Life before the PC.

Due to another thread, I now realize that most of you have hardly any clue to life and technology prior to the early part of the twentieth century, and many do not have much of a clue about life as late as the middle of the century.

Perhaps some body else can add to the following.

The modern bicycle (using a chain drive) was a wonderful device invented in about 1890. Prior to about 1915 or so, families would travel as much as 60 miles each way via bicycles to go to a seashore resort for the day.

You did not need a building permit or other govenment permission to build anything until some time in the 1920' or 1930's.

Did you know that many (perhaps most) professionals did not attend college until the early twentieth century? You became a doctor, lawyer, engineer by serving as an assistant to an established professional. The professionals with excellent reputations often did not have to pay their apprentices (archaic term for somebody learning on the job), but might pay a promising learner who was poor. In a sense you paid for your professional education by working for the teacher. For some, it was actually a pretty good deal, because a doctor's assistant often ended up taking over the practice when the doctor retired. Even a doctor did not need a license. In many ways the system worked better than the current approach. It was much easier for a bright individual with no money or connections to become a professional.

The federal income tax was unconstitutional until about 1913. They got the enabling amendment passed by advertising the first tax bill. That bill called for a 2-3 percent tax on income over about $25,000. The average person made less than $1000 per year at that time. The attitude was "Gee, I did not know that anybody made 25 Grand. They won't miss a measly 2-3 percent." If they knew that the average worker would some day pay 20-35 percent, they might have lynched a few congressman for the idea.

Prior to about the time of the first World War (1914-1918), there were no controlled substances. You could buy cyanide, heroin, morphine, marijuana, peyote mushrooms, medical drugs, high explosives, almost anything without a license or prescription.

If you check a mail order catalogue from 1890 to about 1920, you will discover that you could buy guns, ammunition, even dynamite to be delivered via the US Post Office. There were no laws against mail order sales of even more dangerous items, but the mail order houses policed themselves and would not sell nitroglycerine or highly corrosive substances.

On a per capita basis, I think (though am not really sure) that here was less violent crime and drug abuse in the US than there is today.

Well into the twentieth century, most people had no indoor plumbing other than just running water to a sink or bathtub, and many did not have that. Some major cities in South America did not have water systems at late as 1960: The residents carried water to their homes from community wells.

The history of telephone technology is interesting. Until about the 1940's you only dialed 4 digits, meaning that you needed an operator to call somebody beyond about 500 to 1000 meters (yards) from your home. Near the boundary of your exchange, you could not dial somebody who lived across the street. If that technology were in use today, every man, woman, and child employed as telephone operators would not be able to handle a fraction of the current day US telephone traffic (without even considering the connecting of computers to the Internet).

You folks in the USA: Did you ever wonder why New York City has area code 212, and area codes like 312, 213, 313 are assigned to other major cities? It seems that area codes were developed when prior to touch tone phones. On a rotary phone, digits like 7, 8, 9 & 0 took a long time compared to 1, 2, 3, 4. It was important to minimize the time required for dialing, so the major cities had the area codes that took the least time to dial on a rotary phone. Note that a central office with almost 10,000 telephone numbers does not have more than 200 dialing circuits (at least it did not until fairly recently). Some central offices do not have more than 50 dialing circuits. As telephone usage went up, the number of calls increased dramatically and the average time per call went down, causing a real problem due to the small number of dialing circuits. If all the dialing circuits were busy, you did not even get a dial tome and your phone seemed dead. When Kennedy was assassinated, the US military almost scrambled SAC in preparation for war with Russia. There were so many people trying to dial friends & relatives that the phone system was thought to be sabotaged because thousands of people could not get dial tones. Several high level SAC officers could not contact anybody via phone for 30-60 minutes, and couriers reported similar problems elsewhere.

A real problem for telephone companies is the requirement for compatibility with obsolete equipment. The last phones which required the cranking of a hand generator went out of service in the 1980's. Even in the middle of the century, the US had hundreds of millions of telephones in use. You cannot replace all those phones and all the Phone company equipment in less than 3-10 years, and some people just do not want to buy new phones. Ergo, any new technology must be compatible with stuff from at least 20-50 years earlier.