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Before streaming, before TV

I wonder how many Aardvark readers are old enough to remember a world before every living room in the country had a TV set in the corner.

Well I'm one of those oldies.

When I was a kid, we had to amuse ourselves by reading, playing board-games or listening to the radio. There wasn't a TV set anywhere in the house.

Those were also the hey-days of the movies, the cinema, "the flicks".

Every Saturday my mates and I would head into town and watch the matinee showing of our favourite movie serial. It might be old reels of Flash Gordon in black and white or perhaps some western that I've long since forgotten the name of. Regardless of the actual movie being shown, the cinema experience itself was king.

Back when I was a kid, it would cost just a bob (one shilling) for your ticket and an icecream or other confectionary at half time. Cheap as beans.

It has been many decades since I've stepped foot inside an actual picture theatre but I expect that these days the prices are well over two orders of magnitude greater than back then -- such is life and inflation I guess.

However, I have just rediscovered those old black and white movies from the 1940s and 1950s -- you know, the ones that used to be the mainstay of Sunday afternoon TV back in the 1960s.

As I toss and turn, trying to get (back) to sleep every night in my regular battle with the effects of Parkinson's, I have found to my infinite joy, that there are a huge number of these old movies on YouTube and available for free. Most of them don't even have any ads associated with them.

They are somewhat paradoxical in nature.

On the one hand some are actually really entertaining and watchable but at the same time they are the perfect cure for insomnia -- sending me off to the land of nod in just minutes.

It's great to see all those old familiar movie-star faces. Humphrey Bogart, Glenn Ford, Ingrid Bergman, Rita Hayworth and many others who I recognise but can't recall their name.

Given the number of these movies it's clear that they must have been churning the things out at a huge rate of knots. It's also obvious that a visit to the cinema was a very regular part of every-day life back then. I wonder how much this contributed to the sense of community and cohesion that prevailed before we all started spending our evenings locked in our own homes in front of a TV set.

Why have I written about this today?

Well nothing highlights how far our technology has come than a look down memory lane. As we sit in front of our 65-inch big-screen LCD TV sets, watching 4K content with surround-sound audio, all delivered to our homes via light shining down a thin strand of glass, it's fun to marvel at old tech and a simpler society from three quarters of a century ago.

Given that the rate of technological change appears to be an almost exponential curve, I can't even imagine what things will be like in an other 75 years time. Can you?

Carpe Diem folks!

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