were (big, reel-to-reel) audio recorders. We listened to records at two different speeds: either 33 and 1/3 rpm or 45 rpm.
When I was a kid, only airplanes had seat belts. All telephones were black and had dials. No i-pods or walkman players, we had desk-top taperecorders that used reel-to-reel tape. There were no CDs or even cassette tapes.
Americans smoked everywhere and did not worry about the health effects. There was no warning on cigarette packaging. Everyone was blissfully ignorant of the hazards.
In elementary school a young singer named Elvis Presley became very popular, but he was drafted and had to join the army. My memories of junior high include President Kennedy, the twist, Beatle-mania, and the British Invasion. In high school Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated.
Through high school and into college we did calculations with a pencil and paper. I learned to use a slide rule. I saw my first handheld calculator after entering college. They cost the same as 3 months rent, so I continued doing calculations with a pencil and paper.
We typed our homework and term papers, made corrections by hand, and--if that got too messy--typed the assignments all over again. Between high school and college Apollo 11 took a man to the moon. Then flower power rocked the world at the Woodstock Festval promoting hippy ideals of love, peace, and recreational drugs.
There were no lap-top or even desk-top computers. They were all floor-top computers. There were no screens. We put instructions on punch cards, which we handed to professional computer operators. We picked up the output--on special computer paper or punch cards--about three hours later. If our programs did not work, we thought about them long and hard before submitting them again.
Young males were conscripted for military service by lottery. College students studied hard so that they wouldn't have to go to Vietnam. Some of them got shot anyway. Universities all across America went on strike. Draft card burners were arrested and sent to federal prisons. Thousands of young people were arrested in Washington DC in a single day. And then came the Watergate scandal.
Last updated December 2016
Copyright (C) 2008-2016 by Jeff Blair
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