The Information Super-Frog

(another in Froggy's youthful memories series)

In 1973 I was with my family in Mérida, Yucatán. The city did not seem significantly less modern to me than the U.S.A. or London, but the countryside was quite a different matter. Mérida had the peninsula's modern international airport, back when Cozumel still had a gravel landing strip served by small prop planes, and Cancun was still a dream in developers' imaginations.

One day at a market with my older sister, we were talking to a country Maya woman who came in to the market. She asked if we two blonde haired people came from far away. Did we come by bus? No, Sister explained, we came by airplane. "Airplane," the woman repeated looking at us for a moment, then asking, "Is it true that the sky has no end?"

One weekend my Dad took the family to the famous ruins of Chichen Itza. We drove west on a well paved two lane road, which most people drove down the center of, except when passing vehicles going the other way. Piste was the town nearest the ruins, and my Dad had been informed he could get the gas tank refilled there. He went up and back the length of the small town without seeing a gas station, so he asked someone. He was directed to a non-descript shop building, where he knocked on a door. The man who answered asked how many liters he wanted, then came out with a big metal milk can of gas, a smaller can used to scoop and measure, and a funnel.

So, yes, I am old enough to remember my dad getting gasoline for his automobile at the hardware store, before these newfangled gas pumps had popped up everywhere.

Interesting short interview with S.F. writer William Gibson from Rolling Stone

One point I find interesting is his observation on the Sony Walkman:


"The very first time I picked up a Sony Walkman, I knew it was a killer thing, that the world was changing right then and there. A year later, no one could imagine what it was like when you couldn't move around surrounded by a cloud of stereophonic music of your own choosing. That was huge! That was as big as the Internet!"


I am just old enough to remember the Walkman phenomena and the technological state before it, and had a very different impression.

I had a Walkman (or one of its early clones) and enjoyed using it, but at the time regarded it as a minor improvement of existing technology with a large dose of marketing hype.

Walkman article on Wikipedia

When I was a little kid in the 1960s, there were already "Transistor" radios about the size of a pack of cigarettes that one could listen to with an earphone jack. (I take it that the technology was fairly new at the time, and I recall slang use of the term "transistorized" to mean something made improbably small.)

By the early 1970s, there were cassette tape recorders just slightly larger than a hard-cover book that one could easily carry with one hand, and listen to either with the built-in speaker or through an earphone. (I saw cheap cassette player/recorders at Radio Shack within the last year that look little changed from those of more than 30 years ago.)

The Walkman-- okay, they made it smaller, in part by elimiating the built in speaker. And instead of an ear-plug, a pair of tiny cheap-ass headphones. OK, but I rolled my eyes at the advertising that proclaimed it somehow revolutionary.

Perhaps the stereo rather than mono is what particularly impressed some people? I consider stereophonic sound reproduction nifty, but when the audio isn't particularly high-fidelity to begin with, a minor point.

YouTube video from the Johnny Cash show, 28 October 1970:

Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash do Blue Yodel #9

Satchmo would be dead in less than a year, but he's in great form here.