irememberjfk_l6fq3c – Page 30 – I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

50’s Nostalgia in the 70’s

The Mothers’ Ruben and the Jets, released in 1968, the oldest 50s nostalgia I can find

As we moved from the 60’s into the 70’s, we discovered something. We didn’t like the 70’s. Student protests turned into student apathy as the draft slowed down and finally disappeared. Everyone quit fighting for causes, and instead sat around thinking about themselves. Early in the decade, some termed it narcissistic.

I remember missing the 60’s very much by about 1972. I missed the Beatles. I missed Get Smart. Entering my tumultuous teen years, I missed the more carefree days of being a little kid.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one pining for the past. Because the early 70’s saw an unprecedented wave of nostalgia sweep the US, which stayed around right up until the start of the 80’s. We all wanted to go back in time, and the decade that was most sought after was the 1950’s.

By and large, the nostalgic wave was kicked off by George Lucas’s brilliant low-budget smash American Graffiti. Lucas must have sensed the Boomer generation missing its youthful days when he envisioned a film about his own youthful cruising of Modesto’s strip in hot rods circa 1962. But he probably didn’t foresee what a smash the film would be, and the continuing flow of nostalgia that would follow.

The soundtrack became a Top Ten album. Songs that had been on the singles charts in the 50’s reappeared. And Wolfman Jack was given his due as one of the greatest DJ’s of all time.

But we wanted more! So the next year saw Happy Days appear on TV, starring none other than AG‘s Ron Howard. Though the show was eagerly watched by Boomers, the rest of the country didn’t catch on right away. But by 1976, it was the #1 rated show on TV, and it propelled ABC from its traditional distant third place into the top network on television.

Personal note: I loved the first season the best, when Fonzie was a side character who was very intimidating for the others to even talk to. When he was made the focus of the show, it suffered. Never mind the fact that he was the original shark jumper.

Happy Days spun off successful shows of its own, and I remember going to lots of 50’s parties about the time I got old enough to drive. And the commercials! My favorite was a 7Up ad featuring a ghostly 1950’s teenager who fades into and out of the commercial while a great doo-wop song blares in the background. YouTube has a plethora of old 7Up commercials, but I didn’t find this one.

Predating American Graffiti by two years was an off-broadway play called Grease. It scored great reviews and got lots of attention. It opened on Broadway in 1972 and drew huge crowds throughout the decade. A movie was eagerly anticipated, and in 1978 was released.

Grease vaulted the careers of already successful John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. It also garnered a #1 single for 60’s veteran Frankie Valli. And it brought on another tidal wave of 50’s nostalgia right in the heart of the disco era.

As we moved into the 80’s, the obsession with the 50’s finally began to wane. But it remains a hot era even in our time, as the recent smash success of Hairspray proves.

What genuinely surprised me was that we finally even got nostalgic about the 70’s! Dazed and Confused and That 70’s Show were big hits in their own right, although the popularity of 70’s nostalgia has never approached that for the 50’s.

But hey, the new century is still young. Let’s wait and see where longing for the past takes us next.

Yo-yos

Many a kid was seen walking down the street playing with a yo-yo when we were kids. They were also played with by our parents, and probably our grandparents, too.

The yo-yo is a toy that has had many waves of popularity since its introduction early in the 20th century. One of those waves coincided with my childhood, another one hit in the early 70’s, when I was in junior high. During the latter craze, yo-yos and clackers were banned at schools all over the country, as kids played with the toys instead of doing their lessons. At Bentonville Middle School, the principal kept a box in his office that was full of confiscated yo-yos, popperknockers, and squirt guns.

The yo-yo can be traced back to Greece about 500 B.C. It is belived to have been used in China long before that date, but actual specimens from Greece have been unearthed. Artwork from the period also shows people playing with them.

The yo-yo spread around the world. Art from places as diverse as India and France from the 18th century depicts them. They also achieved a large degree of popularity in the Philippines.

In 1915, Filipino Pedro Flores immigrated to the United States. He went to law school, but never completed his law degree and began instead making yo-yos while working as a bellboy. In 1928, Flores started his Yo-Yo Manufacturing Company in Santa Barbara, California. Two years later, the Donald Duncan Company bought him out, and, despite the Depression, the yo-yo business did pretty well.

