Next On My To-Do List For Never

I may have conquered using apps on a smart phone or removing jams from testy copy machines, but the technology of yore frightens me. I don’t get it now, and I certainly wouldn’t have gotten in back in 1955, at the University of Colorado.

“the university’s prized electronic brain”

Nope. Too many wires.

Next up: isotopes. Haven’t talked about proton/neutron stuff since high school, and I’m not gonna start now.

the isotopes lab for atomic research equipment

She is clearly steering a cardboard ship, but I know not what the men do.

engineering the thing

Too many black holes and knobs in the cube. It doesn’t even fit in my pocket.

“the latest electronic equipment available to AIEE-IRE members”

Get a load of this jet engine compressor! I’d rather feed a porcupine.

And this last one takes the cake, with “nurse aids performing the pleasant task of hairbrushing for a paralytic.” Pleasant? That looks like a nightmare. 

Rapture, take me now.

16 thoughts on “Next On My To-Do List For Never”

  4. Yore not kidding, some of that old stuff looks scary. But the iron lung in the final photo, well, that brings back memories. As a kid during the polio years, we were always threatened with the danger of ending up in an iron lung if we weren’t careful. Wash those hands, kids! Polio was a much more worrisome virus than COVID-19 and if you got infected you could be in one of those iron lungs for anywhere from 2 weeks to the end of life. Shudder to think.

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    1. I’m not worried at all about COVID but yes, polio would have been terrible. Just today I got a birthday card from an aunt-in-law who apologized for her “post-polio symptom” chicken scrawl and said her arms were getting worse. She has one normal leg and one thin one and is in a wheelchair, but somehow my mother-in-law never got it. An iron lung sounds like a prison sentence.

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      1. I discovered there are still 3 people left in the US who have been confined to iron lungs for their entire lives. In their 80s now. The thought of a life like that gives me the shaking heebie-jeebies. Nope, couldn’t do it.

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      2. Really? So no walking, no scratching, no brushing your teeth, no sex, no LIFE. Just staring up at the ceiling all the time? I agree with you; death would be so much sweeter. I hate MRI’s! It’s like a lifetime of being in an MRI. It just seems like some steps could have been made since 1952 to improve life for them. Certainly puts life into perspective.

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      3. As it turns out, all those things are possible! I googled the subject and people who use iron lungs have a different lifestyle but maybe not as restricted as we might think. Worth googling just for general interest.

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      4. I read about a guy in Dallas who was a lawyer and is able to get out of his lung for very brief periods of time. Look at us, learning new things! But it still totally sucks. Especially if you’ve just eaten Indian food and you need to run to the bathroom and you can’t run anywhere. Or you need an emergency bottle of wine.

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