THE YEAR 1905

[gman]

This will boggle your mind, I know it did mine!
The year is 1905.
One hundred years ago.
What a difference a century makes!
Here are some of the U.S. statistics for the Year 1905:
The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years.
Only 14 percent of the homes in the U.S. had a bathtub.
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.
A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven
dollars.
There were only 8,000 cars in the U.S., and only 144 miles of
paved
roads.
The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily
populated than California.
With a mere 1.4 million people, California was only the 21st most
populous state in the Union.
The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower!
The average wage in the U.S. was 22 cents per hour.
A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year,
a dentist $2,500 per year,
a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year, and
A mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.
More than 95 percent of all births in the U.S. took place at home.
Ninety percent of all U.S. doctors had no college education.
Instead, they attended so-called medical schools, many of which
were condemned in the press and by the government as
"substandard."
Sugar cost four cents a pound.
Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.
Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.
Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used borax or
egg yolks for shampoo.
Canada passed a law that prohibited poor people from entering into
their country for any reason.
The five leading causes of death in the U.S. were:

1. Pneumonia and influenza 2. Tuberculosis

3. Diarrhea 4. Heart disease 5. Stroke

The American flag had 45 stars.
Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Alaska hadn't been
admitted to the Union yet.
The population of Las Vegas, Nevada, was only 30!!!
Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and ice tea hadn't been invented
yet.
There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.
Two out of every 10 U.S. adults couldn't read or write.
Only 6 percent of all Americans had
graduated from high school.
Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the
counter
at the local corner drugstores.
Back then pharmacist said, "Heroin clears the complexion, gives
buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and bowels, and is, in
fact, a perfect guardian of health." (Shocking!)
Eighteen percent of households in the U.S. had at least one
full-time servant or domestic help.
There were about 230 reported murders in the entire U.S.
And I forwarded this from someone else without typing it myself,
and sent it to you in a matter of seconds!
Try to imagine what it may be like in another 100 years.
It staggers the mind.

[TRAIL-OF-TEARS]

Yeah, but where are all the flying cars?

Thanks gman that was cool.

[Arne]

I was thinking back to the 1960s, when I first started working... long distance phone calls were kept short to keep cost down... 800 numbers were kept secret so people couldn't use them.....

[gailkaitschuck]

As my children would say, here's on "old fart" story.....

Hey, just this week I was discussing with a new, young dietitian about the time I wrote my thesis (waaaay back in 1977)...using a TYPEWRITER (I must have type 1000 danged pages on the bloody thing; one change of a word meant the entire page had to be typed over).

NO computer, NO word processor. Just tippy-tapping day after day, literally from dawn to dusk to get the thing finished.

He look shocked!

I told him my husbands first calculator (a hand held one that would probably cost under $10 today) cost us (as poor graduate students) the whopping sum of $150 back then!!!!

Gail

[madjack]

more old fart stories;
our first TV...1959, I was 6yrs old and it was black and white
XM radio...HA, I remember when FM radio came to town...about 1964
I had an aunt and uncle who got a COLOR TV also in '64...
...the whole neighborhoood would go to their house to see COLOR pictures
Air conditioning....again in '64, dad came back from an all day fishing trip with my uncle...
...it was in August and my uncle had an air conditioned car...
...within a week we had a new car with air conditioning and a radio with FM buttons...
...ya know big ol' mechanical buttons that went clunk when you pushed em and a mechanical marker moved across the dial...
sometimes you had to push them twice to get the needle all the way across...
... that next spring we got a window AC unit for the living room...
...we only used it when company came over and we sit in front of it marvelling at the cold air
...there are many other things like my dads 110 key adding machine thay weighed about 50 lbs and did you know that in the summer or 1969, man actually walked on the moon...and phones had to be plugged into the wall and had a big ol' rotatry dial and football was ALWAYS played outdoors as did kids and folks rarely locked their doors and....................................
yes children these and many more miraculous things occured back in the "good old days"
madjack

[Denny Unfried]

As a sexagenarian (like that wurd), in college in the 50's I took two years of "Slide Rule" which was required for engineering. Still have mine, do you?

