Things have changed in my lifetime.

This is me with my mom, circa 1960.

This was before the invention of transistor radios or pocket calculators.

When large corporations paid taxes, so one parent could work while the other stayed home with the kids.  And the family could actually afford to own their own home.

In those days, all telephones were on landlines.

George Orwell’s vision of “1984” was inconceivable.

A computer could fill a whole building, and could only be fed commands by punch cards.

“Records” were pressed on vinyl, and record company executives bribed DJs and radio stations to broadcast their records over the airwaves, so people could listen to them for free.

Back then, you didn’t replace the battery, you wound your watch.

There was only one Batman, and he existed only in the pages of comic books.

Fire trucks were red.

Comic books were intended for kids.

All books were printed on paper.  (Unless they were printed on cloth so babies could safely chew on them.)

Walt Disney’s company didn’t lobby governments around the world for increasingly draconian copyright law at the expense of civil rights, but busied itself in the creation of family movies and children’s programming,

There was no cable TV, and the picture on your TV set was in black and white (or, what my niece more correctly called “blue and white”)

Nor was there any “Star Trek.”

The customer was always right.

And the Internet did not exist.