Duncan survived the Depression and sold millions of yo-yos over the next thirty years. They hit a wave of popularity during WWII, then faded again. In the early 60’s, they took off again. Interesting how the yo-yo business went up and down, isn’t it?

But Duncan received a lethal blow in the midst of their toy’s popularity. When they bought Flores’ “invention,” they also trademarked the name “yo-yo.” That meant that competitors sold “come-backs”, “returns”, “returning tops”, “whirl-a-gigs”, and “twirlers.” However, in 1965, the Federal Court of Appeals ruled that Duncan’s trademark for the word “yo-yo” was no good. Yo-yo’s name had become so widespread that it was now a permanent part of the language and it no longer only described the toy, it was the toy. The legal costs incurred sank Duncan.

The company which had been manufacturing Duncan’s plastic yo-yos bought the Duncan name and took off like a rocket. Yo-yo innovations began pouring forth, and another wave of popularity hit the early 70’s.

As the years went by, things like ball bearing shafts, clutch springs, and rim weighting have turned the humble yo-yo into a sophisticated performance piece. But we Boomers have fond memories of cheap wooden models, or Duncan Imperials that were a bit more pricey, as we made our way from childhood to being grown-ups.

Your First Color TV

A magnificent 1964 Magnavox color TV console

For us Baby Boomers, the appearance of HDTV a few years ago brought back memories of the last big jump in TV technology.

When homes first started sprouting TV antennas in the 50’s, black and white sets were the norm. They weren’t cheap, either. A new one was an investment of hundreds of dollars. Most stations outside of big cities didn’t broadcast in color at first when it became possible in 1954. So spending over $1000 for the pictured 1954 CBS-Columbia color TV was simply out of the question.

But color was catching on fast. By 1965, most US TV stations were broadcasting in color, even though many network shows were still black and white. In fact, it was interesting that some TV shows “jumped the shark” when they went color, the Andy Griffith Show being the prime example.

The prices had dropped by then, as well. You could get a living-room sized color TV for around 500 bucks. So many, including my father, took the color TV plunge about that time.

1967 newspaper ad for Mickey Mantle’s Restaurant, Joplin, Missouri

I saw my first color TV at Mickey Mantle’s restaurant in Joplin, Missouri in 1964. They had one set up in the lobby. I remember standing there stunned at the incredible sight of seeing moving images in gorgeous color.

One of the first things a new color TV owner discovered was that the blasted colors wouldn’t stay the same! It would go in and out of tune during a single show. A nice flesh-colored face might end up with a greenish tint before a show ended. And passing airplanes would also wreak havoc with the picture.

Many homeowners, my father included, decided to spring for a rotor that would turn the antenna around to directly face the transmission tower. In our small northeast Oklahoma town, we had signals originating from places as diverse as Tulsa, Joplin, and Pittsburgh, Kansas. Being able to point the antenna perfectly greatly improved color reception.

Channel 7 in Pittsburgh would begin the broadcast day with color bars that you could use to perfectly adjust the tint and hue. An announcer would describe each color, and you would try to match it. The picture would then be perfect, until it started getting off track again within minutes. Automatic fine tuning appeared in the 70’s and ended this daily ritual.

I waited five years until I took the HDTV plunge. By then, the local networks were broadcasting in it, Dish Network offered a hi-def DVR at a reasonable fee, and the sets themselves had finally gotten reliable and cheaper. And as I installed it, it brought back fond memories of dad proudly hooking up our very first color set, circa 1965.

X-Ray Specs

There’s not a person in the world who has looked at American comic books from the 50’s through the 80’s and isn’t familiar with a device called X-Ray Specs. There would always be a half-page ad from some novelty company offering items like onion gum, joy buzzers, whoopie cushions, and the mysterious magical spectacles.

They promised the ability to see the bones in your hand, and hinted that you just might be able to see through curvaceous young ladies’ clothing, as well.

Talk about something that grabbed the attention of a young male!

I never knew of a single friend of mine who actually ordered a pair, though. We just never could justify spending candy bar money on something that, while looking very intriguing, also carried with it that curious phrase “a hilarious optical illusion.” That phrase seemed to imply that it didn’t really use x-rays to allow a peek under young ladies’ dresses! Come on, for a dollar, this thing better be the real deal!

