6 ms·
We were dirt poor, and I remember the day my father brought home the Magnavox Odyssey box. My brother and I learned all the state capitals, we had fun with the
by eggy 5y ago
We were dirt poor, and I remember the day my father brought home the Magnavox Odyssey box. My brother and I learned all the state capitals, we had fun with the ski game, and the other overlays that came with it which fit perfect on our Magnavox TV! I remember trying to put plastic wrap on the screen and use markers to make our own games. Wow, I just had a wave of nostalgia that warmed me up a bit! Static held the overlays in place. The controllers reminded me of an Etch-A-Sketch, and so I was able to navigate the square due to the muscle memory. This was 1972. I was 8 years old.
My first computer came five years later. It was a Commodore PET 2001 followed by a Vic-20. I had saved up $832 from working odd jobs - shoe shine boy, fixing bicycles, newspaper route (in a bad neighborhood), and saving my allowance. I always thank my Dad to this day for buying the Odyssey when I know there were days we didn't have anything in the refrigerator before this time. My Mom and Dad also bought us two sets of encyclopedias on a payment plan. It was the renaissance of my family's way towards getting out of poverty. When our top floor Brooklyn apartment burned down, amazingly the outward facing bindings of the encyclopedias were pitch black, and the end books, but the whole set survived the fire which was in the center of the apartment. My brother and I used those encyclopedias all through high school, and into university. He was the first to graduate in my immediate family. Good memories.
- dangle1 5y agoEncyclopedias. I kind of forgot about those, but now I can remember relying on a hand-me-down encyclopedia set for answering childood questions without having to go downtown to the library. Late '70s, and my interest in space is met with the encyclopedia's entry on the moon: "Someday, man may go to the moon."
- eggy 5y agoI was 5 when Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon in 1969. I remember watching it on a 12 in. black and white TV. Encyclopedias amazed me. I would thumb through them and look up each mention of something I didn't understand - the modern equivalent of link hopping, except I kept my thumb on the main article.
- imadethis 5y agoI think having 4 of my fingers holding places on different pages in a reference book is the best analogue representation of the hundred tabs I open whenever I browse Wikipedia.
- eggy 5y agoExactly, but at least it is self-limiting. How many tabs can you keep open with 32 gb of RAM? ;) And if your finger slipped out, there was no 'back' key!
- jamesandthewolf 5y agoYou actually saw that on tv good sir I am impressed. Encyclopaedias are probably the reason why I started making this website, I want to share something with the world and to list every game every made! It will take me a life time to achieve the PC games section when I get there that is intemidating and arcade machine..., I'm not even sure I can obtain this goal but I'll have fun trying.
- matwood 5y agoWow, this sounds a lot like my childhood except it was my grandparents who had the encyclopedias and the Odyssey. They also had 100s of back issues of National Geographic. Because we (my mom and dad) had so little, and my parents were always working, I spent a lot of time at my grandparents. Thank you for the nostalgia.
- eggy 5y agoI had a warm memory triggered by the OP, and now you have too! Another reason to be grateful for what we have.
- TacticalCoder 5y agoI'm 10 years younger than you but that encyclopedias thing: my great-grandmother (she lived until 99 so I knew her well into my late teenage years) offered us a great one, in 26 volumes (now that I think of it maybe some letters were joined together in a single volume, so maybe only 20 volumes or so, but still a lot) and I remember it was a big deal in the family, because it represented a significant amount of money. I spent countless hours reading it for it was my go to "Wikipedia" when I was a kid and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one with fond memories of this.
- eggy 5y agoI remember when the encyclopedia salesman came to our apartment to show my parents the three sets of encyclopedias they sold. We bought the Book of Knowledge (for grade school), the Encyclopedia Americana (high school and university), and The World of Science (a popular science set for high school IIRC)set. My older children make fun of me, because I sniff books at the bookstore, or when I get a new book in the mail. It goes back to opening up those encyclopedias and associating their scent with an enjoyable adventure of the mind.
- humaniania 5y agoIsn't that smell chemical outgassing? Not sure that's a good thing to sniff.
- eggy 5y agoIgnorance was/is bliss for the pleasure. I don't smoke (never did, really), gamble (parents were rabid horse bettors), or drink anymore, so let's say it is one of a few vices I am keeping for the pure pleasure of it. At least I am not huffing gas, and I always liked when my Dad pulled in and filled the car up. I did paintings conservation for over 3 years, and I developed sensitivities to the benzene family like toluene and xylene; a whiff would give me an instant migraine, and I usually didn't get headaches much at all. All new construction, even the so-called 'green' techniques, has a lot more VOCs or other compounds that gas out, deteriorate, and otherwise create a by-product, which is why I liked my old drafty house. I lost some energy efficiency, but always had significant air exchange and all the glues had gassed off decades ago. New construction lead to Radon becoming more of an issue as a result of airtight basements and living spaces for the sake of energy efficiency. My old house was on top of glacial moraine, so Radon is something to be concerned about, but if it doesn't accumulate in concentration it is not as much an issue. That and simply caulking cracks and holes in your basement to keep it from entering in quantity is the other thing you can do. Also the drafty house ensured it never accumulated upstairs. The fix for newer homes was to put a vent to the outside the basement after caulking, sort of mini-chimney of stainless steel tube. And the fact is that it is the decay of uranium to radium to radon that releases alpha and beta particles, and gamma rays. Radon has a half-life of 3.8 days compared with uranium-238 of 4.5 billion years! All of this reminds me of why I loved Wood Allen's movie Sleeper when I saw it with my Dad in 1973 (yeah, I know a 9-year-old shouldn't have seen such a movie, it was PG, and ratings had been less than a decade old). In short, a man is woken up 200 years later in 2173 in a dystopian future with a police state. In short, the scientists are perplexed by his request for wheat germ, tiger's milk, and something else. When they tell him all his friends are dead, he says, "But they ate organic rice!". We learn that steak, cream pies, and deep fat are good for you. Cigarettes have also been found to be very healthy! Hilarious movie! Now I have to see if I can find it! EDIT: Found this link all about book smells. There's even a perfume for it! https://www.compoundchem.com/2014/06/01/newoldbooksmell/ https://www.compoundchem.com/2014/06/01/newoldbooksmell/ PS: Don't tell California; they'll ban printed books or put labels all over the cover ;)
- pkaye 5y agoMy parents also got the full encyclopedia set on a payment plan. I think it was $1000 back in the mid 90s for about 30 books. Before the web, that is how we could browse information from home. I would search some topic in the index books, then read the related article in the other books. That would to more articles in other books. Spent hours browsing.
- gedy 5y agoI learned more from our encyclopedias (bought one at a time from the grocery store) than I did in school!
- redleggedfrog 5y agoThat was a really good story. Thank you.