No Sense of History

[aekiy]

Every now and then, someone (usually my mother or mmsword's father) sends me one of those e-mails about how easy kids have it these days and all the things that didn't exist in their youth.  These things drive me crazy, because they are always inaccurate.  Just this morning, I've received the biggest whopper of them, targeted at the just-over-30 crowd.  I

Comments

[aekiy]

Ya, but the e-mail specifically started with an `I swore I'd never be like those people' bit and "now that I'm over the ripe old age of 30." A number of the listed items are only valid for people over 60.

[aekiy]

hee

[sixteenbynine]

We did, however, have silly chain letters like this.

[aekiy]

It's true. These things have existed for approximately as long as there's been any kind of long-range communication service available over which to carry them.

[strahd414]

Amusingly enough, my parents didn't have a TV for the longest time and we took even longer to get our first microwave. I remember sitting with my family listening to radio shows when I was really young. The microwave is an interesting thing. For most of our cooking, we really didn't need it, some things were just a bit quicker if we microwaved them and there were some things we couldn't microwave.

[aekiy]

::noddle:: At this point, my mom uses the microwave regularly with her cooking, if only to help thaw things or the like, and that's not because she's a bad cook - she's actually quite a good one. Chefs around the world regularly use microwaves for various things. Twenty to thirty years ago? Not so much, but people typically had them anyway.

[hummingwolf]

In (some attempt at) fairness, when something was invented doesn't tell you when its use became widespread. But speaking as someone who remembers the 1980s:

CompuServe or something similar was popular amongst geekier-but-still-mainstream types in the early- to mid-'80s.

Spanking & the occasional beating-with-belt were much more acceptable in the '70s and '80s than now, but CPS weren't exactly idle.

CD players started really catching on the mid to late '80s. (When my father bought one in 1985, my friends were jealous, but pretty much all of their families had CD players within the next few years.)

I have no argument with your comment on cell phones. They seem to have been annoying me forever.

Pay TV (scrambled broadcast signals you'd need a descrambler to watch) started spreading when I was in elementary school, so call it 1980. Actual cable TV wasn't really popular for a few more years, but it was nearly ubiquitous by the mid-'80s. As far as I recall, cable always had a channel with program listings, though they weren't

[aekiy]

Obviously these things will vary by family, location, et cetera, but chain e-mails like this tend to use "we" in the broad sense, as if no one had those things. And yes, things don't often become immediately popular when they're released (or at least didn't prior to the last decade or so), but for some of those things, they've been around far longer than the people who send these chain e-mails imply

[hummingwolf]

but chain e-mails like this tend to use "we" in the broad sense, as if no one had those things.

Yeeeah, but I tend to assume that they mean broadly "we who were not super-rich" or something along those lines. I also figure "kid" means someone under about 12, since this type of e-mail seems more likely to refer to playgrounds and child seats than dating or drinking, so I'm willing to give them a little leeway. So by my standards, if this e-mail were written in 2000, it wouldn't be completely wrong for people who were 30 at that time, which actually makes it an improvement over some of the e-mails friends my age have been sending me.

It is true that microwave ovens became popular in the '50s and '60s

By what standard? According to this page, "By 1986, 25 percent of U.S. households owned a microwave oven, up from less than one percent in 1971. Assuming microwave oven penetration into U.S. households was constant during this 15 year period, about 12 to 13 percent of U.S. households would have owned a microwave oven in 1978." From

[aekiy]

Well certainly when people were actually buying microwaves in the '50s and '60s it was largely the relatively few that could afford it. I'd gotten the impression from elsewhere that they were more popular earlier, but I can't remember where or when that was, so I dunno. I at least seem to recall that advertising for microwave ovens was pretty ubiquitous in those days, and that's apparently when people who could afford them actually started buying them, which they weren't really doing in the late '40s and early '50s, based on my fuzzy memory.

[kitten_goddess]

I find the idea of "no remotes" being a hardship hysterical. OMG I HAVE TO ACTUALLY GET UP TO CHANGE TO CHANNEL! OH NOES! ELEVENTY ONE!!!!1111!

[aekiy]

We're moving into a world where people might not have remote-controlled televisions any more because more and more people get their entertainment from a computer with Internet access. The last few households in which I've lived have been households that use only cable Internet access rather than subscribing to cable television. But ya, it is pretty sad to think of it as a hardship, never mind that there have at least been wired remotes for more than half a century.