I remember watching film strips as kid. You would put the film strip in the projector and put the cassette tape in the cassette player. You would press play and when you heard the beep you would move the film forward one frame. The film strips told a story on any subject. I thought they were pretty cool.

    I also grew up in the day when you could rent reel to reel movies from the library. We watched all kinds of Disney movies at the church and school assemblies. We also watched many adventure movies like Sinbad and the Seven Seas, and Robinson Caruso Those were magical moments.

When I was in 7th grade, digital calculators and digital watches became the big things to buy. I brought my first digital calculator for $10 dollars. This same calculator would cost a dollar today at the dollar store. Before the digital watches were a thing, everyone wore wind up watches with the big and little hands, and most had a hand for the seconds. In Junior High, we would set our watches with the same time as the school clocks so we knew exactly when the bells would ring.

 I remember watching video tapes that were only at schools. They were twice as big as a regular video tape. We loved watching a series called Reading Rainbow. It got kids excited about reading different books. I didn’t like reading, but I loved the show. It was a big deal when we got our own VCR video playing machine. We loved watching movies. Movies were expensive to buy at first, so most people just rented them. After a while, videos came down in price so we started buying our favorite movies to watch.
   

 I remember the days when you would put popcorn in a pan with a little bit of grease and pop your popcorn. We ate a lot of popcorn over the years. I remember one of the Boy Scouts brought Jiffy Pop popcorn on a scout camp, and I thought that was amazing. When the popcorn popped, it grew in this pan made of expanding aluminum foil. When you were finished eating the popcorn you threw the disposable pan away. When I was in High School, we got a microwave and loved making microwave popcorn. What a transformation popcorn has made over the years.

In recent years the iPod was fantastic. The fact that you could store all of your music on this little device the size of an iPhone, was a game changer. I started downloading all kinds of books onto my iPod. I have listened to hundreds of books and could listen to my Christmas music in October, and no one had to know.
    In the last few years, having a smart phone has been wonderful. I have access to the radio, podcasts, a calculator, thousands of photos, all my music, access to the weather, the internet and have a flashlight all in the palm of my hand. The best part is I love to take photos, so I carry my camera everywhere I go. I wonder what inventions will be like in another 5 years. Technology is really starting to blow my mind.