We recently had one of the computers here go down, so we had to work around it while it was being serviced (It's back in and appears to be doing fine). It got me to thinking about what equipment it takes to do my job on a day-to-day basis now compared to when I first started doing this.

Now, understand, when I started in radio, it was also a presidential election year. But, the candidates at that time were Richard Nixon and George McGovern. If you don't know what year that was, ask your grandparents.

My first job basically consisted of playing music and commercials and reading news. The music part involved playing 45 RPM records on turntables. The recorded commercials were on tape cartridges, which looked something like an 8-track tape. The news came in on the Associated Press teletype, which was hooked up to a phone line. Any local news that got typed up was done on a manual typewriter. The secretary had an electric typewriter to type the program logs.

Now, of course, all of that is done by computer -- music, commercials, news, program logs -- everything. And, today, when our computers go down, we wring our hands and wonder how we'll get by. If you've been doing what you do for any period of time, you've probably experienced the same thing.

I continued to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

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