Picture me as a small boy, standing on a box my father has given me, running Prints through the Hypo, He has already exposed them, and developed them in his favorite place, the Darkroom in his Studio, in Ft. Madison Iowa.
We had no idea this would soon end, as the rest of our world, did in the Fifties. We had worked hard to get get where we were, and could not imagine it ending. Bur it did, with the election of Trump, quite a while latter. How did this happen?
I will use my own life as an example. I did the right thing: I went to college and became an Electronic Engineer.
This meant I knew a lot about Vacuum Tubes. the dominant technology of the time. You cannot imagine how useful they were. If you had a Radio in your cat, it had tubes in it. If it quite working, as it often did, you took your screwdriver out and removed it from your car, and took it to a drugstore, An ordinary drugstore, because it had a Tube Checker. You used it to check the tubes in your radio, one by one. If you found a defective tube, you bought a replacement for it, right there. You were back in business.
The first TVs also used tubes, especially the output display: a large tube with a flat face. As TVs got larger, these tubes got larger. I remember when our town Marshall (the force of law in our little town) fired his gun through the TV and through the front window of a local bar. There was still glass on the sidewalk when I walked to school Monday morning.
In 1980, vacuum tubes were replaced by transistors, tiny things that could perform many functions. A Phone, with a few chips in it could do everything. I was out of a job.
This was a crisis, bur I solved it by changing jobs. I became a Technical Writer, and then a Programmer,
My father was not so lucky, he lost his Photography Studio, and every business he developed to replace it. He got a lucky break, he sold his property in Nauvoo, Illinois, And was able to retire in Mexico, in poor health.
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