Mixed Bag 25th Anniversary Material
Quarter-Century Factoids
In 1974...
- Nobody owned their telephones. You rented your telephone from the
Phone Company. Not many people had touch-tone phones.
- Telephone answering machines for consumers did not exist. Nor did
voice mail.
- Gasoline was less than 50 cents a gallon, but a decent computer would set
you back abuot $50,000, and for that price, you got about 1 meg of memory.
- 8-track tapes were at least as popular as cassettes, though the LP
remained the dominant music form. Compact discs were still 9 years away.
- No one had heard of AIDS, but smallpox was still a problem.
- There were just three national commercial television networks, and
commercials on prime time TV averaged only about 8 minutes per hour.
- The only people with fax machines, which were large mechanical beasts
with rotating drums on which you placed a sheet of paper, were newspapers and
law enforcement agencies.
- American Motors was preparing to introduce the 1975
Gremlin.
- People were saying that 1984 was only ten years away, but they were
preparing in earnest for the nation's Bicentennial, which was only two years
away.
- Digital watches were very rare, and the ones that did exist required
you to push a button to get the time display to light up.
- VCRs for home use did not exist, but reel-to-reel audio tape recorders
were still popular.
- The fastest way to get a written message to someone was to go to the
Western Union office and send a telegram.
- Microwave ovens in the home were very rare and quite expensive.
- Richard Nixon resigned and one of Gerald Ford's duties was managing
the war in Vietnam.
- Only a few cars required unleaded gas.
- The vast majority of television sets sold in this country were made in
the USA.
- The last of the Volkswagen Beetles were still being sold.
- Walter Cronkite still hade five more years before he would retire from
the evening news.
- John Lennon and Elvis Presley both were working on new albums.
- Mixed Bag first appeared on WVIA-FM less than four years after the breakup of
the Beatles.
- Titanic star Leonardo diCaprio had not yet been born.
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This page last updated March 07, 2016