We – those of us over sixty five – were born before frozen food, photo-copying, plastic and contact lenses.
Before credit cards, laser beams and ballpoint pens.
Before panty hose, dishwashers, clothes dryers, electric blankets, air-conditioners and drip-dry clothes.
In our time closets were for clothes.
We managed without house-husbands, gay rights, computer-dating.
And daycare centers and group therapy.
We never heard of guys wearing earrings.
Chip was a piece of wood and hardware meant hardware.
Software wasn’t even a word.
“Made in Japan” meant junk. Instant coffee was unheard of.
And:
Rock music was grandma’s lullaby.
• • • •
And no one knew that a blog was a contraction of weblog.
Eric Koch’s new book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
And good restaurants in Toronto!
And answering machines and cell phones!
But in many ways much of what exists now was there before in another form. The telegraph made trading possible between London and New York. Secretaries took messages. There were secretaires at railroads where executives had to travel overnight by train.
Much of the work of gadgets was done by people. `One good servant is worth a thousand gadgets.” I don’t know where I heard it or who said it. But it is probably true.
That should be male secretaries at railroads.
“No man is a hero to his valet” but I suspect that many gadgets are heroes to their owners. I know my BlackBerry is….
Instant coffee was invented in 1901 by Satori Kato, a Japanese scientist working in Chicago. Kato introduced the powdered substance in Buffalo, New York, at the Pan-American Exposition.
George Constant Louis Washington developed his own instant coffee process shortly thereafter, and first marketed it commercially (~1910). The Nescafé brand, which introduced a more advanced coffee refining process, was launched in 1938.
Thank you.
Please don’t tell me that cell-phones were invented by a Peruvian plumber in Outer Mongolia in 1867.
Was Kaffee Hag invented before Nescafe ? I do not remember secretaires at the railroad station. But on the train between Frankfurt and Lausanne someone in the dining car bought me a sherry.