“Just take this as a warning. Know that there’s always a price for not being yourself.” – Benilde Little
“Rad.”
“What?”
“Check out this trick Caballero is doing in this picture.”
“Whoa, it says he’s doing an ollie and a 360 at the same time.”
“Cool.”
“Whoa, J , check this out.”
“What? What is it?”
“Check out this picture of Lita Ford, she’s practically naked.”
“Oh wow.”
“Give me that let me see.”
Joel reaches for the magazine and grabs it.
“Hey, I’m looking at..” rip!
“Great, now look what you did, jerk.”
I am sure you are thinking that’s a strange story to lead off with, right? But is it? Let me explain.
The scene:
San Jose, CA
Jason’s bedroom
Any day early Nineteen Eighty something.
One of the following playing in the background – Maiden, Priest, Rush, Sabbath, Ozzy… just shy of our discovery that changed the course of it all for us… Metallica, Slayer, Exodus – What a major turning point that was for us. More on that another time.
So, what were we doing? What is all this non-sense? We were reading magazines. We were sharing them, passing them back and forth, and pointing out pictures, talking about them. Commenting, making jokes, razzing them, and razzing each other. Cutting out pictures we wanted to pin on our walls. This was social media of the time.
Of course, the word social media didn’t even exist yet. There was no internet, at least not as we know it today. Computers were not a household item like a fridge or toaster. Homework assignments were still hand written on paper and cursive was a required skill all kids had to learn. There were no gaming apps, or online gaming – there was Atari, and we sat together and played it together in the same room next to each other because the joystick cords were a certain length, no wireless consoles or controllers yet. Didn’t bother us a bit and we loved it. We didn’t know any other way.
File sharing? DropBox, Air Drop, drag & drop, Google drive, rip & burn? Nope. We had to record our vinyl albums on to cassette tapes. That meant playing the album in its entirety, one side at a time. When one side finished we had to flip the album over, flip the tape over and repeat. That gave us plenty of time to write down the artist, album title, and song names on the blank cassette inserts. And, when it was finally done? Run it across the street to Jason’s and hand deliver the tape and get whatever tape he recorded. That was file sharing and transferring. More specifically, that was called tape trading.
It was global too. Not via the world wide web, however. There was no internet yet, remember? You had to go to a record store, buy certain magazines and way in the back were these classified-like ads that people posted requesting to exchange music tapes. You picked a few you liked and contacted them by snail mail or phone, but international calls were super expensive. Then you sent tapes back and forth snail mail again.
Except, when trading with your neighbor friends of course, so back to Jason’s house…
“Hey J, here’s Kill ‘Em All, can I get Show No Mercy?”
“Sure, here, take this too.”
“What is it?”
“Just a tape I made of my favorite metal songs that came out this year.”
That’s right, the mixed tape. And let me tell you…Big J was the master. He had volumes, and volumes, and more volumes – still does to this day. And, he still makes them for me. Only difference is they are in today’s modern format.
What made those mixed tapes even better was the WalkMan! It was one of the latest and greatest inventions then. We could now ride our bikes, walk to school, bomb the slopes, play donkey kong, you name it, all while blaring our favorite music with our stylish, oversized, foam padded head phones (which are coming back, actually). Brilliant!
We had fun back then, let me tell you! If only we had a way to create videos. Ok, we did have video, I’m not that old, but there was a not practical means yet. Most home videos were recorded on 8mm reels and watched on a projector. The first camcorders came out in the early 80’s and was large and expensive and were not a household item yet. Even if someone in our group had one, we didn’t even have a VCR (videocassette recorder) in our house yet. A VCR is how we would watch videos and movies at home; no streaming with Hulu or Netflix. Still no internet. The only thing streaming back then was us boys peeing in the backyard. Seeing who could make it go the farthest, or longest, or whatever.
That was social media of the 70’s & 80’s! Boy, those were fun times. So what is the point of all this? To be nostalgic? Nope. To point out how old I am? Nope.
It is simply to show you that things change. Technology pushes us forward in ways we could never imagine. Some are incremental improvements, others are quantum leaps. Some are positive, some are negative. No matter what happens, the fact is that it’s going to happen whether we like it or not. The main forms of communication then were –
Written: snail mail.
Voice: telephone.
Live: face to face.
Look at it today! I wouldn’t have dreamed up half of this stuff. So, here are the main points to introduce this series:
- it’s going to happen, so you might as well embrace it.
- Someone has to invent it, why not you?
Here’s your warning –
It’s coming whether you like it or not. If you don’t embrace it, you better at least accept it. Because if you don’t, you’re going to eat a glass sandwich…
Talk Soon,
Kevin W – Owner-Operator
@LEAP272
you have to leap if you want to live
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