1975 | Hacker News Reader

1975

ranprieur.com

26 pointsdivia20 comments

This is but one impressionistic view of 1975 whose claims should not be taken literally. A few examples...

no video games except pong -- The Odyssey home system was sold as early as 1972.

Word processors were still 10 years away -- WordStar for CP/M came out in 1978; for DOS in 1982. AppleWriter for Apples in 1979.

No one thought to make a sequel to a movie just because it made a lot of money -- Ten Bond films had already been made by 1975.

The work week was five hours shorter -- This still varies a lot by region and industry; there are plenty of people who work 9-5 or less. And long-term studies of work vs. leisure time suggest Americans were working slightly fewer hours in 2003 than 1975. (See for example Figure 1 on p. 9 of this survey: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1233842 .)

These things (video games, word processors, sequels) were available, but they weren't common. You can go out and buy a tank today if you want (http://www.tanksforsale.co.uk/), but tanks aren't something the average American would own.

Yup, exceptions that prove the rule.

Also, digital watches existed in 1975. In fact, one of those ten Bond films you mention (Live and Let Die, 1973) featured Bond wearing a digital watch (it was a cool gadget).

I remember a guy I worked for showing me his new digital watch. It was a matrix of tiny red LEDs that consumed so much current from the batteries, that the display would only light up when you pushed a button on the side of the watch. I bought one myself a year or two later.

This list shows how much things don't change more than how they do. A lot of new ideas are really just old ideas recycled and updated. Look at movie plots and popular music - even movies that aren't explicitly remakes are often very similar to old movies that most people have never seen. The same thing for business ideas - just as development of railroads and parcel post allowed Sears to develop as a catalog company, Amazon was made possible by the internet and electronic payments - and they've gone about capitalizing on it in much the way Sears did - by getting very big very fast, etc. Studying the past teaches us about the future.

I have his same age but things were a little different in my home country in Europe:

- No automatic doors in supermarkets. Actually there were no supermarkets, just little shops. - Coffe: we had espresso in every bar/restaurant. - Only one and a half tv channels, no tv in the mornings, no cable of course. - University was free and it's still basically free (small fee) - We had no pizzas, (or cereal for breakfast or burgers)

oh well, too many differences, political and social etc

Visiting the Irish countryside and smaller cities in 1996, I swore I had fallen into a time warp to my small-town American childhood of the 1960s. Spices in grocery shops consisted of salt, pepper, cinnamon, and that's it. Shops closed at 6 pm. (Hence, no aspirins or antacids after 6 pm.) Restaurants served food only at specific mealtime hours. No beverages, snacks, or medicines at gas stations.

Nobody went into debt for college. You either saved money in advance or worked your way through.

The Federal government has been loaning money directly to college students since 1958 and has been guaranteeing bank-originated student loans since 1965.

Phones had disks with holes, not number pads.

I can't find statistics on how quickly Touch-Tone dialing was adopted, but AT&T started promoting it at the 1964 Worlds' Fair.

Tapping a phone was difficult, both technically and legally, and you could safely assume your phone calls and letters were private.

The Church Committee reported in 1975 and 1976 that the CIA and FBI had been wiretapping and intercepting mail without warrants. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was not passed until 1978.

"Recorded music was a little scratchy, but sounded better because engineers did not kill dynamic range to make it louder."

I thought they compressed the dynamic range in those days too, in order to compensate for noise in tapes and vinyl?

Not to the extent that they do now, at least in pop music.

I thought they went to tape to avoid the popping.

Yes. The RIAA Curve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization) has been around since 1954. Before that there was an assortment of different compression strategies used by different record-player manufacturers. In the 1930s records made by one company often wouldn't sound correct on record players made by another company. The RIAA standardized this. Perhaps a more surprising note for the 1975 list would be "And the RIAA made contributions to the industry which benefitted consumers."

"Doomsayers were worried about something they called the "greenhouse effect." They said if we didn't reduce our carbon emissions soon, the world would heat up and we would have an ecological catastrophe."

Ice age was the preferred senario of the Doomday crowd back then.

http://sweetness-light.com/archive/newsweeks-1975-article-ab...

My grandfather subscribed to Reader's Digest and kept every one of them, in a tall neat stack that reached to the ceiling next to the toilet. There were more from as far back as the 50's in a little cubby hole between the toilet and bathtub. We lived with him for a year in the 80's, and I read a huge number of those; I was convinced the return of the ice caps was imminent, and quite excited about the prospect.

I read quite a bit about the nuclear winter debate, and nothing in the popular press about warming until the 90s. I know from what I have read that papers on warming were published as early as the 40s, but in the popular immagination, cooling was expected, and any human effects would be catastrophic cooling from a nuclear exchange.

> "Doomsayers were worried about something they called the 'greenhouse effect.'"

I picked up a strange anthology from 1971 for classroom use, Science Fiction: The Future [ISBN 0155786504], from a street vendor a couple days ago. Here is an excerpt from "The Human Race Has, Maybe, Thirty-Five Years Left" by David Lyle, originally appearing in 1967 Esquire:

"Dr. Barry Commoner reported recently (in his book, Science and Survival) that the burning of fuels has caused the carbon-dioxide content of the earth's atmosphere to rise fourteen percent in the past century. This has produced a general warming effect on the atmosphere. The President's [Johnson, I suppose] Science Advisory Committee concludes that this warming may begin melting the Antarctic ice cap by the year 2000 (raising sea levels four feet a decade and, of course, finally inundating huge land areas and major cities, like New York)."

I remember thoughts of global warming floating in my head since the 1970s, perhaps, vaguely, having to do with chlorofluorocarbons and holes in the ozone layer. But I don't recollect anything about increased carbon dioxide. Hence, I was a bit amazed and surprised when I read about carbon dioxide in this old Esquire article last night.

> Ice age was the preferred senario of the Doomday crowd back then.

I had not heard of nuclear winter until the 1980s. Wikipedia (definitive source ;-) confirms "nuclear winter" buzz began in the early '80s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#History

Oh, well. I have faint memories of Laser Discs around 1983-1984. When DVDs were being heavily marketed in the early 2000s I could hardly believe it...

"Huh? I thought we already proved those were inferior to recordable/affordable VHS tapes in 1986." (I still think this. DVDs make for horrendous media.) Oh, well. Fact is, not much has changed in terms of actual day-to-day life beyond the interactive qualities of the internet.

Pong, ahh. I almost wish I had been born sooner so I could have watched computers become mainstream.

Yes, but for all that time we missed, we can see that much more in the future.

I was there, youngster. The bong and pong were a natural pairing--get toasted and play pong for hours. Another plus: Saturday Night Live was actually fuuny back then.

At a pizza restaurant in my home town in 1974-75, I used to shove my quarters into the Pong machine over and over and over while my little sister shoved her quarters into the jukebox to hear David Essex's "Rock On" over and over and over. Pong and "Rock On" are inextricably paired in my mind.

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