I have witnessed some evolutions in my lifetime.
Take the telephone, for example. When I was a child, in the house in which I primarily grew up, we had a telephone attached to the wall in the kitchen. There was another one on my parents' bedside table, wired to the wall, and another in the upstairs hall with similar wiring between my brother's and my bedrooms.
Because the upstairs phone was near the door to my brother's room, he could easily take it into his room and act as if he had his own phone in his own room. But I was quick to remind him he did not. Alas, I could not stretch either the wire from the phone into the wall outlet or the phone cord of the receiver far enough to get it into my room. It annoyed me to no end that he had his "own phone." (And again, he didn't.)
These were telephones with rotary dials. Eventually there were the "touchtone" phones, which that house never had. When my dad died in 2006, the bedroom and upstairs rotary phones were still there. He had gotten a push-button phone in the kitchen, but it was still "pulse" and not touchtone, meaning even though it had the buttons, it still ran on a pulse system, however that worked. (My dad was anything but progressive, by the way. I am sure he decided it cost too much to upgrade to touchtone.)
I even remember when there was only one telephone company, some version of "Bell," depending on where you lived. And I believe that was, at the time, all part of AT&T. I'm way oversimplifying, but as I recall, the Justice Department broke up the conglomerate phone company via an antitrust lawsuit, which gave way to the various phone companies.
That was plenty to transpire. But who in their wildest dreams would or could have predicted what eventually happened -- that those phones attached to walls would become obsolete? And that many of us would hold in our hands a telephone that is also a camera, a GPS and a personal computer (among many other things)?
What I keep waiting for is for the "home phone" or landline to come back into vogue the way vinyl records have. We went from records to eight-track to cassette to digital to . . . what's that? Vinyl? Yep. Full circle. Many musical purists believe vinyl is, well, the purest way to listen to music again.
And old stereo systems, once pieces of furniture with a turntable and built-in speakers, restored to their original woodgrain and with perhaps some tweaking to those speakers? Those are now collectors' items.
So, if you have an old wall or desk telephone laying around awaiting disposal, wait a few years to see if it will also return to fashionableness as a retro must-have. You might already be ahead of your time.
