Entering into the World of Technology



I remember when our family got one of the first phones in town. It was a party-line
it later became a private line. The phone operator could still listen in but they weren’t supposed to. Sometimes the operator would talk to my mom while I was on the phone to my mom. The operator was a friend of my parents. You would pick up the phone and the operator would ask you what number you wanted to be connected to, “Number Please.”
Later there were modern rotary phones you could lift up the handle and get a dial tone and then dial the number. Everything was connected to a phone jack in the house. You couldn’t just move the phone without a jack. It was really something when my mom bought a twenty-five-foot cord which would allow you to be in a different room and use the phone. All of the phones were black. Like Ford said when asked about different colored vehicles, “You can have any color you want, as long as it is black.”
That was my introduction to the world of technology. One Christmas I got a transistor radio. It was small, pocket-size, and it had a little earpiece that you could listen to the radio, even in church unless you were spotted by some infamous adult.
Our first typewriter given to Joy by her
Grandmother Christensen
In school, I took a typing class. All of the typewriters were manual, either Royal of Underwood, except for one. It was a beautiful Adler electric. You didn’t have to worry about having even keystrokes. If you just hit the letter, it would type. The teacher didn’t really like it because it didn’t teach correct hand form and touch. I liked it.
The world then moved on to IBM Selectrics. They would return automatically. They had a little ball with all of the letters and other items you might use on it.
My parents bought me a calculator for Christmas for my new job as a teacher. I wanted it to figure out grades. It cost over a hundred dollars. It was a Texas Instrument and could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. It also had the ability to remember one set of numbers. It was really something. It was supposed to be
Close-up of the portable Corona Four
pocket-size, but you had to have very large pockets.
Adam processors came onto the market; it was one of the very first computers. You could connect it to your TV for a monitor. It had a dot-matrix printer, and you could play games on it. It had little cartridge you could plug in and play games.
When I started teaching, they needed a math teacher that knew about computers. Because I had the Adam, I got the job. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t had any math since high school and knew nothing about computers, but I still got to teach the class.
One Christmas we purchased an IBM computer, and then I found out a little more about computers. I was writing classes for BYU and needed a computer. Later we got a different computer, and now we have six or seven in the house hooked up to the internet, one more thing I don’t understand. My wife tries to keep me up-to-date and informed about what is going on with the computers and programs that are available.
We both now have cell phones and no phone that is connected to the wall. If you want to talk to the operator it is going to cost you forty cents or more. My cell phone can do all kinds of things. Phoning is just one of the things, and I think it is a minor one. I can actually talk to someone and see them. It boggles my mind what it can do. Joy often shows me something on my phone that I didn’t know was there or able to do. What will the future bring? I really don’t know. Maybe a smellaphone. I’m not sure I am ready for something like that, but who knows? Maybe soon not only God will know what you are doing or thinking, but technology of some sort will. I don’t mind God knowing, but I’m not sure about others (NSA). 

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