My daughter is studying the American Revolution in her fifth grade class, and learned some colonial-era folk dances from a woman who visited their classroom. To accompany the dancing, the visiting instructor brought a record player. It was the first record player my daughter had ever seen!
Which started me thinking about the fold-up portable RCA stereo record player I had in high-school. It was very cool, and I took it with me when I left for college. It did duty long after college too, because I remember it in Z�rich, where I worked for a few years in my early twenties.
The RCA stereo was approximately the same size as my first home computer I purchased many years later: one of the very first Compaq portable computers. It had two floppies (no hard drive) and ran the MS-DOS operating system. It must have weighed about thirty pounds; certainly not very portable by today’s standards!
Okay … I’m back… I was gone with the memories of my youth, but I’m back now.
Hi Barbara,
You have my sympathy on the flood!
I got a kick out of your record player story — it was less than a year ago that my 16-year-old asked me what, exactly, a phonograph was. He had heard of them, but never learned their function. I stared at him, stupified. And we actually have a turntable, and I use it rather often!
By the way, that Compaq you had weighed 38 pounds, and probably came close to pulling you arm out of its socket. They called them portable, we called them luggable.
— Barry
lol, I had to chuckle when you said it was the first time your daughter had seen a record player. In the New Year, some of my kids (grade 4/5) at school bugged me to bring in the song, “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair.” I did and I pulled down the ancient portable record player our school has. The looks and the questions….”What is that thing?” Amazing the difference between 1 generation and the next 🙂