the good old days

  today i was thinking about my grandmother.  wondering what she would think of things had she still been alive.  then i got to thinking of all the things that have happened in my lifetime.  and then i got to feeling old but that is another story.   in my lifetime i have known/seen the following:  

records.  honest to goodness vinyl records.  Lp's, 45's and i have a faint memory of 78's
8 track tapes.  they weren't around long but i do remember them.
cassette tapes. do they even make them anymore?  can you buy music on cassette tapes?
telephones with dials. oh yeah, there was a time before push buttons.  and the phones came in just a few rather ugly colors.  black, brownish tan, blue, pink
telephones with cords attached to the handset.  yeah, no cordless stuff when i was growing up.  and i miss them too.  hanging up on people have totally lost the "slam the phone down" hangup effect.
car phones.  before cell phones was the car phone.  they were really expensive.  few people had them.  they had to be installed into your car.  then later you could take them in and out of your car.  but you could only use them connected to your car.
hand held calculators.  ok, i have no idea when they first came out, but i remember the local radio station having contest where you could win one, so it was a pretty big deal.  i still have my first one.  wherethe numbers light up on the screen looks totally different than they do today.
vcrs?  there was a time that if you wanted to tape a television show you had to put a cassette player up next to the tv and hit record.  you could tape sound but not picture.  then came vcr's.  but there were 2 kinds.  the one that isn't here today is the beta one.  don't know why it never took hold.
president Kennedy killed.  i was really little so i really don't remember much about it.
president Nixon resigns.  that was huge.  i remember the headline on the newspaper.  it was HUGE you have thought we had gone to war.
president Regan shot.  that was totally wild.  we didn't know at the time how close he came to dying.
president Clinton impeached.  another wow.  that makes 5 presidents on my list so far. 
presidents Bush, and Bush.  father & son's become president.  can you believe all these things that happened with presidents of our country have happened in one lifetime?
the berlin wall in germay comes down.  talk about living through history in the making.
life before seat belts.  sure i guess cars have almost always had them, but who wore them?  laws were passed before people really started wearing them.
a m radio.  you could buy radios that only had a m no f m radio stations i guess.  if you listened to radio it was a m stations.
life before cable tv.  listen up you young things.  when i was a kid we basically had 3 tv stations.  ABC, CBS, and NBC and if you were really lucky it seems like you could get a channel on UHF. and there was no cable, you had rabbit ears or antenna on top of the house to try to get clear stations.
mtv "satan's channel".  i remember everyone being up in arms when MTV first started.  parents were talking about having cable disconnected.  they had to come up with a way to block just that one channel or lose customers.  it was a HUGE deal.  and MTV was nothing like it is today.
computers -- before the internet.  there was a time when a few people were able to have "personal computers" at home.  when i went to community college we learned a little about computers but it was for computers used at work.  the year after i graduated i went back to learn the latest technology -- word processing.  i learned on the best at the time, the Wang Writer.  ever hear of it?  guess it went by the way pretty fast.  

guess that is enough reminiscing for today.  i am sure there are tons of other things i could add to this list.  but i will save them for another time.