However, if you want to go ahead and spring for something you may never have bought as a child, you can order a pair from Stupid.com. Inflation being what it is, though, they’re up to three bucks.

Why Does This TV Show Look…Different?

When I was a kid, I noticed something about TV very early in the game: my mom’s “stories,” as she called the soap operas she watched on weekday afternoons, had a different look to them than other shows like Leave It to Beaver or Bonanza.

The look is hard to describe. But there are unmistakable differences.

Later in life, I learned that the soaps were filmed on videotape. The other TV shows were captured on cameras that utilized conventional film.

Go back to the early 50’s, and all shows were caught on film. However, most were captured as kinescopes. The cameras capturing the action were piping their feeds straight to broadcast. The only way to record what they were filming was to point a film camera at a monitor screen. Thus, the quality of the captured show was only as good as the sharpness of the monitor and the focus of the camera. In other words, lousy most of the time.

During that decade, AMPEX, makers of sound tape recorders, was experimenting with putting video on tape. By 1957, they had perfected the process enough that a TV episode was shot for the first time entirely by videotape cameras. This was The Edsel Show, a Bing Crosby-hosted special that was considerably better than its namesake. Rumor has it that a door handle fell off of a car shortly after it was featured on the show.

While many TV shows were captured on film, the process didn’t work well for shows that depended on live audiences. Scenes would often be shot out of sequence and pieced together in the spicing room. When you had three cameras filming live action, there wasn’t any way to put their outputs into one package, short of filming the monitor image.

But if your camera could record to tape, and have its images instantly accessible (i.e. not requiring darkroom developing), that would open up all kinds of new possibilities.

“Terrific!” you might say. “So that means old broadcasts were saved for posterity!” Well, sadly, videotape didn’t make much of an early contribution to the preserving of shows. The 2″ reels cost about $300 in 1950’s money. And coincidentally, they could be erased and reused. Thus, the same reel of videotape might have been used to capture many episodes of the same show only long enough to be rebroadcast three hours later for west coast viewers.

1960’s Ampex videotape machine at work in the TV studio

However, many episodes of early videotaped shows have survived. For example, in its second (1960-61) season, six episodes of The Twilight Zone were shot on videotape, in an effort to cut costs. Remember the one where the kid could talk to his deceased grandmother on a toy telephone? Notice how it has a different look and feel from most other offerings.

It was the soaps that embraced the new technology most quickly. They were filmed live on a daily basis, and videotape was perfect for the three-hour rebroadcasts that were essential due to the four time zones that span the US.

In the early 70’s, an interesting trend took place in TV studios. Many sitcoms started to be shot on videotape, giving them a “soap opera” look. Norman Lear was one of the pioneers of the movement, and all of his vast storehouse of comedies utilized videotape.

Lear’s success, driven by ratings giant All in the Family, caused others to switch to the videotape format. Thus, many of our favorite 70’s half-hour comedies, including Barney Miller and WKRP in Cincinnati, have the distinct videotape look.

Nowadays, digital has changed all of the rules. Digitally filmed shows do not have the videotape look, at least to me. Looking at the the current top twenty rated shows, I don’t spot a single one shot on videotape. I’m not sure if the soaps still use them, I haven’t seen one in thirty years. Perhaps a reader can enlighten us.

Videotaped TV episodes have largely been digitized, retaining their original look and feel, but now no longer subject to the deterioration of the tape itself. Many of us have likewise digitized the tapes we shot with our videocams in the 80’s and 90’s for the same reason. And if you haven’t done so yet, you’d better hurry!

So now, when you spot one of the six Twilight Zone episodes that look different from the rest, you, as Paul Harvey would say, now know the rest of the story.

When You Weren’t Sure Exactly What Time It Was

Got a cell phone in your pocket or purse? How about a GPS in your car? I’m sure you have a computer, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

Then you know, within a teeny fraction of a second, exactly what time it is. We take such a situation very much for granted. Some of us even wear watches that communicate with an atomic time server several times a day, making microscopically small adjustments to ensure that the time displayed is exactly right.

But it wasn’t always that way, was it, Boomers? When we were younger, the exact time was largely unknown. The local bank might have had a big clock outside for all to see, and presumably, it was accurate. It had better be, the whole town might have been setting their watches to it.

