Strange, But True.

[NightskyeB4Dawn]

Yes. It seemed that we appreciated what we had more back then. Even the little things had value and brought joy.

Something as tiny and finding an over ripe berry bush, long past season, and having our mother make us kids pancakes or a cobbler out of them. Of course the pride that went along with being the one responsible for providing the berries for the treat, made it all taste so much better.

Very little was taken for granted back then, even though we had so much less.

Yup. I recall many a time that I'd go out and bring in a gallon of blackberries, to which we would add some water and a little sugar and boil them down into a thin syrup, and then add in our own peculiar brand of hillbilly "dumplings" - just biscuit dough mixed loosely, and spoon-dropped into the blackberry syrup, and when they were done, the whole shebang was ready.

I recall finding 3 wild plum trees on one of my mountain wanderings a couple miles from home, and bringing a couple gallons back for canning. They were a lot better than the store-bought purple plums.

I recall finding a single lemon-balm plant out in a clearing in the woods, and working with it until I figured out what it was. It looked like a pale catnip plant, but smelled like lemons instead of catnip when you tore a leaf, and that was a perplexation that I HAD to solve.

There was a joy and a sense of accomplishment in discoveries like those that is no more in this age when everything is just a keyboard or mouse click away.

Regarding the computers discussed in the OP, back then we thought of computers as a huge bank of closet sized metal boxes with flashing lights and tape reels on the face of them. I went to the University of Akron, Ohio, one day in 1973 to tinker on a computer they had there. The computer itself filled the entire floor of an economics building on the other side of the campus, and the computer room was just a bunch of terminals - just a keyboard and a green letters on black background CRT display. There were about 10 or 15 terminals in that room. I recall it could play baseball via that terminal, and if you got mad and cussed at it, the terminal would shut down until you apologized, and I found that amazing - that a machine would do that. The computing power of that floor-filling assembly of computers, which was state of the art at the time, can now be contained in a cell phone many times over, or even a mere wristwatch in this day and age.

I'm not sure that all the "advances" we have made since then are really positive things.


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I worked for the Navy in the computer services division. It took up a whole building.

This is when we had keypunch operators, verifiers, and had to hand wire the boards.

We have come a long way. But once personal computers came on the scene, I saw it coming, where we are now, and where we are headed.

It doesn't take a lot of imagination, to see the path of how we got here, and where that path leads.