Rod Speed wrote:
Tony Bryer wrote
Harry wrote

They were the playthings of the relatively wealthy in the 1950s.
It was not until the 1960s that all theses appliances became
commonplace.

I think this is one of the extraordinary changes in recent times -
first mass production cars start of 20C; in my 1960s junior school
class only a handful of children came from car-owning families.

Fark, cant remember any of mine from the 50s that didn't.

In the UK, very few families owned cars even into the late 60s.

Colour TV, video, mobile phones, broadband have gone from being
technically exotic to mainstream within a decade or so.

Lot longer than that with the first few.

Colour TV was first broadcast here in 1967, and by the end of the 70s,
among people that I knew, about 90% had a colour set. There was an
immediate obvious benefit from colour. Admittedly, it was invented in
the 1920s, but it didn't leave the laboratory until long after that.

Video recording took 30? years from the first industrial models to the
first domestic models, then another 15 until the format wars between
Betamax and VHS. Home videos didn't really take off here until the
killer application of being able to watch a movie at home became
possible with the advent of 3 hour tapes and video rental shops, then,
within five years, almost everybody had a video recorder or player.

The first cellphones were introduced here in 1985, and by 1988, I was
the first coach driver in London to have one, and that situatrion lasted
a year or so, then in the early 90s, I was driving groups round with a
dozen or so phones in a group of 40 people. Nowadays, within 20 years,
it's common for passengers on the coach to text each other rather than
talk, and there are more mobile phones in use than there are people in
the UK. I've even had texts from someone at the back of the coach asking
me to turn the heating up.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.