In my hometown of Miami, Oklahoma, at precisely noon each day, the B.F. Goodrich plant would let loose with a blast on a steam whistle which would alert plant workers (and everyone within a couple miles) that it was lunchtime. Many a wearer of a wristwatch would stop what they were doing and adjust their timepiece to 12:00 noon.

We had other ways to set our timepieces back then, of course. Today’s article will remind you of what they were.

If your dad had a short wave radio like mine did, then the exact time was readily available on a station located in Denver. In fact, in researching this piece, I learned that the station, WWV, is still broadcasting away on a number of frequencies.

“At the tone, the time will be eleven hours, forty-three minutes, coordinated universal time.”

Dad would set his Seiko chronometer, brought back from Asia by my older brother, to the precise minute. It would be good for a week or so, such was the accuracy of the fine auto-wind timepiece.

You could also get the exact time by calling a Denver number, if you could abide the expensive long-distance rates back then.

Coordinated universal time dates back to the late nineteenth century, when the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England was selected as the world’s official timekeeper. Your own local time was described as being plus or minus GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) depending on whether you were located east or west of the British town. For its early history, the clock depended on the movement of the earth. But there’s a problem: the pull of the tides is gradually slowing down the earth’s rotation. Additionally, major physical events like the 2011 Japan earthquake also affect the length of the day just a tad. A more accurate clock was needed.

This breakthrough occurred in 1955, with the invention of the atomic cesium clock. The next year, the atomic clock was used by the U.S. National Bureau of Standards to broadcast the exact time via short wave. A leap second is added every now and then (every eleven years or so) to keep the clock in step with earth’s ever-diminishing day.

Thus, geeky teens could keep their LED watches perfectly on time for counting down school bells and the like.

Another way to tell the exact time was to listen for the chime on CBS. When a CBS show would start at the top of the hour, it would be preceded by a “dong” that the savvy viewer knew was the exact beginning of said hour.

The CBS tone disappeared some time in the early 80’s. By then, digital time had gotten much more accurate for the average Joe than the mechanical version. Nowadays, of course, we might occasionally change our wristwatch time, or change a few clocks twice a year for Daylight Savings Time, but we don’t worry about whether our cell phone, computer, or GPS has the right time. It’s all fully automatic.

However, back in the day, if you wanted the exact time, you had to earn it!

When You Got Your First VCR

As I sit back and watch my episodes of The Sopranos that my DVR automatically records every Wednesday night from A&E, I sometimes think about days long ago when you either watched a show on TV, or you missed it. If you were watching Bonanza, and the telephone rang, or company came over, you didn’t see the ending. Your only hope was catching the rerun.

If you can recall TV from the early 50’s, even THAT was not an option. It was live, and the only recordings were kinescopes, which were films shot by pointing a camera at a television monitor.

The first kinescopes were useful for preserving performances for posterity, but they weren’t suitable for broadcasts, although they would be later used to air shows three hours later for west coast audiences.

This all changed in 1975. That was the year Sony introduced the Betamax. This machine was instrumental in turning the world into commercial-skippers, thanks to that handy remote control. It also meant that you could watch TV programs ANY TIME YOU WANTED TO. That was pretty profound stuff the first time we realized it.

Of course, that convenience would cost you. The Betamax recorder, which came with a 19″ Trinitron TV, cost $2495 in 1975. Yikes.

But VCR’s were the devices that taught us that when something cool and expensive comes out, just be patient. It will soon get INexpensive, and still be cool!

By the next year, you could get a rival VHS recorder for less than a thousand dollars. By 1985, when I finally sprang for one, it was down to $299. And it played back in stereo, too, so I could watch movies like Days of Thunder and listen to the stock cars roar by from the left side of my living room to the right!

It also came with a digital clock, which, if you’ll recall, usually flashed all zeros.

That leads to another new concept which arrived shortly after the VCR’s themselves: renting movies.

We rented movies because they were too stinking expensive to buy. A movie on tape circa 1978 could cost over a hundred dollars. As a result, we signed up at video rental outfits, and didn’t mind shelling out as much as fifty bucks to sign on! That seems outrageous today, but I recall my older brother, who obtained a VCR about 1980, ponying up that cash to join a store that required a 15 mile drive to get to.

Oh, and the movies we watched. Years before the world wide web, VCR’s allowed you to watch ANYTHING you wanted to. The result was that many video rental places had a special “back room” that was opened to you by request only. You can guess what sorts of films were available in there. And, they generally were quite regularly rented.

