Oct 28,2025. Things lost.

 As we age and reach the point I find myself, you have time to think,  Not just the normal young person style thinking about something, but instead to tape a meandering distraction from whatever boring and mundane task you were doing.

I was reading, some older novel, but not THAT old, and they were talking about typing and notes and such, There was a line about an aspiring journalist always having a pad and pencil…How long until people don’t know what that is?

Starting in Middle School, my kids were doing school research and writing school papers, and handing them in, on their phones.  Pencils are for art projects for them.  I remember we were required to have pencils in lower grades and it was one of the signs of approaching adulthood that you were allowed to use INK! Not in math class though.  Will the next generations know what a pencil was?

Yeah laugh, but I’m old, but 70 isn’t that old.  For many of us, that was retirement age.  Even so, I remember dial phones, hung on the wall in a hall.  If you wanted to talk to someone, you either stood there, or did like my sister Micki and pull a kitchen chair into the hall so you could sit there for hours and scream at me every time I went down the hall.  Even better, party lines.  My grandparents phone had ring patterns.  Groups of 3 rings was my grandparents.  If it was a group of only 1 or 2 rings, or a group of 4 rings, you ignored it…but sometimes people didn’t.  Sometimes you would hear them breathing on the line.  It didn’t make much difference though, because Mabel (why did every phone station have a Mabel?) would have the new spread around town before you could put on your shoes.  I’m not saying it was a good experience, but it’s a thing lost…

I have to kind of wonder if books are dead. When my daughter was visiting universities the library was part of the tour  I was astounded by the lack of printed works  . It was almost completely computerized! Asking professional people I worked with, chemist, I was amazed how many don’t read books  those that had library cards tended to use them for music and audiobooks. 

8 track tapes, and even cassette tapes are gone  most people probably don’t even remember cassette tapes used for storage on home computers. My son was totally aghast at a reel to reel tape.

I know that times change, new stuff comes up, old stuff is forgotten,  but there really should be more effort made to preserve memories.

Some video on Youtube had some NASA stuffed shirt saying, we can’t even visit the moon today.  We have lost the technology to go to the moon.  What other technology are we loosing?