1955 mechanical engineering student,
Denny

[Archer_1]

I sure do. A 1947 Post Hemi, made in 'Occupied Japan'. I keep in practice with it.

Steve_N.
1981 Aerospace Engineering Graduate

[cracker39]

I remember the first calculators and digital watches, with the red LED numbers. One of my co-workers got a TI scientific calculator for Christmas from his wife. It cost over $400. electronics start high, and they drop in price and become obsolete many times faster than other products.

My first "real" computer (not counting a TI keyboard system that used a TV for a monitor and a cassette tape player) was a Dell 386. It had 4 MB of memory, 256 MB (that's megabytes, NOT Gigabytes) of hard disk space, and processed at about 16 mHtz. It cost me $1600 at a shoppers warehouse (like Sams today). That was about 6 weeks pay for me at that time. Today, the one I built 3 years ago processes 160 times faster than that Dell, has 125 times as much memory, 1000 times as much disk storage space, and cost about 1/3 as much. In the 60 and 70s, I operated mainframe computers. One such system had 6' high cabinets of hardware that filled a room 48' x 48', yet, 40 years later, my PC that I have now has more processing power and more disk storage than that large room full of hardware. It boggles the mind to think what we'll see in the next 40 years.

[Spadinator]

My first computer was an Atari 800XL which I still have. You know the one with the 5 1/4 drive that attached to the side!!!!

[asianflava]

Back in my day we used to walk to school, both ways, in the snow, against the wind..... No not really, but I couldn't think of anything else to post.

Our (my brothers and I) first computer was Commodore 64. It had the floppy drive was only a little bit faster tan the tape drive.

[cracker39]

We didn't have snow in Florida, but it was uphill both to school and back home.

I just remembered that my very first PC was a Texas Instrument (TI)-80. It had all of 16kbytes of memory, and as I mentioned before used the TV as a monitor and a portable cassette tape player for storage. I did translate a BASIC text program of Startrek on it, and created my own BASIC program of Connect 4. That was cool and my kids loved to play it. It made sounds as the red and blue disks dropped down. I had a couple of other games, but don't remember what they were.

Now, slide rules. Yep, I had to have one in high school in '54 for geometry and trig. I don't remember what make it was and I have no idea what became of it.

[bledsoe3]

Anybody remember the Vic 20? Pre Commodore.

[Gage]

....................................yes children these and many more miraculous things occured back in the "good old days"
madjack

What do you mean, back in the "good old days" You just described my house to a tee. And just last week I took the radio out of my car because I couldn't get the 'marker' to move all the way to the right. It would only go as far as the CD symbol.

Have a good day.

As for a slide rule, I used a Pickett LogLog for many years. Still have it and still play with it once in a while. Once when one of my sons was in high school and the batteries went out in his calculator I handed him my slide rule.

[asianflava]

Anybody remember the Vic 20? Pre Commodore.

Yeah, we made fun of them, and the TRS-80 (Trash 80) The 64 had far superior computing power!

[toypusher]

Back in my day we used to walk to school, both ways, in the snow, against the wind..... No not really, but I couldn't think of anything else to post.

Our (my brothers and I) first computer was Commodore 64. It had the floppy drive was only a little bit faster tan the tape drive.

Belive it or not. I am the only one in a family of seven that did NOT walk 2 miles to attend a 1-room school house. I'm the only one to attend kindergarden in my family. I was in the very first class of the newly built school in the newly formed 'Central' school! I can also remember when the power company put the power lines in and first hooked up electricity to our farm house!! Kerosene lamps and cookstove were the norm until I was about 4 1/2 years old! I can remember listening to the radio at night - the Green Hornet - the Shadow- etc. We got our first TV (B&W) when I was about 9 and my parents did not get a color TV until about 1980 , but that was their choice. You guys talk about the first PCs you had, well I had most of them too. The very first Harddrive that i ever had was a wopping 10Megabytes and was 5 1/4" wide by approx 3 1/2" tall. Boy it was sure nice being able to put all my programs on there, though! No more 5 1/4" floppies

Enough 'Old Fart' stuff for now!