Tonight, for no particular reason, I’m thinking of things that struck me as wonders of technology, long, long ago in the Age of Analog.

It was my aunt, I think, who gave our family an old black and white TV. I don’t think it was one she was discarding; I have the idea it was a TV somebody had given her, and she didn’t want it. So we were suddenly a family with two TVs, big stuff in the early ’60s. It had a blonde cabinet and was about the size of a Frigidaire. I think it was a Muntz. Dad put it in the hall, upstairs. The only problem was that our antenna was attached to our “real” TV (also black and white), down in the living room.

The solution was provided by my uncle (who sometimes reads this blog). He brought Dad a marvelous new device—an antenna signal splitter. With this piece of electrical wizardry, you could have two TVs attached to the same antenna! Who’d have believed such a thing was possible?

The secondary TV never worked very well, though. I don’t think that was the fault of the splitter; I think it was just a lousy TV, which explains why our aunt wanted to get rid of it in the first place.

I remember trying to watch a broadcast of “Hamlet,” performed at Elsinore Castle in Denmark, starring Christopher Plummer (that would have been 1964, according to IMDB). If I looked carefully, and worked my imagination hard, I could almost make out which shadow was saying what. To this day I still envision “Hamlet” as taking place in a snowstorm. (Note: this is not true. It just seemed like an amusing thing to say. And it wasn’t.)

(I also remember trying to watch “Fractured Fairytales,” but “Hamlet” sounds classier.)

The other day, over at Facebook, our reader Aitchmark mentioned his old IBM Selectric typewriter. Even after all these years, that called forth a sort of reflexive envy in my heart.

How I wanted a Selectric! When I took typing class in high school, there was one Selectric for the whole class, and as it happened I was the first one to get to use it. Which was not a good thing, all in all, because when I had to move to a big Royal manual, after my turn was done, I felt like I was engraving stone tablets with bronze chisels.

But my love for the Selectric abided. I got to use one in one of my many jobs, but I never was able to afford my own. What a dream it was… a typewriter that actually corrected your mistakes through just hitting a key. What a brave, new world we lived in!

Today there are probably people who’d give me one for the taking of it away.

Solid things, those Selectrics were. You could use them for boat anchors. Some are probably actually being used as boat anchors as I write.



Didn’t get any proofing done last night. Tonight, I shall. A shrewd guy, my publisher. With me doing the final read-through, I can never blame anybody but myself for the typos that will—inevitably—show up, once the thing is published and out in front of God and everybody.