40 Years of Voyager

I recently read an article on the 40th anniversary of Voyage I and II. The article also referenced John Kennedy's 1961 speech about putting a man on the moon. That got me to thinking about what thinks were like then and the changes we have seen.

In 1961 I was in Germany. Transistor radios had just come out. Their big feature was they were instantly on. There was even a top song about them. We did not have a TV in Germany. The Armed Forces Radio broadcast old radio serials; Inner Sanctum, The Lone Range, Johnny Dollar, Fibber McGee and Molly, Burns and Allen to name a few. The radios we used were big bulky affairs that took several minutes to warm up and activating the speakers.

Back in the states we had black and white TVs that took several minutes to warm up. One of us children had the duty of turning on the TV for the warm up period while the rest cleaned up from dinner. The warm up took anywhere form 90 seconds to 5 minutes, depending on the age of the tubes. Most convenience stores had tube testers and I spent many an hour testing tubes. The kiosks almost never had the tube we needed.

Radio and TV was over the air. Until UHF came available sometime in the 60s there were usually only 3 channels to watch.

Sometime in the 60s TV manufacturers came out with Instant On TVs. This worked by keeping the set on standby with warmed tubes all the time. electricity was cheap. Even the Instant On TVs were not instant on. They took about as long as current LED TVs to show a picture.

Color TVs were only for the rich. The NBC Peacock's purpose was to allow you to calibrate your colors as the color settings would drift. I never saw the utility of the Peacock as it was never on long enough for you to calibrate the colors. A tedious process. There were even psychological studies on your personality type based on the color setting you used. Football was one of the last  shows to switch to color; as my father said it was too fast for the cameras to follow.

Computers where huge room sized machines. The first third generation language (FORTRAN) was not developed until the late fifties. The machines were slow and very limited by today's standards. I wrote my first program in January 1974 on a machine that was first released in 1962. It had a maximum of 64KBytes of RAM. Disk space was around 1-2 MBytes of removable storage. The machine ran at around 600KHz. We eventually sped it up to 1.1 MHz.

Now to 1977. Apple had just released their Apple II. Personal computer were for hobbyists and we mostly considered to be toys. There was no internet. We were coming out of the fuel crisis and a lot of cars smelled like rotten eggs and most had fuel economy in the teens with horrible quality (Vega). HBO was about the only TV subscription available and only was broadcasting from 3 pm to midnight. The shuttle Enterprise had its first test flight in 1977. No shuttle orbited until 1981. The AT&T Antitrust case was only about half way done. AT&T was accused of stifling innovation in phone systems. We were still tied to our land line phones. Most of us did not even have answering machines. Most people had instamatic cameras that used one time use flash cubes. We waited for up to a week for film to be developed.