Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for February 21, 2014

Wow Phoebe, you should see the one in my house! It hangs on the wall and has a rotary dial!

“Oh, Puh-LEEZE mom! Next you’ll be telling me that TV screens weren’t always flat.”

But how do you see the internet on it?

An incident that happened to us just a few years ago, right before cell phones started to get real popular – My wife and I were in charge of the Youth Group at the church. When we were through for the evening, we told the kids to call their parents and tell them to come pick them up. The phone was hanging on the wall in the kitchen. The first little girl came back and said she didn’t know how to use that kind of phone. We went to look at it and it was actually a rotary dial! My wife and I had a good laugh about it, but the other kids were too sympathetic with the girl to join in our laughter!

Where’s the camera on it?

Come on, the phones have not evolved that much to not to be able to recognize an old model from a new one.

Yes. to operated this device, you clap the two plastic halves together, spelling out your message in Morse code.

It is still hard for me to believe there are college graduates that have lived their entire life never knowing a world without the internet.

Not just phones-when I had the computer repair tech over he brought his 10 year old son. When I went to pay him, I used a check which I typed on my IBM Selectric III (the model that used a ball and allowed you to change fonts by inserting a different script ball) and protected it with a check printer which imprints the amount into the paper as well as inking it so that it can’t be altered. The kid was amazed-had never seen a typewriter, much less one that had a correcting feature on it so you could erase a typo. I gently informed the child that this was 1970s high tech that still worked and hadn’t gone through umpteen updates and tweaks. My Burroughs computator (adding machine) was broken or I would have shown him that example of 60s high tech-The Bowmar Brain one of the first pocket calculators came out when I was in high school but we learned how to use a slide rule-didn’t have that handy or he really would have freaked. Thought my computer was something else as well as it is 10 years old.

Remember, Phoebe, that phone paved the way for the cell you have now.

I have an honest to goodness candle stick reproduction at our home. The only reason I don’t use it for other than display is no land line. Very ironic.

Nice glasses look mam! I love to see your eyes above your glasses.

A few years ago I was having a new satellite dish installed. The installer brought his approx. 12 yr. old son to help. The kid came in to check the signal strength on the TV, and had to ask me how to turn it on — there was no remote! I introduced him to the concept of walking up to the TV, pushing the power switch, and turning a knob to change the channel…

My dad (rest in peace) used to install television antennas. Sometimes he’d install a “tenna rotor,” a little electric motor that would turn the antenna in any direction. It was controlled by a knob-driven device inside the house; you selected the direction and the tenna rotor would move the antenna in that direction, bringing a clearer picture on the t.v.. How times have changed!

OH YES! I loved that show! Bunny Rabbit, Mr. Moose, Grandfather Clock, Mr. Greenjeans, Tom Terrific…GREAT memories. And while he was kind he managed not to condescend to kids the way most kids shows today do.

Computers used to take up entire rooms, Phoebe, and they weren’t any more powerful than that phone you are holding.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eniac

My kids were in the school office, years ago, when when two girls came in and asked to use the phone. The secretary handed them a rotary-dial phone. One girl looked at the other and said, “I think you put your finger in the hole, and it knows what number to dial…like pushing the buttons on a regular phone.”“They didn’t even know how to use a PHONE!!” my kids hooted as they told us the tale. We still have a Bakelite rotary-dial desk phone in the basement..it was an “extension” phone, so the bell is disables, but we still use it! Without that, my kids wouldn’t know about rotary dials, either!

I remember the old Selectric typewriters. I thought the font balls were pretty cool, and I still do.

Rerun! Nice to see it in color, though!

When I was a really little kid, we had a crank phone and a party line. Later, in the house we built in 1955, we had a late-20s Model 202 that Bell had recently started making again to help consume their huge inventory of spare parts. That was the model that had a body that looked vaguely like a Hershey’s Kiss. It was smaller than the models that came after it because most of the works, including the bell, were in a Bible-sized box on the wall, instead of in the body of the phone.  I started in the computer game in 1965. Roughly speaking, all the computers in the world in 1965, put together, equal one iPhone. (IBM’s most popular mainframe at that date maxed out at 16,000 six-bit characters of main memory; their biggest production mainframe maxed out at 196,608. The smallest disk drive held 2,000,000, and was about the size of a washing machine, while the largest held about 234 million and was the size of an industrial refrigerator.)

The Princess was designed to take less space on a bedroom table, and to include a night light. It must have been successful, since they kept making them until AT&T got out of the telephone-set business in the 90s.