I was taught how to program an IBM mainframe using computer cards. Ironically, those "computer cards," and the code they use, were invented decades before the earliest computer.

 

I remember some things from...before I was getting high!

 

I remember playing marbles, ones that looked really special and we could collect and swap as commodities, and jacks.
Ladies all wore aprons around the house.
Etch-a-sketch, rollerskates, real, strap on ones that we skated on the path in with no crash helmets, no helmets either when out on our bikes.
Doing the twist, come on baby – the 50s, 60s and 70s would never have been the same without it.
Paper dolls that you popped or cut out and dressed or redressed in outfits for hours. It was the ultimate in girls’ entertainment.
Lava lamps – particularly in the teenage years.
Cap guns – loud shootin, gun powder-smelling ones with sheets of red cap paper.
Sewing patterns – making your own clothes, budgeting your money to stretch for a special piece of fabric that you could cut to the perfect shape and tailor to your own body. Such a sense of achievement in sewing back then.

 

The little school where I learned my ABCs, long closed and now somebody's house, but still surrounded by fields where we used to jump the fences and help ourselves to the peas growing there!

 

That's awesome! Growing up in that kind of bucolic setting must have been wonderful!

It made me think of my own Catholic elementary school - it would be to the left and in the block behind the church:




I remember when an earthquake forced them to remove the top half of that steeple - the photo is afterward.

 

I remember when multiplayer gaming was done with friends in person and not online

 

I remember when computers were at NASA and on Star Trek, not in everything, including my pocket

 

A boy in my neighborhood got polio and had to wear leg braces. Nevertheless, when the vaccine was invented, I was more afraid of the shot than the disease. Those shots hurt.

I was required to get a shot anyway. The next writing lesson in our first grade class was to copy from the black board (actually I think it was green) "Today we got our polio shots. Only one of us cried."

Fortunately, it was not me.

 

Computers were called "electronic brains." Many feared that they would put people out of work. That did not happen yet. Now it is happening.

 

I remember attending a segregated elementary school in the South. I wanted it to be integrated, and sometimes said so. I was woke before the word existed. Since then I have never attended a school where blacks made up more than five percent of the student body.

Later than that I have talked to whites who attended or taught at public schools where most of the students were black.

 

At least, for every job eliminated by a computer, at least two new ones are created.

- shootersa

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Computer technology creates a few jobs for people of above average intelligence. It destroys many more jobs for people of below average intelligence. Bar codes reduce the need for cashiers. ATM machines reduce the need for bank tellers. Industrial robots reduce the need for factory workers, as you can see from this chart:



Bar codes, ATM machines, and industrial robots are dependent on computer technology. Computers more directly reduce clerical jobs in accounts receivable, accounts payable, and payroll. Also, interactive voice systems reduce the need for telephone operators, although I would rather deal with a live person than a computer that tells me, "I'm sorry we don't understand what you said. Please choose again," when none of the choices are relevant to my problem.

 

I remember the days when you could lose your wallet/purse and get it back. It happened to me twice when I was younger and both times I got it back with the cash still in it.

 

How smart does one have to be to maintain/fix those bar code machines?

Cmon man, we been through this before. Technology creates jobs, for everyone.

- shootersa

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You missed my point. Bar codes make it possible for cashiers to process more customers faster during a given amount of time. Consequently, fewer cashiers are needed. The chart I posted in comment #51 demonstrates that since 1980 the number of factory jobs has declined dramatically, even though the value of factory production has increased. This is because of the increased use of industrial robots.

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The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 4, 2018

Autonomous driving technology could replace some 294,000 long-distance truck drivers over the next 25 years, a lighter impact than some have predicted but one that could still significantly reshape freight-industry employment, according to a new research paper.

The changes would likely eliminate some of the best-paid positions held by the more than 2 million heavy-duty truck drivers in the U.S., according to the analysis by Steve Viscelli, a sociologist who is a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Robert A. Fox Leadership Program and a senior fellow at its Kleinman Center for Energy Policy.

