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70's Gadgets
By Christina Mulberry
It started with a family discussion about growing up. The 70's were the period of my childhood that I can remember with quite a bit of detail when I try. We were saying how things hadn't changed that much. Of course, neither computers nor cell phones had come along yet, but aside from that, things were pretty much the same. We talked a bit longer, remembering the things we used to do as kids, laughing about the time we spent with family. How we watched TV as a family, had meals together, and so forth. The more we talked, the more I began to remember. I began to visualize it all. I recalled the layout of the house where I grew up, the items within the rooms, and the smaller details. It's then that I realized, even those things we believed hadn't changed, were indeed quite different. It started with the telephone. That lifeline teenagers had to the outside world. We didn't have computers or the internet. We couldn't text message on our cell phones. If we wanted to connect with friends from home, we had to call. In fact, we often had to compete for phone time with everyone else in the house since there was generally only one line. But the real difference that struck me was the dial. Dials were popular in the 60's and 70's. You didn't have digital stuff, you didn't have a lot of keypads for tapping things out quickly. Dials were very mechanical. I don't remember exactly when "touch tone" phones came along, but throughout much of the 70's rotary phones were what we had. Dialing a phone took time. Whirling that dial around, and then waiting for the click, click, click recoil, before you could dial the next number. Going through the process seven times. No rushing, the dial had it's own timetable and you were at it's mercy. But it was pleasant in it's own way. A brisk push forward, whoosh, then the staccato of the return. It was a unique sensory experience. Dials were the way to control most gadgets in fact. Televisions still had dials for changing the channels throughout the early 70's. They were clunky and offered a lot of resistance in some cases. It took a bit of "umpf" to push these dials around. Luckily I guess there were far fewer stations to switch among. Many of us had only five or six stations to choose from. I remember the television we had was capable of dialing up to 40 stations or so, at least three quarters of which had nothing on them. But mind you, you couldn't skip over these when dialing. Like the telephone, there was no short cut for getting where you wanted to go. You had to clunk, clunk, clunk, through every station until you got to the one you wanted. Most of us didn't have remote controls, so you had to get up from your seat and stand in front of the TV, cranking away at the dial. Needless to say, channel surfing as we know it today, didn't really exist. It wasn't hard to obey the command, "don't touch that dial", when it came time for commercials. Plenty of other 70's stuff used dials. Car radios had dials. No, not just the dial to turn it on and off or adjust the volume, but to change stations. There was no seek or scan button. You had some big buttons that allowed you to select five stations or so to preset your favorites, but other than that you used the dial. They weren't like most of the dials you use today. You had an indicator that would move left to right along a wire. You could feel it's smooth movement with a constant tension. No digital display told you when you had arrived at your desired location either, it was more like reading the numbers on a tiny ruler. If there were stations located on either side of the one you wanted, it could be tough to land in just the right spot. Dials were even present on microwave ovens back then. There was no punching in the time, or power level. You cranked on a dial. Stoves and ovens as well operated with the twist of a knob. The same with your clocks and watches. It's not that there aren't clocks around with dials today, there are just far fewer. The transition to the digital clocks and watches started in the mid to late 70's. It seems a trivial think to think about such things, but that's how it happens. Little things disappear, first one then another, and before you know it things have changed completely. |
A Look Back at 70's Toys
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Rotary Phones
Rotary phone information and products.
www.squidoo.com/rotary-phones
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This intel was contributed by mulberry
mulberry
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May, 2012
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