Essay by Ed Quillen
Technology – April 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
BACK WHEN OUR DAUGHTERS were in school here, one of them came home with an assignment that made me feel old. She was supposed to ask her parents about how daily household life had changed since we were kids 25 years earlier.
At first, I couldn’t think of many changes, especially significant changes. We had natural-gas heat and indoor plumbing, which was a big change from how my parents had grown up with coal stoves, privies and pumps. We got around in automobiles, a big change from my grandparents’ early years with horses and buggies and trains.
We used electric refrigerators, not iceboxes, and we had freezers and frozen food, though before we got the freezer, we rented a meat locker at a place where I’d stick my tongue to the cold metal when my mom wasn’t looking. Mostly we shopped at supermarkets. Milk was delivered then.
Of course we had telephones, or more properly, a telephone. Rare was the house with an extension phone, because you couldn’t just buy one and plug it in. They had to be leased from Ma Bell, and a technician had to install it. We did have dial phones — they came along when I was in grade school, but to me they seemed a big step backward. Before, I could just tell the operator that I wanted to talk to Wayne Tazari or Dick Ziegler or Billy Potter; afterwards, I had to look up the number.
There were no cordless telephones, let alone cellular telephones. Long-distance calls had to be made through the operator, and they were so rare as to be memorable; almost always, they meant that someone had died or been seriously injured.
Sometimes we had TV — if our set blew a tube, my dad wasn’t always in a big hurry to fix it, since he didn’t much like television anyway, and money was always tight in our house. A few rich families had color TV, but that wasn’t a big deal because the color was bad (green faces, purple leaves, yellow skies) and required constant adjustment, which meant getting up and walking to the set because there were no remote controls.
Because our TV was so sporadic, I never got accustomed to watching any specific programs. I remember wanting to watch The Untouchables with Elliot Ness fighting Chicago bootleggers during Prohibition, since my friends at school all talked about it, but my folks wouldn’t let me watch it. Radio drama still existed then, and I remember following Gunsmoke and the adventures of a private detective named Johnny Dollar.
Thinking about that made me see the big change: household electronics and related communications. My kids had trouble believing that FM radios were once a rarity, and that I didn’t have one when I was in high school. Nobody I knew then had an FM radio in a car. The eight-track tape had just been invented, and though they were common when I was in college, I don’t remember hearing any before then. Audio cassette tapes were around, but they could barely reproduce speech audibly, so music was pretty much out of the question.
Recorded music came on vinyl records in three sizes and speeds: 33, 45 and 78. Most households had some way to play them, but many homes didn’t have stereo, and full-range speaker systems with woofers and tweeters were just things I read about in Popular Electronics.
There were video recorders, but they cost thousands of dollars, and only TV stations owned them.
I did have a short-wave receiver, and even held a novice-class amateur-radio license (WN0QNY) for a while, before I discovered girls and cars, and lost all interest in communicating by Morse code with some ham operator in Australia at three in the morning. Thus my electronic knowledge never reached even knowing the difference between Colpitts and Hartley oscillator circuits, and I can barely remember Ohm’s Law. And to this day, every time I burn myself while trying to solder something, I think “I was an English major. This was never supposed to happen to me.”
SO THAT’S PRETTY MUCH what I told my kids: that in our household of modest means, we have electronic gadgets far beyond any dreams I might have had when I was their age, and that even the richest people when I was a kid couldn’t have had what we had.
My kids could listen to music that wasn’t fuzzy or distorted; they could record their favorite songs; they could watch films they picked out rather than those offered as The Saturday Night Movie.
Because Martha and I worked at home, we had an extra phone line, an answering machine, a copy machine, and several personal computers. And our kids and their friends had a veritable arcade available to them, including Pacman, Paperboy, and a bevy of creepy medieval quests.
