Thursday, March 31, 2011

Hi-Tech Stuff - Back in the day......

We are a society driven by technology...Cell Phones, GPS, Ipads, etc., etc. but we owe a great deal to the people who developed the items that lead others to create better and better technology....The first digital watches were very expensive ($300) and they did little more than tell the time.....now, they are throw-away cheap. Same with computers....not that I am old but in high school, we used a tele[type that was hitched up to a mainframe computer miles away....and it all ran on the computer language called BASIC....yeah, we actually had to learn the language of computers....let's see your average teenager do that these days... So here are a few pictures of " Old School" guys doing the techie thing back in the day....pretty interesting in light of what we have now.
This isn't some ridiculous "city of the FUTURE!" concept art; this photo of an "elevator garage" was taken in 1936 Chicago by photographer John Gutmann, and here it is from another angle. I can picture dropping in a nickel to get our car back and then seeing it get stuck at the top like a bag of chips in a vending machine. It's easy for us to laugh, but in 1899 this must have looked like a terrifying vision of the future. Even if the guy was wearing a tie, bowler hat and dress shoes. Back in those days, if you were not the more finely dressed army, you were considered to have lost the war regardless of how much land you seized. That's inventor F.R. Simms, by the way, demonstrating his Simms Motor Scout armored quadricycle.

This last picture is not as "old school" as the others but I thought this looks funky....the Airplane looks like it is eating the car...it was how they did it "back in the day"

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