Tags
Betamax, CD, Corvair, Olympus OM1, Polaroid SX70, stereo, technological change, VHS, Yamaha 180
When one reaches a certain age, they have the experience, and the leisure, to reflect back on all of the changes they’ve seen, all the technologies that were once cutting edge, but were replaced by something more convenient, more capable, better. The Japan News reports on one such change:
Canon announced Wednesday it would end sales of its EOS-1v, the last remaining model of film camera that the company has sold in Japan. The company’s film cameras, which symbolize Canon’s old-time roots, will come to the end of their 80-year history.
As the sales of film cameras have been on a decline due to the spread of digital cameras, the company stopped the production of the EOS-1v in 2010 and currently is shipping its remaining stock.
The company said it will continue to accept repair orders and other customer inquiries until Oct. 31, 2025, even after finishing selling the product.
It was inevitable. The advent of digital cameras and home computers cut deeply into the film and camera industry, even those early digital cameras could not compete in image quality. Where they could compete was in convenience, and that convenience was the death knell for Polaroid cameras and film.
credit: cameraAgX
In the late 1970s, I did crime scene photography, and used some of the best cameras available:the Olympus OM1 and OM2. For instant photography, I used a Polaroid SX-70, state of the art at the time. The quality and features of these cameras were a revelation at the time, and they served me well. But eventually, even though the new digital cameras couldn’t match the quality of Kodak film, the ability to take, and immediately see photographs caused me to sell my film equipment, and now, image quality is of sufficiently high quality that the age of film is coming to an end.
credit: B&H
I remember my first record player. My parents got one for my sister and for me. Monoral–not stereo–and to play 45s, one had to stick a little plastic adapter into the hole in the 45. Stereo took care of those. When I think back on the miserable quality of the first home stereos, I shake my head in wonder, but they were better than a tinny sounding mono player with a cheap needle.
Mine was dark brown
credit: cardesignnews
My first car, a mid-60s Corvair convertible, was pretty neat. My parents got it for me because I wanted a motorcycle. They were convinced I’d kill myself, so figured the car would distract me for at least awhile. It was pretty amazing: a car that had been genuinely driven only by a little old lady to church. It was actually pretty nice, and the truck looked as though it had never been opened after the vehicle left the factory floor. It had a radio common at the time: AM only, and a single, tinny speaker mounted in the center of the dashboard. Then my mother and sister took it on a trip and hit a deer, which trashed the front of the vehicle. The radio, sadly, survived. We all know what happened to the Corvair and AM radios with single speakers.
credit: wikipedia
Cassette tapes were important to me as the 1970s dawned. For the first time, I, a budding musician, could actually record the pseudo-musical noise that drove my parents to distraction. Computers and CDs surpassed that technology.
Remember Beta videotapes? Mrs. Manor and I choose a Betamax machine for our first home video. It was enormous and weighed about 35 pounds! We eventually switched to a JVC VHS format, which was about eight pounds lighter, because there were far more available movies, and it had a remote control–on a long cord.
It’s amazing how much simple technologies can change society. VHS, and the ability to play and record movies at home, changed everything. Prior to that technology, if one wanted to see “adult” movies, it was off to a disreputable little “theater,” where popcorn and other goodies weren’t the point. Virtually overnight, that business disappeared. Add in home video cameras, and entirely new industries grew like weeds. Whether the growth of the porn industry is a good or bad thing is debatable, but the transformative effects of technology remain.
Mine was blue
credit: classic motorbikes.net
And on my, oh my, how motorcycle technology has changed. I’ve had a few, but I’ll never forget my first bike, a two stroke Yamaha 180. I loved that little machine, but compared to contemporary bikes, it was crude indeed. I remember–oddly soundly–having to constantly top off the oil tank. Oh how I lusted for a triple cylinder, 500cc Kawasaki two stroke street bike, the fastest crotch rocket of the day, but they were too pricey, and my parents had no doubt I’d kill myself on one of those.
And then there are cell phones…
I could go on and on, but how about you, gentle readers? What have you seen? What has changed for you?
Stately McDaniel Manor 
I bought a Kawasaki H2 – the 750cc version of that 3cyl 2stroke you talked about (the H1) – from a friend in college and enjoyed it quite a bit even though I wasn’t anywhere near the kind of rider it really needed. Eventually I sold it to a guy I met in traffic court who also owned an H2 and did in fact ride it the way it was meant to be ridden.
(He was in traffic court for speeding. I was in there for – well, damn, it’s embarrassing but true: smoke. Even with a fully maintained engine and fully maintained stock exhausts that two-stroke smoked so much I got 3 tickets in 3 years for excess smoke.)
(This was 1975-1977.)
I should add – since you mention your parents … I bought that bike for one reason and one reason only: To torque off my parents. And it sure as hell did. I’m not proud of that now, but, you know, I was only 17.
On a Blue Steak your parents might have been correct, they weren’t known for being forgiving of the least bit of inattention. I started with a CB350, the low mufflered cousin to the CL in the lead photo.
The dentist used to stick little film holders in my mouth for x-rays. Then he’d take the pieces of film into the darkroom and process them. Several minutes later, he had images of my teeth on little bits of film.
Now he sticks something about the same size and shape in my mouth, takes x-rays, and in seconds they’re displaying on the computer monitor in the room, blown up to fill the screen, and with controls to adjust brightness and contrast to bring out the details he’s looking for.
I’m expecting someone to develop digital subtraction algorithms so he can look for anything that’s changed from the previous exam. I think that’s just waiting for the ability to match alignment and orientation between successive images.