By the time our older daughter graduated in 1993, other marvels existed, too, but I was resistant. We didn’t have a fax machine; we never used ATMs; our ’65 Dodge couldn’t talk to us; and we didn’t have a credit card (so we couldn’t order and pay for scads of new electronic stuff we didn’t need). But I slowly came around. It’s hard to buy an airplane ticket without a credit card, and darned near impossible to run a publishing business. In a thirty-five-year-old vehicle, it’s hard to take mountain curves fast enough to keep kamikaze drivers from passing you on double yellows. And alhough I still hate faxes, valued customers insist they’re convenient.
Though I was loathe to admit it, my childhood was fairly primitive. In my youth computers were the star attractions on school field trips; we’d marvel at how quickly the punch cards flew through a reader.
MARTHA GREW UP with more connection to computers. Her paternal grandfather was one. He could add columns of 10-digit numbers in his head, and “computer” was his job title. (In the same era, keyboard operators, not the machines, were known as “typewriters.”)
Her father sold computers; he worked for Univac, Honeywell, RCA and a bunch of other companies, but never for IBM, a company he despised because “they have the world convinced that computers only do things for banks and utility companies, and there are a lot of other uses for them.”
He died in 1979; shortly before that, I asked if it would be possible to buy a small used computer, somebody’s obsolete trade-in, perhaps. “Why would anybody want a computer at home?” he asked.
I told him I thought it would be fun to play with one, and he thought that was pretty weird. Of course, he thought that just about everything about me was pretty weird.
But I had actually seen a “home computer” before that, in 1977 when I lived in Kremmling and was over in nearby Granby selling ads. Some merchant and I were chatting, and he said he had a friend who had assembled an Altair kit, and I ought to see it.
So I did. The guy spent about 20 minutes flipping toggle switches so the lights would blink in a certain pattern, and to be honest, I didn’t see much future in that kind of computer. Thus my interest in a used commercial system.
Now we live in a much different world, and in most ways, it’s a big improvement. For one thing, there’s no way I could write a regular column for a metropolitan newspaper 140 miles away if I couldn’t use a computer and phone line.
Research for writing is immeasurably easier with the Internet (available as a local call in Salida since 1995, and now accessible with high-speed connections). With email, I’m better about writing my mother. And without affordable computers, we couldn’t make this magazine.
Today, small publications can do most of their production work at home, cutting and pasting with the touch of a finger. But when we started in this business, as owners of the Middle Park Times in 1975, we had to lay out each page as a flat, literally gluing in typed stories and corrections. And our offices had to have lots of room for a typesetting machine, a headline compositor, a dark room, extra staff, and banks of light tables (in addition to all of the room we needed for desks, typewriters, files, reference books and other things we still use now).
But all of this progress comes with costs, of course. First off, the fact that machines are getting more efficient is costing people jobs. Furthermore, whenever I read lackluster prose, I wonder if some writers shouldn’t be thinking more and word-processing less. And there are days when I swear that the time wasted with spam e-mail and web-browser pop-ups far exceeds any time that the Internet might save.
I noticed another of those costs on March 5, when I went to Cañon City for the annual Arkansas River Water Basin Forum. It was a snowy morning to the east — schools were closed or delayed in Colorado Springs and Cripple Creek — and Martha wanted me to call home once I got there so she’d know I hadn’t slid into the canyon along the way.
The forum was at the VFW Hall, and it’s a good conference facility with ample room and decent acoustics. But I couldn’t find a pay phone anywhere nearby, and nobody was in the office. I suppose I could have asked to borrow someone’s cell phone, but I’m kind of shy about asking strangers for favors unless it’s life or death, and besides, I’m not sure I’d know how to operate one, since I’ve never owned one.
THERE ARE TIMES when I can see where one would be useful (car broken down along some empty highway). But I also like the idea that I can have times when I cannot be reached. Only then, it seems, is it truly possible to relax, knowing that no one can disturb me just by pushing a few buttons.
