As I was on the way home from the range today I was listening to channel 5 of XM Radio.  That’s strictly music of the 50’s, when I was a kid.

Couldn’t help but wonder how many other people had ever called in to a radio station to request a DJ play a certain song.

Or to dedicate a certain song to someone.

Or to report a “breaking news item.”

Hmm…

I remember my first portable radio.  It was a little blue, UGLY blue, thing I bought in a little shop on Canal Street, in the heart of New Orleans.  I’d been looking at it for a week or so; I had to stand outside that window to wait for my bus transfer every day to school.  Temptation finally got the better of me.

Now, this was in the days before transistors.  Yeah, we started fires back then with stones, too.

Waaaay before integrated circuits, and nobody had caught on yet that if you could fry a technician out in front of a radar unit, maybe one could bake a chicken the same way in the kitchen.

It, the UGLY blue radio, had tubes — those things that work by heating a filament hot enough to cause emissions from one place to another.  Think battery drain.  Think SUCKING on that battery.  Nothing drains a battery like a heating element, other than a short, which is sort of what a heating element really is.

There were two such batteries in that cigar box size (”portable” means different thing in different times) radio.  They took more space than everything else in the radio including the tuning condenser that was a set of interleaving metal plates that rotated as I rotated the dial.  The plates changing position changed the capacitance value in the tuning circuit and the frequency of reception changed, ergo, “the station changed.”

Battery life was roughly 2 hours.

Batteries were not cheap.

I learned the hard way.

And now in the 21st century I get steamed if the cell phone, complete with x gig of memory for the PDA portion, and it fits in my hand, won’t keep a charge for 5 days.

I’m truly spoiled.  

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Did I tell you the one about the microwave in Austin, Texas?

1970’s.  Goodyear store in Austin, there to buy one of those newfangled microwave things for the kitchen.  Hey, I’m an avionics guy — gotta have a microwave for the missus.  Yeah, that’s it.  It’s for her.

Yep, we’ll take that one.

Sale complete, salesman cautions us not to open the door for a minute or so after it stops.

I ask why.

He says it takes a bit for the electrons to stop moving around.

Uh huh.

Electrons travel at the speed of light, give or take a parsec or two, correct?  That’s about 186,000 miles per second.

And the inside of that microwave is a little larger than a Swanson TV dinner.

Tell me again how long I have to wait for those little electrons to make the trip around inside that thing?

I’ll bet he knew tires, though.