I don’t know what the old darkroom is being used for these days, and the person who bought the old film to recycle the silver is probably doing something else for a living.
Your dentist is no doubt still using the dark room for illicit, conjugal trysts with your dental hygenist.
Billing his time as “fillings”, no doubt?
Dear karlembke:
Better than “examination” perhaps?
@karliembke – oh the dentist! When I was a kid my parents took me to the family dentist – a nice older guy – and his drills and polisher were operated by belts – the drills/polisher were slow and vibrated your whole head and were miserable to experience. I had to go to the dentist when I was in college and – wholly cow! – discovered that they had invented air-driven drills that were like a dream! What an improvement! (The family dentist just hadn’t put any money (and perhaps, training) into his practice for years and years …)
Check out the pictures here – I’m very glad I never experienced the “wind up drill”! http://www.millerdentalcare.com/eugene-dentist-the-evolution-of-the-dental-drill/
Strep throat cultures use to take 24 hours or so. Now? Results in less than 10 minutes. Blood sugar tests needed a vial of blood and a whole day. Now? A drop and 30 seconds. Some tests don’t need blood … just pass a light through a flap of skin.
Used to be able to get a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less or it was free. Now they want $20 or more for a single pie, plus another $3 to $5 to bring it to you, hopefully the same day.
Where the heck do you live? Pizza prices aren’t anything like that here.
By the way, the 30 minutes or it/’s free guarantee was the cause for quite a few car accidents, which was one of the big reasons they stopped doing that. I’d call that an improvement.
Electronics come to mind for me. I recall my junior or senior year in high school when the Texas Instruments TI-30 came out; the original red LED model. If memory serves it cost about $30, which was quite a lot of money at the time. I have in my drawer an older but still usable TI-30SLR+. Solar-powered, all sorts of statistical & mathematical functions, and fits nicely in a pocket. You can find an equivalent today for $10 or less.
Personal computers also come to mind. My first computer ran CP/M, but I eventually moved over to a Compaq Portable. While it had a multi-frequency monitor (it could do crisp MDA text or CGA graphics) it wasn’t very hardware compatible with an IBM PC. You were locked into the Compaq ecosphere, so I bought a “turbo” (8Mz) XT clone and replaced the cpu with a NEC V20. I worked through a series of upgrades starting with the turbo XT motherboard, hitting the 286, 386, and 486 along the way. Upgraded from DesqView 386 (pre-emptive multi-tasking long before Windows had it) to Win95, and went downhill after that.
It wasn’t until the Pentium motherboards came out that one started to see integrated peripherals onboard, such as hard & floppy controllers or sound chips. Before then you had to buy an expansion card for EVERYTHING, including extra memory.
These days I have a rather plebeian 2-core AMD system that isn’t much of a gamer, but handles sound & video beautifully. I remember not that long ago when a 1Gz cpu with a gigabyte of memory was yuge. Now I have a 2-core, 2.8Gz cpu with 12Gb of ram and it’s considered slow & out of date. Even Windows is usable now.
The bad news is that Windows 7 and later won’t run earlier 16-bit Windows applications and MS-DOS apps. The good news is that the DOSBox emulator handles those quite nicely under modern Windows. You can even install Win3.11 or Win95 within DOSBox if you like. It’s kinda fun emulating a 33Mz 486 on a modern system.
Dear Casey Tompkins:
My first home computer was a tiny Apple with an 8″ black and white screen, and no internal hard drive. I had to buy an accessory device, all of 20 Mb. It was amazing for its time, but Moore’s Law quickly overtook it.
Dear Mike,
Where to start? (Sorry I’m late to the game)
Betamax – actually the better quality home format derived from a professional series that continued into the “oughts” in digital with the same basic tape cartage – I sill have a functioning SuperBetaHiFi editing deck.
Two factors killed Betamax:
A. Beta (at first) was limited to 1 hour tapes – VHS was released with 2 hour standard – Sony quickly came out with Beta II with a (slight) reduction in quality
but
B. refused to license the format for porn and that category accounted for the bulk of rentals. – Laserdisk? and totally obscure “L- Cassette?”
“Bikes” – yes, Kawi 3 cylinder crotch rockets – pass anything but a gas station – the 750 had this hidden hinge under the gas tank – “graduated” to a Norton 850 until I got tired of trying to “potty train” it (oil spills) ended up putting over 100k miles on a highly modified Honda 500/4 (5.5 Gallon gas tank, punched to 650cc, cam, “clip on” bars, rear set foot rests – almost made the “4 corner tour” of the US – I was stationed at Reem Field, (Naval helo base) the southern end was the US-Mexican boarder and the west was the Pacific ocean – didn’t make it all the way to Key West due to hurricane.
Cameras – I met my late wife building what at the time were the best broadcast TV cameras (IVC-7000 series) when we had our first child we bought a Sony 8mm that was smaller then the lens on the “portable” (had a special shoulder and “belly” brace and a 80lb backpack!), took better pictures in low light and it recorded as well! These days I play with modified GoPro cameras (can stick ANY lens on them!)
First car, well, that was unique, a “barn find” Morgan +8. I learned a lot – if you hear more than a few “sproing” sounds when cornering with wire wheels…
for some reason it always seemed to leak more water in than out in the rain
and I don’t recommend it for a first date if it starts to rain – it took two people who knew what they were doing at least 20 minutes to untangle the frame and then stretch the canvas – Oh I forgot the doors…
Dear Videodrone:
British bikes of that era? Gad! Stylish and pretty neat, but one had to drag an oil pan underneath them to catch the outflow.