The wonders of modern technology

Do you remember gestetners and telexes? You'd type the page using the stylus setting on the manual typewriter on special paper, pull it out, adhere it to the drum, add ink, insert paper and turn the handle And telexes were fun to use.

My first few jobs I had to use a manual typewriter. I'd type Specifications and reports for engineers and architects and if they decided to delete a paragraph, I'd have to retype that page and all the following ones (if it was a good-sized paragraph). And we'd use carbon paper and yellow paper for office copies.

Nothing gets easier

It's that laundry syndrome. We used to wear the same clothes all week, barring accident and nobody thought a thing about it. Mom spent half a day, or more working with washboard, clothes lines, and flat iron. Today, it's clean clothes every day with washing machine, dryer, and maybe steam iron if the wash and wear needs a little help. Mom still spends half a day, or more taking care of it.

What's the word on the modern, paperless office?

Hell, when i was a boy, i hadda walk five miles to school every day . . . each way . . . uphill both ways . . .

Seriously, though, some of the technologies we used were incredible by today's standards. The army, in the 1960s bought into Addressograph/Multigraph printers. You typed data base type information onto a metal plate, much like a dog tag, and about the size of a credit card. To print your report, you hade to sort through the metal cards, stack them correctly with standard heading plates, produced in the same manner, and the run the report for proof-reading. If all was well, you printed however many reports you needed. To be able to punch out the metal plates, and assemble them correctly for a report, you had to develop the skill of reading upside down and backwards. The racket from the machines was deafening.

When your Ooma blinks red so you can’t use Internet (usually once a day but sometimes more), unplug it; then turn Netgear off; now wait ten seconds; now turn Netgear back on; then finally plug Ooma back in

Yes, hard to believe it’s 21st century and no, 5 seconds won’t work

I don't know what the hell you're talking about, and i suspect you don't either. In any event, i assure you i don't care.

I remember a company using teletype machines. This neverending ribbon of paper they read as it came through the machine -

1986 and 256K was considered an awesome amount of space.

This computer has about 100 times as much RAM as the entire storage space on the hard drive of my first box.

from film to giant video discs to tape (Beta or VHS-- hint; the smart money was on BEta). VHS won. VHS to DVD and then, DVD to HD DVD and then HD DVD to streaming to mega (4 terabyte is common) Hard drive. HOWEVER, Ive got an attic box full of family and kids on
VHS that I wanna copy to HD DVD.

Everythings a commercial about how good their technology is. BULLSHIT. Its all merely meted obsolescence

Ooma and Netgear are two devices used with home Internet

I don’t exactly understand what they do but Netgear is a router and Ooma is a phone system

It’s okay, you’re not required to

I think that's what I ran into with my first broadband connection operated between MicroSoft and the Phone Company. We referred to it as "jumping the modem" and all the disconnects and reconnections needed to be done in the right order.

The process totally negated any time savings associated with broadband, and I went back to dialup for a number of years.

Alas the ties and knots of the 21st century

Hey, I love computers and automation.

I just think it's hilarious when someone tries to improve things, and the "improvement" takes three times as much work as the original method.

There's a shirt for system administrators that says, "go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script."

The point being that most people end up doing things manually that can easily be automated.

The computer is really useful among those century.

I totally agree. And I loved the machines when I used them back then, too.