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Monday, October 30, 2006
I remember being in high school back in the early 80s and hearing about cable television. Many of our friends were suddenly getting movies broadcast on their television sets, as well as seemingly countless channels from which to choose. My parents looked into it and found that cable was not available in the area where we lived, but the powers-that-be promised it would be coming soon. We did, however, discover another thrilling item that was given to us by family friend: a video cassette recorder (VCR). We were told about a local store that would rent movies to us on a video cassette tape, and that we could watch it at our leisure, right on our television set. We found a video store in town and began renting movie after movie. Where before, we only saw movies at the expensive theater, now our entire family could watch a movie for a mere three or four dollars, and in the comfort of our own home. We were also thrilled with the fact that we could pause the movie and take breaks. It seemed like technology had finally arrived. A year later, I secured a job at that only video store in town, and I helped with the grand opening of a second store on the other side of town.
A few years later, a guy I was dating gave me something called a compact disc player (CD player) for Christmas. I had never seen one, though I had heard the name once or twice. I have to admit I was quite disappointed because all my music was either on cassette tapes or records. Compact discs were quite expensive at about fifteen dollars each and I was not inclined to re-purchase all the albums I already knew and loved and owned in another format. Still, over the years, I acquired all my new music in CD form and eventually made the complete change-over in the early 90s (though I still have many of my old tapes and records).
When I met and married my husband, I found out that he loves being on the front lines of all the changes in technology. He already had the top of the line computer while mine, he said, was from the dark ages. He made sure I had the newest, best model computer, and he showed me how to log on to something called Compuserve, a place that the computer could call over our phone line, where we found games, information, and other tid-bits. Little did we know, this was the beginning of the internet. Within two years we had email and full internet access, all along wondering what we had ever done without it.
The other change that my husband embraced, but which I found as frustrating as the change-over to compact discs was the change from video cassettes to digital video discs (DVDs). Apparently, the look and sound of movies on DVD were going to surpass those on video cassettes, and my husband wanted to buy one of those very expensive machines. Well, we waited until they came down to about five hundred dollars before purchasing one, but we found that the video stores were not yet renting the DVDs, and buying them would cost an arm and a leg. Yet here we are now, years later, with two DVD players in our home, as well as a portable player we can take in the car for our children. I am not sure what we will do with all our video cassettes.
I have also found out recently that my CDs are becoming obsolete. While we thought CDs were the highest we could go, it turns out that music is now almost completely computerized. My husband has an ipod and our son even has a video ipod. They download music, books and movies off the internet right onto their ipods, which can be listened to with head phones or hooked up to home or car stereo systems.
It seems we have come about as far as we can go with technology; but that's what I thought back in the early 80s when I worked at that video store. And to think, that was only a bit over twenty years ago.
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