Memories on Friday.

I'm coming up for half a century in a couple of years time. Looking back over that time I can remember inventions that we thought back then were amazing. Way before mobile phones, ipads and mp3 players. We couldn't even imagine those things being real back even in the early 80's.

Some of the things that were "new" when I was a youngun were:

Portable transistor radio, these were still quite big, but put about a dozen D sized batteries in and you could take it to the beach it would run for a good....40 minutes.

My father had a habit of leaving it slightly off station so our music was accompanied by the horrid static white noise .I'm sure it's why I'm a bit nutty now.

Palm sized transistor radio...no earphones you had to hold it to your ear for your own personal space, they had a real tinny sound but it was great.It was awesome to have music of my choice in my own room.This was actually a big deal in my house. Odd ,yes ,Personal freedoms were a privilege.

Portable Record player

I was never lucky enough to have one of these but my friends did. I remember one 11th birthday party listening to Fox on the Run by sweet,over and over and over and over.I included the song, so you can get into the excitement too. You may want to play it over and over and over,thats ok .

Cassettes These were a huge thing in the late 70's and 80's. They were only about $2 cheaper than LPs or records as we called them but they started putting the cassette players into cars and the portable transistor radios. They were expensive for what they were and often got loose and you'd hear mwaaaarrr mwaaarrr mwaaarrr and not much else. There used to be lots of unravelled tape at traffic lights, a sight you don't see anymore.I just gave our collection of about 150 cassettes to our brother in law, he bought a campervan with a cassette player in it. It's all 70's and 80's music. I hope he gets more than mwaaaar mwaaaar mwaaaar out of them.

1970 brought us one of these rotary phones, not everyone had an in home phone then but in the next few years,not many homes didn't have one.Before that we used these.

Mum was lucky we had one in our street a few houses down, but some people had to walk for ages then wait their turn for the box.

I remember my mum buying one of these u beaut electric typewriters in about 1985. We were researching the family tree and mum would type up family groups etc. We also used it for our resumes.She tried to give it to me about 6 years ago we all had computers with printers by then.It's still in the back of a cupboard.

Thanks to the Japanese, by the time I got to highschool in 1975 calculators had been introduced for maths.Legions of students never had to remember the formula for cosigns and tangents.

Not that a calculator helped me, I was hopeless at maths.

I keep finding these in drawers.I think they breed.

In 1974 the sewer finally came to my home town. We could have had a pump out septic for about 3 years prior but Dad was not going to pay the plumbers twice,so we put up with this....
for 3 years longer than we needed to. There was no light in there, plenty of spiders and it only got emptied by the sanny man once a week. God help us when we had visitors.

I'm glad some things have changed!!!