So I’ve managed to resist the temptation to get a cell phone, even though about half of American households have at least one.
The more that people use cell phones, the less need there is for traditional pay phones — usage has declined by about 50% in the past decade. With fewer people using pay phones, the phones will make less money, and so companies will install and maintain even fewer of them. One regional telephone company, Bell South, got out of the pay phone business altogether this year.
The pay phone probably won’t become totally extinct, but finding one will continue to get harder. And at some point, I will feel forced to get a cell phone, even if I’d prefer to live without one.
And how will I find a cell phone that is just a cell phone, without a camera or text-messaging or a dozen other gimmicks that I don’t want to have to deal with?
This gave me another way to think about modern technology. How much of it is stuff that I really wanted? And how much if it is stuff that I felt more-or-less forced to buy?
It doesn’t necessarily involve high technology. Suppose you wanted to heat your home with coal. When we moved to Salida in 1978, the town still had a coal yard, and coal mines operated in nearby Frémont County. Neither is true now. Your coal furnace might work perfectly, but where would you find fuel for it? Nobody delivers it here.
I HAVE A SIMILAR CONCERN about my old Nikon FM2 35-mm camera. It’s nearly 30 years old, but still works perfectly. Plenty of places still sell film for it, and there are two places in town with one-hour developing.
So the supporting structure is still in place. But last year, digital cameras outsold film cameras; the trend is clear. Film and developing will become less available, and at some point, I’ll need to get a digital camera, even if the old Nikon still functions fine. The 35-mm film that is ubiquitous now will be something like glass plates for tripod-mounted view cameras — possible to use, but only if you’re really dedicated.
When we get to computers and data storage, the forced-upgrade cycle moves into high gear. I’ve got a big box full of computer components that probably still works just fine — except they use the ISA or EISA or VL bus, and newer computers offer only the PCI bus.
A punch-tape reader might still work well, but with what? Ditto for the card punch and reader. Or the 8-inch floppy disk. Or the 5.25-inch floppy disk (of which we still have a few dozen, which is why one machine still has a working 5.25 floppy drive, just in case). A lot of new machines don’t even have 3.5-inch floppy drives.
But that’s okay. We’ve got CD burners, right? So we store data on CDs, except who’s to say that they won’t become as obsolete as punch cards or paper tape some day soon? Am I going to feel forced to change to DVDs, even though all of my CD gear works fine? And if you think that sounds preposterous, see if you can find any 5.25″ floppies on a retail shelf these days.
I’m not a Luddite, but there are many days when I’d rather write than figure out how to use the new technology that I’ve felt compelled to adopt, whether I want it or not.
And sometimes we get so accustomed to the high-tech way that we forget that there are simpler ways. This came to mind a couple of months ago. I needed to send an ad proof to Carol Hill at the Book Mine in Leadville.
For some reason, our fax systems weren’t getting along. So we were trying to think of where I might send the fax when I finally recalled that the mail is generally overnight between Salida and Leadville. For 37 cents, the problem was solved.
So at the moment, we can enjoy lots of ways to communicate: traditional mail, faxes, email. But I have to wonder how long that’s going to last. Mail volume has been declining. Small post offices are closed. Service gets cut.
BRUCE CATTON, best known as a Civil War historian, once wrote a book called Waiting for the Morning Train. It was a memoir of his boyhood in Michigan, when passenger trains and ferry boats connected the state. Therein he observed that “Once it becomes possible to reach a place by automobile, it quickly becomes impossible to reach it by any other method.”
And maybe we’re reaching the point that “Once it becomes possible to call home with a cell phone, it quickly becomes impossible to do so by any other means.”
Or “Once it becomes possible to send a fax or an email, you forget that there’s still a postal system.”
Or “Once you’ve figured out how to use the stuff you’ve got, it’s obsolete, and you’ll have to buy something new which will be obsolete by the time you’re comfortable working with it.”
That’s progress, I guess.
