Analog barely existed

Knowledge of a whole generation of tech is basically limited to just 3 generations. Just a nostalgic diary entry that might be interesting if you're over 40.

I wonder if for Zoomers the idea of needing a handful of coins for a payphone on the street is like watching a period piece with people using scrolls. The weird thing is in historical terms tech being analog was so brief before it went digital. Like for a thousand years tech improved but roughly stayed the same.

Then for like 50 years we invented all this stuff that we still have today. But it was analog and weird and needed all this knowledge how to use. Like want to listen to a song? Well you need to learn how to carefully place a needle on this piece of plastic or you’ll scratch the bumps which control the magnets. Or we moved on to cassettes. But sometimes it got all cocked up and you had to use a pencil to physically rewind the magnetic film back onto the plastic wheels they were placed on.

But what I find weird about this isn’t that it exists. It’s that it existed so briefly. Like the pre-technology revolution lasted for so long that it’s a part of all our histories. You can watch “The Favorite” and understand the world they lived in to a degree. Because you’ve seen and read so many stories from a time period with similar technology. And if you hadn’t seen a story from the 17th century you saw one about the Middle Ages. And everything roughly worked the same. Sure, there was paper instead of parchment, and a printing press, and the buildings were bigger, the government ore stable and a million other changes. But everything was physical. And the changes took place over a very long period of time.

Analog lasted about a century. And even then the analog devices changed every couple of decades. There’s maybe a 15 year period where if you watch movies the technology is going to be those big push button land lines and cassettes. Before that you had rotary phones where you had to spin a wheel.

And you were annoyed if someone had a “9”in their number because it took so long to reset so you could enter the next number. And before that the phones were in two parts so the receiver and the speaker had to be held separately.

And for some reason even after they figured out push buttons it took another decade to realize they could just make the cord super long. So you were suck sitting next to this heavy box for as long as you wanted to talk on the phone.

And then it’s like 1999 and later 2007 came and all this stuff went away. The entire analog world that basically took off after WWII disappeared and got replaced with the digital world. First your laptop replaced a whole world of physical analog tech. Cell phones got cheap. Then in 2007 the iPhone came out and smartphones eliminated the rest. And there’s basically only 3 generations which used it. And if you’re not part of those three generations you’ll not really get why people are using all that stuff like that.