In the meantime, Hollywood, in a rare moment of conscious thought, realized that the pricing structure for taped movies would have to be changed. Movie prices dropped dramatically, with many rental places being put out of business since you could buy a film for twenty bucks, the price of renting it four times. Paid memberships were also gone by the mid 80’s.

The buyers of the original Betamax machines, which had visibly better picture quality, were dismayed to see the VHS format win out. By 1998, you had to go to Japan to find a new one. But Sony kept cranking out a few each year until production finally ceased in 2002.

Today, the same situation exists in the high-definition DVD field with Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. If you invest in a player for either format, which are incompatible with each other, you run the risk of putting lots of bucks into a dead technology.

That’s okay. My standard DVD looks pretty darned good on my modest 30″ high-def TV. I’ll be happy to wait a few years while the two technologies slug it out. When I finally sprang for a VCR in 1985, it was clear who the winner would be.

When You First Tried a Home Computer

Okay, this is a no-brainer. If you can read this, it means you have mastered a few things. One, you know how to use a computer. Two, you have figured out how to connect to the internet. And three, you have figured out how to go to a certain website, or at least read your email.

Congratulations. Had the you of twenty years ago seen you now, he or she would be quite proud.

Computers have been quite a leap in technology for Baby Boomers who grew up with black and white televisions. Indeed, some of us (myself included) have lived in areas that didn’t have telephone service. And just look at us now! Interacting instantly with people on all sides of the globe.

But with each of us, it all started with nervously typing on a keyboard for the first time somewhere.

In my case, it was 1982. I was working in a Montgomery Ward’s in Amarillo, Texas in general maintenance. My crew would get to the store at 6:00 in the morning and get the place ready for the daily rush of customers (yes, Montgomery Ward’s used to do lots of business). While sweeping the floor, I stopped at a display that featured a Commodore Vic-20. You could type up a little BASIC routine that would flash a message on the screen. There was an instruction sheet that stepped you through it. My boss, call him Jim, was an evil little troll to work for. When I walked away from the computer, it was dutifully flashing “Jim sucks! Jim sucks!”

The experience taught me that I could master a computer.

Many of us got our first computers thanks to the lure of games. Indeed, games were the driving force behind the sales of Ataris, Commodores, and TRS-80’s. Prices were all over the map, depending on how much of a computer you were willing to buy. You could obtain a Timex Sinclair with a single K of RAM that required a television for use as a monitor for less than a hundred dollars. Or, you could spring $999 for a TRS-80 Model 3 with dual floppies, 16K of RAM, and built-in monitor.

As much of a geek as I turned out to be, it was sort of surprising that I waited until late 1993 to spring for my own smart box. I could just never justify the expense, and I wasn’t too much into games. But it was the writing urge that finally made me cough up 1500 bucks for an IBM slc2-66 (basically, a 386 that had been tricked into thinking it was a 486). A couple of months later, I sprang for a 2400 baud modem and connected to my first BBS. Life would never again be the same.

I loved using a word processor that caught things like spelling and grammatical errors, and joining AOL gave me access to people looking for writers.

I long had a paid gig producing a daily column for FamilyFirst.com. I decided long ago that while being a full-time writer was feasible, I enjoyed my job as a geek too much to pursue it. So it was a nice little diversion on the side, thanks in large part to a Commodore Vic-20 I encountered 25 years ago.

When We Learned to Dial Direct

Long distance phone calls are made without a second thought nowadays. I have a very reasonably priced cell phone plan that allows me to converse with my brothers, who live a long ways from me, for no added charge. You can buy cards in convenience stores that give you long distance for pennies a minute. In fact, international calls have gotten cheap. And many take advantage of Skype and similar services to talk to friends and relatives all around the world for next to nothing.

But go back to the 60’s, and many of us were having to speak to an operator to make a call outside our immediate area. And those calls didn’t come cheaply, either.

The first direct-dial long distance phone call was made in 1951 when the mayor of Englewood, NJ called the mayor of Alameda, CA. Before that, most long-distance calls required an operator at both the calling AND receiving end.

But AT&T launched the direct dial system, which necessitated the adoption of area codes, and the long distance operator began a slow but sure path to extinction.

