DocAndersen
When I was first starting as a school teacher, I remember people giving pens. It was important. One of my favorite scenes in the movie “A beautiful mind” is John Nash getting his pen at Princeton. People used to give pens as gifts. I even have a couple of pens that were given to me as part of an award. As a technologist, I spent a lot of time chasing the ultimate pen to paper to the digital tool. Livescribe Echo was my first foray into that, and it was something I enjoyed using. I still have one of their pens and do, from time to time, use it. Pens and paper have long been important to me. It is funny when you look back and remember things that used to be necessary.
Pens yup, they were a big deal. That got me thinking about other things that used to be a big deal. One of those was television back when I was little. We have 5 to 8 channels (some of the southern ones did not come in when there were thunderstorms). But TV was different then you had two chances to see a show, either live or during summer reruns. If you missed the show, you had to wait for it to be put into what was and is called syndication. For shows that were on later, we almost always missed them during the school year. So we had to catch them on summer reruns. They didn’t always rerun the entire show. The other thing about back in the day is they made more shows.
Where today, they make 22 or fewer for a show; back then, they would make 30 to 35 new shows for a year (Batman, the TV show was only on the air for four years but had more than 115 episodes). So some shows we never got to see all of them. Now in the modern world, we don’t have that issue. We’ve had a DVR in the house for more than 20 years now. Before that, a VCR. I don’t remember the last time other than sports that we watched live events on TV. Well, we watch the news, but that is, for the most part, delayed anyway. Funny how things change, and the impact slides away from us. Do you remember when TV shows had a lot more episodes in a season?
This work is Copyright DocAndersen. Any resemblance to people real or fictional in this piece is accidental (unless explicitly mentioned by name.)