 

Technology removes jobs, but also creates them. When technology removes a job and the employee does something else, that drives he GDP up.
And your chart ignores one thing that you are fully aware of; manufacturing jobs started moving overseas decades ago; in fact, Shooter recalls you yapping about that very thing, how, you know, those good paying union manufacturing jobs moved overseas and shooters entire generation was sitting home fuming about it and hired Trump.
So you can't get it both ways, old boy.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-...ates-more-jobs-than-it-destroys-10460880.html

Despite the constant modern fear that robots are eventually going to take all of our jobs, a study by financial services company Deloitte has found that technology has created more jobs in the past century, not less.

The authors, Ian Stewart, Debapratim De and Alex Cole, pored over census data for England and Wales stretching back to 1871.
They found that rather than making human workers redundant, technology has simply shifted work into other areas.

Rising wages and more leisure time has meant that people are spending more money on grooming now than they were during the Victorian period - as a result, there is now one hairdresser for every 287 people in England and Wales, as opposed to one for every 1,793 in 1871, The Guardian reports.
​

And if you think about it, if technology indeed destroyed jobs, our unemployment rate, indeed the labor force numbers, wouldn't be continually dropping and rising. We'd see increasing unemployment directly tied to innovations, and we'd see the labor force numbers dwindling.

That is not what is happening.

 

I remember when Nixon was president... looks like we've got a worse one.

 

I remember when Netscape was The browser.
I remember when AltaVista was The search engine.
I remember when I had porn on Betamax.
I remember when Laserdisc was to be the media format of the future.
I remember when they said no one would ever want a computer in their homes.
I remember when all my joints didn’t ache all the time...

 

I remember..
Just walking out the door to play with my friends and telling my mom I’ll see you later.
The doors were never locked at our house, so all our friends could just walk in.
Matinee movies were $.25.
Running from the cops and they would just go and tell your parents. We never learned to just stop for them.lol

Mr. C

 

Now you're going to think I'm really nuts but I can prove this!
When I was a child a showman used to over winter in my tiny English village and brought his animals with him, at one time he got chucked off the local bus for taking a snake on it! But that's not the biggest animal that spent the winter in our village, he also brought his lion!! You could hear it roaring from one end to the village to another and we accepted it being there every year!
The showman Nick Nyoka and Simba the lion were in the film Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor.
Picture taken in my village.

 

The industrial revolution eliminated jobs for farm laborers, but it created jobs for industrial workers. Initially these jobs were long, tedious, often dangerous, and paid subsistence wages. In time the growing productivity of labor, and liberal economic reforms, like minimum wage laws, laws to protect labor unions, and laws to ensure safe working environments, made the the kind of factory and mine jobs Trump's white blue collar supporters are nostalgic for when they respond favorably to the slogan, "Make America great again."

Nevertheless, computer technology and the automation it makes possible are eliminating the better paying jobs most people are able to learn. We can see this in the decline in factory jobs.



Computer technology is one of the three reasons for the growing income gap. I have discussed the other two reasons elsewhere. The growing income gap can be seen in this chart,



and here:

"CBO figures...show that in 1980, the richest fifth of our country had eight times the income of the poorest fifth. By 1989, the ratio was more than 20 to one."
https://fair.org/home/the-way-things-arent/

 

When I got out of High school I could walk or take a bus to any one of 20 factories, and start that day at a wage close to what a married man was getting paid. The training cycle was a guy took you to the work place and said do this and that, for 8 hours a day. If you were good at it sometime piece work would make a difference as well as over time. For the most part, you could do the job with a grammar school education. There were places like that that people thought of as a life time job, guys stayed for decades. After you did that for a while some of us realized that we wanted more, went to night school or college, or often to the military for 3 or 4 years. Then with the GI bill you could afford college.