My hometown had a movie theater with one room. I use the word “had” because it closed about the time I reached double digits. I’m sure I was taken to more, but the only movies I can remember seeing were “Dr. Dolittle” (1967), “The Computer Wore of Tennis Shoes” (1969) and “Trog” (1970).
“Dr. Dolittle” came decades before the Eddie Murphy version. Although Rex Harrison still managed to talk to the animals. Trog was about a doctor (Joan Crawford) who discovers a troglodyte – a caveman – still living in the caves somewhere in England. I had nightmares about “Trog” for years, and to this day don’t care much for scary movies and I don’t do caves.
“The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes” – now there was deep movie. A student gets shocked while putting a replacement part on a computer and suddenly is a genius, memorizing the entire encyclopedia. Kirk Russell, still a teenager, was the star of the movie, which, those who attended my eighth birthday party are still bitter about, did not win an Oscar.
Of course, until I Googled the movie for the writing of this column, I thought the name of the movie all these years was “The Computer World of Tennis Shoes.”
Computers back then took up the better part of a kitchen-sized room and had all of those little blinking lights, which I assumed were in sync with the countdown for the next Apollo mission to take some brave men and/or chimps to outer space.
I was on a sports talk show back in the ’90s when a caller informed us of an article he’d read on ESPN’s Web site. My co-host and I looked at each other, neither wanting to be the one to ask the question, “What’s a Web site?”
We knew of this World Wide Web thing, but it had yet to reach the status of practically controlling our daily lives. Surely, it would really only benefit those working at NASA.
Reading news and sports off your computer? Why, when there was a perfectly good news station that came on at 6 and 10 and the morning paper could tell us everything that happened the day before (unless of course it happened after say 8 p.m., then we’d have to wait another day)?
I had been wrong about the all-sports television network (ESPN) that the local cable company was touting in the early ’80s. No way a 24-hour all-sports station would make it, I thought, even as much as I loved sports. And for those of us that can recall, the two sports that took up much of ESPN’s early programming was Australian Rules Football and Kickboxing. Funny how that network now controls the NCAA.
I remember one of the first search engines I used was a thing called Dogpile. I looked it up to see if it still exists. It does. It was born a year before Google.
When I began in the newspaper business, we still used typewriters, and when we got our first computer, I seriously considered about changing fields because a computer, I thought, was only used by workers at NASA… or the Jetsons. And I didn’t wear special tennis shoes like Kurt Russell.
A couple of friends taught me how to text message a few years back, right about the same time they convinced me to join MySpace. That was about the same time that MySpace began collapsing under the weight of the new king of the Web, Facebook.
I remember my first Apple, a MacPlus that had a screen not much larger than the size of your hand. I laid out a newspaper on one of those in the late ’80s and wondered how we ever had managed without it before. George Jetson and Kurt Russell should be so lucky.