A teacher conducts a science class and discusses America’s retired space shuttle program and its replacement, a private sector Dragon spacecraft.
Category: Technology
Meet Alexa, Amazon’s AI Personality
Alexa is an artificial intelligence personality invented by Amazon, Inc. There is a home product you can purchase called the Amazon Echo. It is a microphone-speaker device that uses Alexa as an interface. It can accept and respond to voice commands to do various tasks for you. This post is
Old TV
To change channels in the old days, you had to get up, walk over to the TV, and turn a knob with your hand. You had only about nine channels to choose from, and you had to adjust an antenna differently in order to see each one clearly. I’m kidding, right? Wrong.
Old Phones
In the old days, phones were big, clunky, heavy, had wires connected, and could NOT be carried around. Outside the house, to make a call you had to find a public phone booth or go into a store and ask to use their phone. They might or might not say yes. Would I kid you about something serious like this?
Old Music
When I grew up, music was played on reel-to-reel recorders, record players (called ‘turntables’ today), eight-track tapes, audio cassette tapes, and radios as big as a small suitcase. If you’ve never heard of most of theses, that’s because they’ve become obsolete or are rarely seen anymore.
Old Movie Theaters
When I was growing up, we watched movies sitting in our cars looking a a big movie screen outside. We could often see two or three movies one after another for the price of one movie ticket (yes, we sat for a long time). Movies were recorded on Betamax or VHS tapes or laser discs or reels of magnetic tape. There were so few movies that they would often return to the movie theaters again the following year.
Old Games
When I was growing up, we had NO computers, NO Internet, few movies, and very few TV programs. Our only amusement was cards, table games (aka board games), and going outside to ride bikes or play baseball or football in an open grassy field.
Old Computers
I was about 27 years old when the first personal computer (PC) was invented. We saved data by recording sounds to an audio cassette tape, then to hole-punched paper tape, then to 5.25-inch floppy disks, then to 3.5-inch floppy disks, and finally to hard drives! We read data by playing sounds from audio cassette tapes and by reading hole-punched cardboard cards. Our computer monitor resolution was so low that I could easily see every pixel in every letter on our 24-line, 80-characters per line screens. Definitely NOT the good old days. 🙁