Once upon a time, you will recall, you began your long distance call by dialing 0. When the operator answered, you told her (most of the time, although male operators have existed since the early days) what number you wished to dial, in what city, and what method you preferred. Your choices were person-to-person (expensive, but if your party was unavailable, free) or station-to-station (cheaper, but a voice, ANY voice, on the other end meant the meter began ticking).

Of course, the person-to-person method allowed imaginative individuals to communicate free of charge. Placing a call to “Joe S. Aboy” would announce the gender and name of a newborn free of charge to a relative in Minnesota circa 1965.

By the 1970’s, most of the country was capable of dialing directly, although many chose to do it the old fashioned way. I recall AT&T running many commercials about the reduced cost of 1+ long distance in the early years of that decade.

My thrifty father picked up on the new technology early in the game, insisting that in the unlikely event that a long distance call WAS necessary, it must be made by dialing directly. We were on a party line in Centerton, Arkansas when it finally made it to our home, and the operator would ask you what number you were dialing from, and that was the end of the dialog. After that, you had your own direct long distance connection, “untouched by human hands” (as a local potato chip maker liked to advertise about their wares).

So if you remember JFK, there’s a good chance you also recall when a long distance call meant dialing 0, instead of 1.

When We Dialed Telephone Numbers

Try this experiment: tell your grandchild to dial a telephone number. Do you get a puzzled stare back?

Indeed, many of our grandchildren are oblivious to such telephone antiquities as cords, dial tones, answer machines (which are still newfangled things to many Boomers) and, of course, dials.

For many of us, a quantum leap in modern technology was the colored phone. Our parents grew up with (if they had phones at all) a black chunk of bakelite that weighed five pounds or more. It was leased from the phone company, and likely was manufactured by Western Electric, thanks to a sweetheart deal with Bell System. Actually, it wasn’t so much a sweetheart deal as a monopoly, since Bell and Western Electric were actually under the same corporate umbrella.

Indeed, for many years, it was a breach of Bell contract terms for a homeowner to plug any device into the phone line except for the leased brick phone that Ma Bell provided. Inspectors would check the lines for any devices that varied from the peculiar voltage requirements of WE’s phones, and any customer with the chutzpah to do such a thing would be threatened with disconnection.

My best friend’s sister had one of those pink Princess phones in the mid 1960’s. It was a nice act of generosity on the part of her parents, because it too was leased, and cost extra since it was (1) an extra phone, and (2) a fancy phone. Remember, back in those days, it was one basic phone per house, unless you wanted to shell out more bucks.

But this column is creeping a bit. It’s not about leasing phones, it’s about when dialing a phone number meant DIALING a phone number.

Push-button phones appeared as early as 1963 in urban areas, but since I (and many of you) grew up in small-town America, they really weren’t an option. No, that familiar clicking sound would count off each number dialed through the earpiece as the spring-loaded dial reliably did its job, with just the right amount of resistance to the finger as we patiently entered in five or seven numbers.

Some of the older phones, like the one my grandparents in Texas had, would have a strange silent spring-like resistance, and wouldn’t make the familiar dialing sound until your finger was released. I never could get used to that.

Bell continued to have a leased-phone-only policy throughout the 70’s. But prices must have dropped precipitously on colored phones, because I remember my thrifty parents sprang for a harvest gold model in the middle of that decade. It had a dial, of course. While touch-tone phones were available in northwest Arkansas in the mid 70’s, they cost extra, hence not in OUR house!

In 1983, the reorganized and split-up AT&T allowed consumers to connect their own phones to their network. That meant that suddenly K-Mart and the like began marketing extremely cheaply-made phones, in contrast to the massively rugged Western Electric models that we paid for many times over through leasing. And it was cheaper to make push-button phones than dial-up types, so the venerable dial began disappearing at that point.

No touch-tone service? no problem. The phones all had switches on them that would cause the pressed keys to make clicking sounds just like dialer phones, so you didn’t have to pay the extra five bucks or whatever a month to make them work.

Unlike many of the wonderful long-lost things we grew up with, dial-up phones can still be used with most phone companies. They have maintained backward compatibility so that you can dig out your mother’s avacado green bedside phone, affix the proper plug, and use it to dial out on the same wires that might be providing you with high-speed DSL service.

It’s nice when an occasional thing doesn’t change.