I am old enough to:
- have used real Thomas Bros. paper maps in book form.
- have owned 8-track tapes.
- have been alive when the Beatles were still together.
- have attended the premiere of the original Star Wars.
- remember Sensurround.
- remember Femlin.
- remember the Z-Channel.
- have been born in a time when there were only three broadcast television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC.
- remember when gasoline was still well below $1.00 per gallon.
- remember “odd” and “even” days at the filling station.
- remember when a driver-side airbag referred to a driver rather than some safety equipment in his car.
- have been alive when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.
- remember when the Los Angeles area (where I grew up) had but one area code, 213.
- remember when LAX only had a single street level for both departures and arrivals. (See “Airplane”.)
- remember 411, POPCORN, and Jane Barbe.
- know what a dial tone is.
- remember when call waiting was a novelty for which you quite often paid extra every month (like long distance.)
- remember life before microwave ovens.
- have used both white and yellow pages’ phone directories.
- remember the first portable form of a playlist: the mixtape on cassette.
- have seen answering services be replaced by answering machines (as a consumer-owned standalone device.)
- have used both 8″ and 5¼” floppy (yes, truly floppy) disks.
- remember when the fastest dial-up modem was 300 baud.
- remember when 64K RAM and a 1.024 MHz 16-bit microprocessor was a sufficient to run a decent full-color arcade game.
- remember when pinball machines first started “talking” and suddenly went from being 5 balls to 3 balls per game.
- have carried a pager.
- know what Bullocks, I Magnin, Woolworths, The Broadway, Emporium-Capwell, Montgomery Ward, J. W. Robinsons, and May Company were.
- have owned a Betamax video cassette recorder.
- have used a phone booth and a pay phone.
- have owned and made use of a set of encyclopaedia (as books.)
- have owned and used a typewriter, a Smith-Corona Electra 120.
- know what the Dewey Decimal System is.
- remember when it was necessary to develop your own film.
- lived in a time when there was no such thing as a television remote.
- have been alive while Walt Disney was alive.
- remember when Harbor Boulevard was a two-lane road across Interstate 5, itself, then a six-lane freeway.
- remember when Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln (at Disneyland) was a live show. (Frontierland was also Tomorrowland.)