Heart and Mind

When Things Happened/When Things Stopped Happening

I have this game on my shelf called, "Times to Remember." It involves answering questions as to the years that things occurred. I haven't lost yet.

See, I'm into dates. I like them. They're interesting to me.

But no one will play "Times to Remeber" with me anymore. No one else seems to likes dates as much as I do. (Not many, anyway.)

WHEN THINGS HAPPENED

I guess because they interest me, specific years all have a sort of unique feel and identity to them, especially if they're ones that I lived through. So if I'm wrong about a given year that something happened, I'm not usually wrong by that much. I have a good sense of when stuff occurred.

But I always find it funny how very many people I see who don't have a clue about when stuff happened! I see it all the time. People that are my age will be discussing something from "back in the day" and they'll mistakenly lump something like "the Pac Man craze" (which was something like a 1981-thing) as being a contemporary to "the Arsenio Hall Show," which is more like a 1989 sort of thing. They only remember that it all happened at some point when they were growing up in the 1980s, but I tend to think, "Are you really confusing events that you remembered from 3rd grade with events that occurred when you were in high school?" To me, that seems hard to do, but I see it all the time where people do it.

The other day I was in a bagel store and the radio was having this contest where they asked listeners to tell them what appliance was found in over 50% of American homes in 1980, but is virtually obsolete now.

The first caller phoned in and said, "I've got the answer. A VCR."

I immediately thought, "No f**king WAY! 50% of Americans did NOT own VCRs in 1980. That is way too early." I knew it was wrong. Growing up, we got our first VCR in 1983, and we lived in a nice, middle-class suburban Long Island community, and I was the first person I knew to have one. It was this big, clunky thing with two pieces and a top-loading drawer, and it weighed as much as a compact car. In 1983, normal, non-rich people like my family started getting their first VCRs. I'd wager a pretty good guess they didn't really start picking up steam for another year or so. But I know that 1980 is way to early. 1980 was not a VCR world. That was pre-VCR, when we all had to simply deal with the fact that we could only watch stuff when it was being broadcasted.

But VCR is kind of an obvious "obsolete" thing that people know boomed sometime in the 1980s, so it made sense that people might guess that. And boy, did they!

One caller after the other...

"Is it a VCR?"

"This is easy. VCR!"

"The answer is VCR."

It must have been 30 callers and about 26 of them said VCR. (The other 4 said "Record Players," which was also wrong, and I figured it would be because I actually think in 1980, a much higher percentage than half of the homes in America had a record player in them.)

I never did actually hear the answer, because no one could get in in the time I was there. Based on a clue they gave ("it's not really a living room sort of thing, it's more an kitchen, after-dinner sort of thing") I am strongly guessing the answer is a popcorn popper. Sounds like the kind of thing that maybe about half the people had back then, and they're certainly obsolete now. (We've talked all about popcorn in a previous blog.)

Because I enjoy paying attention to dates, I find it so interesting that a lot of people really don't have a clue as to "when things happened."


WHEN THINGS STOPPED HAPPENING

What I mean by that title is, "When things became obsolete."

I find that society as a whole tends to be really clueless on this one. And sometimes I am, too, with this. While I'm good at knowing when things happened, things that become obsolete usually take a much longer time to phase out than we will remember in hindsight.

Unlike "when things happened," where people tend to be clueless but would probably openly admit to that, people seem to actually believe they know what they're talking about when they say, "That was already a relic by then," and they're usually wrong. Things linger much longer than we remember. For example, take cassettes...

I think many people would be inclined to think that cassettes were dead and replaced by CDs by 1991 or 1992. CDs first appeared in 1982, but hardly anyone knew of them and they weren't commonplace. The 1980s were basically still all about vinyl (and cassettes), save for a relatively few hard-core audiophiles who maybe were CD pioneers before the rest of us really knew much about them. ,And around 1989 or 1990 is when I think CDs started gaining popularity among "normal folks," where you didn't have to be either rich or some crazy audio enthusiast to have one. And so people tend to think in hindsight that cassettes were gone as soon as CDs came in. But it's simply not true. Lots of people (not me, personally) were still buying cassettes for at least the first half of the 1990s. You wouldn't think so. *I* wouldn't think so, either. But it's true.

Even one of my cars—which is a 2000—has a cassette player in it. Granted, I
bought the car used and I wouldn't have gotten one if I was the one who ordered it from the factory. (I was using MiniDiscs in the car back in 2000, but I think I was one of about ten people in the country using that format! It never really caught on in the States.) And, also granted, people who were getting cassette deck installations still in 2000 maybe weren't cutting edge. HOWEVER, a) you could still get it and b) some people actually did.

Now, that used to blow my mind a bit, but what really blows my mind is that I recently got a 2003 truck. And THAT has a cassette player in it. It would be ridiculous to get a cassette player in a modern, 2008 car, but if you ask me, it seems equally ridiculous to think that you might get one in 2003. My knee jerk reaction is to say, "No! 2003? Can't be! No one used cassettes then. Burnable CDs and CD players were popular, and we were already starting to have MP3 and Napster and the P2P illegal sites had already been happening and... there's just no way that cassette players were still around to a point that someone would get one for their vehicle in 2003." But they still were lingering as recently as 5 years ago and I have a frieken' 2003 truck with both a CD player and a cassette player in it to prove it (sort of). Hard to believe.

posted by Steve @ 11:26 PM